The Dalai Lama

“Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.”


The Dalai Lama from Good Friends by Geoff Blackwell
Hodder, Sydney, 2003
Page 56

Daniel Georgianna

About the textile mills in New Bedford, early 1900's:

"In order to afford the barest necessities, both parents and their children had to work in the mills. Men held the better jobs at higher pay, but neither men nor women could support a family on a single wage. Children, sometimes as young as ten years old, doffed the full bobbins off the spinning frames, cleaned around the machinery, and did other repetitive, simple tasks. Children learning a skill such as weaving were taught by their parents or other relatives on the job without pay."

About the young sweepers in the spinning room of the Bennett Mill, 1911:

"They called us kids the 'forty-hour kids.' We could only work short until we got to be sixteen and then we could go the full schedule, which was fifty-four hours." Lewis W. Hine: Isherwood

From The Strike of '28 by Daniel Georgianna
Spinner Publications, New Bedford Mass, 1993
Pages 26 and 27

Ihab Hassan

"In this universe, not all the music is of our own making."

From Postmodernism To Postmodernity by Ihab Hassan
Page 12

T.S. Eliot

"To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my sense in our waking time
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our
sleeping time, The breathing in unison"

“A Dedication to My Wife”
from The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot 1909-1962
Harcourt Brace & Co

Eva Hoffman

"Two physical objects cannot occupy the same space. It was the first lesson I'd learnt in basic physics."

The Secret by Eva Hoffman
Vintage, London, 2003
Page 156

Eva Hoffman

"So we sat by her bedside that evening, watching for signs of improvement and decline. As if anything could be done about either. And yet the signs had to be witnessed, in their every minute, hopeless alteration. They had to be witnessed for human life to continue; for human beings not to slide into an abyss of unmeaning. They had to be witnessed for our sake, as much as for hers. That much I understood. And how strange that it's at that final moment that humans seem to be willing to attend most unreservedly to one another; to perform, finally, that close, unjudgemental reading of lip and eye, of striving and failure, that is the real act of love."

The Secret by Eva Hoffman
Vintage, London, 2003
Page 153

Eva Hoffman

"'Because nature has its laws! Because if we want to remain human, we have to accept our limitations!'"

The Secret by Eva Hoffman
Vintage, London, 2003
Page 107

Giovanni Verga

"As the saying is, 'The less you want on earth, the richer you are.'"

The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983 (written 1880)
Page 166

Irvin D. Yalom

An Old Hassidic Tale

“A rabbi had a conversation with the Lord about Heaven and Hell. ‘I will show you Hell,’ said the Lord and led the rabbi into a room containing a large round table. The people sitting around the table were famished and desperate. In the middle of the table was an enormous pot of stew which smelled so delicious that the rabbi’s mouth watered. Each person around the table held a spoon with a very long handle. Although the long spoons just reached the pot, their handles were longer than would-be diners’ arms: thus, unable to bring food to their lips, no one could eat. The rabbi saw that their suffering was terrible indeed.

‘Now I will show you Heaven,’ said the Lord, and they went into another room, exactly the same as the first. There was the same large round table, the same pot of stew. The people, as before, were equipped with the same long-handled spoons but here everyone was well nourished and plump, laughing and talking. The rabbi could not understand. ‘It is simple, but it requires a certain skill,’ said the Lord. ‘In this room, you see, they have learned to feed each other.’"

Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom
Basic Books, New York, 1999
Page 28-9

Irvin D. Yalom

"I've also always gotten comfort from the maxim of another philosopher, who lived a long, long time ago: 'Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not.'"

Momma and the Meaning of Life by Irvin D. Yalom
Basic Books: New York, 1999
Page 243

Irvin D. Yalom

"Listening is a creative process."

Momma and the Meaning of Life by Irvin D. Yalom
Basic Books: New York, 1999
Page 173

Thea Astley

"I'm blessed to discover my smallness."

Reaching Tin River by Thea Astley
William Heinemann: Port Melbourne, 1990
Page 218

Caryn James

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only what you are expecting to give, which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving."

Katharine Hepburn in "Katharine the Great" by Caryn James
The Sydney Morning Herald, July 1, 2003
Page 12

Gabriel Marcel

"There is one thing I have discovered since my parents’ death: what we call being a survivor is in reality to live not so much after as under; those we have never ceased to love with whatever is best in us become something like a living, invisible arch which we sense and even brush against, on the strength of which we are able to go on even as our powers diminish, wrenched from ourselves, toward the moment when everything will be caught up in love."

The Existential Background of Human Dignity
by Gabriel Marcel
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1963
Page 84

Gabriel Marcel

"What must also be brought to light is the fact that love, in the fullest and most concrete sense of the word, namely, the love of one being for another, seems to rest on the unconditional: I shall continue to love you no matter what happens. This is at the very opposite pole from the conditional commitment which seems to presuppose a de facto if not a de jure stability only under the limited circumstances in which it is made. We should also say that love, far from merely requiring the acceptance of risk, demands it in a certain manner; love seems to be calling for a challenge to be tested because it is sure to emerge the conqueror."

The Existential Background of Human Dignity
by Gabriel Marcel
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1963
Page 74

Ludvik Vaculik

"For the hard truth about the evolution of the spirit is that one day a man sees his last chance. He mounts it, and at a wild gallop he tries to catch up with absolutely everything."

The Axe by Ludvik Vaculik
Northwestern University Press: Evanston
1994 (first published 1996)
Page 139

Ludvik Vaculik

"My childhood instinct was correct. One should not be so anxious to discover what people elsewhere possess and what they are doing. One should not be continually comparing oneself with others and always reckoning the disparities to one's disadvantage. And why struggle so hard to keep up with this or that when, for the most part, it's heading for the arse-hole."

The Axe by Ludvik Vaculik
Northwestern University Press: Evanston
1994 (first published 1996)
Page 133-4

Thea Astley

"I am a stranger in need of a centre."

Reaching Tin River by Thea Astley
Minerva, Melbourne, 1966 (first published 1990)
Page 71

David Ireland

"I like the idea that we will never know everything. In a way it's like the things I most like to read: they're things that have some meaning left no matter how many times you read them."

Archimedes and the Seagle by David Ireland
Penguin Books: Ringwood, Victoria, 1986 (first published 1984)
Page 18

Joseph Roth

"He had spent forty-five years of his life in blindness, without knowing himself or the world."

Rebellion by Joseph Roth
Granta Books: London, 1999 (first published 1924)
Page 102

Charles Reis Felix

"Thank God for the mind. It's the only place where we have freedom of speech"

Crossing the Sauer by Charles Reis Felix
Burford Books: Short Hills, New Jersey, 2002
Page 124

Georges Simenon

"On the one hand, I cannot recognize myself in the young man I then was, and, on the other, I feel as if it were yesterday. I am sometimes shocked by the idea that a life can produce so little, can pass almost without leaving any trace.

At eighteen, or twenty, when I was still given to daydreaming, I constructed a little personal theory, which was neither scientific nor philosophical, but which fascinated me.

From a physics lesson, I gathered that a certain exchange takes place between bodies that come into contact with one another; that friction, for instance, leaves its mark on objects.

So I imagined that we leave our mark on the places through which we pass during our lives, somewhat the way game leaves a trail, which dogs recognize by sniffing the air. But not a smell—a different sort of trail, or, rather, a succession of ghosts, drifts of ectoplasm."


The Man With the Little Dog by Georges Simenon
Harcourt Brace: San Diego, 1989 (first published 1964)
Page 79

David Ireland

"There is no more to love than its actions, some say."

City of Women by David Ireland
Penguin Books: Ringwood, Victoria, 1981
Page 141

David Ireland

"Memory makes us a loan of existence, of life itself, and allows us to cling to a past; memory anchors us to a million details with tiny strings that, together, make a strong chain, strong enough to support us our whole life long."

City of Women by David Ireland
Penguin Books: Ringwood, Victoria, 1981
Page 73