|
|
Worlds, Cultures and Narrative
in Motion
Topics and quotes in relation
to Kureishi´s novels
|
|
|
|
Zen . . . does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while
one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts (1915-73), British-born U.S. philosopher, author. The
Way of Zen, pt. 2, ch. 2 (1957).
A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have
succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics.
Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.
W. Winwood Reade (1838-75), English traveler, author. The Martyrdom
of Man, ch. 4, "Summary of Universal History" (1872).
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits
of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at
the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928), U.S. author. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1974).
Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on
the telephone, is a spiritual fake.
Carl Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist. Psychological Commentaries
on "The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation" (written 1939; published
1954; repr. in Collected Works, vol. 11, ed. by William McGuire, 1958).
Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters
of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many
things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something
feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield
the test of excellence.
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. "A Suave Philosophy," in
Daily Express (Dublin, 6 Feb. 1903; repr. in Critical Writings, sct. 12,
ed. by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, 1959), reviewing H. Fielding
Hall's The Soul of a People (on Burmese society and Buddhism).
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. Professor de Worms,
in The Man Who Was Thursday, ch. 14 (1908).
They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence
sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom
some belief in a kind of pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there
is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought
to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth
of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian. On Heroes,
Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Lecture 1, "The Hero as Divinity"
(1841).
"With four walk-in closets to walk in,
Three bushes, two shrubs, and one tree,
The suburbs are good for the children,
But no place for grown-ups to be."
Judith Viorst (b. 1935), U.S. poet, journalist. The Suburbs Are
Good For The Children, in It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies
of Married Life (1968).
"Everywhere-all over Africa and South America . . . you see these
suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's
a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're
terrifying, because they are the death of the soul. . . . This is the prison
this planet is being turned into."
J. G. Ballard (b. 1930), British author. Interview, 30 Oct. 1982,
in Re/Search, no. 8/9 (San Francisco, 1984).
"Heaven is not built of country seats
But little queer suburban streets."
Christopher Morley (1890-1957), U.S. novelist, journalist, poet.
To the Little House, st. 4.
"The future of America may or may not bring forth a black President,
a woman President, a Jewish President, but it most certainly always will
have a suburban President. A President whose senses have been defined by
the suburbs, where lakes and public baths mutate into back yards and freeways,
where walking means driving, where talking means telephoning, where watching
means TV, and where living means real, imitation life."
Arthur Kroker (b. 1945), Marilouise Kroker (birth date unknown),
and David Cook (b. 1946), Canadian sociologists. Panic Encyclopedia, "Panic
Suburbs" (1989).
"All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes
suburbanization. . . . Every great city is just a collection of suburbs.
Its inhabitants . . . do not live in their city; they merely inhabit it."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Beyond the Mexique Bay,
"Oaxaca" (1934).
"Let's face it, we became ingrown, clannish, and retarded. Cut off
from the mainstream of humanity, we came to believe that pink is "flesh-color,"
that mayonnaise is a nutrient, and that Barry Manilow is a musician."
Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941), U.S. author, columnist. The Worst
Years of Our Lives, "The Unbearable Being Of Whiteness" (1991; first published
1981), of the effects on the white middle class of moving out to the suburbs.
"Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs
are incubators of apathy and delirium."
Cyril Connolly (1903-74), British critic. The Unquiet Grave, pt.
1 (1944; rev. 1951).
"The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)."
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), British poet. The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,
of the people of Grantchester, outside Cambridge, England.
"They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after
his neighbour's wife."
Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah 5:8.
"If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass
nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding,
their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly
productive of contempt or disgust."
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773), English statesman, man of letters.
Letter, 3 Nov. 1749 (first published 1774; repr. in The Letters of the
Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, vol. 1, no. 200, ed. by Charles Strachey,
1901).
"You don't hold any mystery for me, darling, do you mind? There isn't
a particle of you that I don't know, remember, and want."
Noël Coward (1899-1973), British playwright, actor, composer.
Elyot, in Private Lives,
act 1.
"What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as
well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules-don't
take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited
to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous
accounting in financial matters."
W. H. Auden (1907-73), Anglo-American poet. The Table Talk of W.
H. Auden, "31 December, 1947" (comp. by Alan Ansen, ed. by Nicholas Jenkins,
1990).
"To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn."
Marcel Jouhandeau (1888-1979), French writer. Défense de
l'enfer, "Erotologie" (1935).
"The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through
correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women
can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship."
Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Social
Relations" (1973).
"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations
and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Anglo-Irish novelist. The Death of
the Heart, pt. 2, ch. 1 (1938).
"If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure-the relationship
so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about
it truthfully?"
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist. The Diary of Virginia
Woolf, vol. 2 (ed. by Anne O. Bell, 1978), entry for 1 Nov. 1924.
Page maintained by : Jose Fco.Saiz
Molina
Last Updated : 05/29/99
Top of the Page Back to UVPress Back to Main Page Previous Page UVPress Website