Conrad Lawrence Quotes

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development — part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" — has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so — and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few — have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.

The obvious point of Conrad’s cartoon is the weirdness of a world where guns are legal, despite the harm they can do, while VCRs (and circumvention technologies) are illegal. Flash: No one ever died from copyright circumvention. Yet the law bans circumvention technologies absolutely, despite the potential that they might do some good, but permits guns, despite the obvious and tragic harm they do.

Conrad had gotten his ambassadorship by being a big bundler and raising a lot of money for the previous president. He reminded Harvath of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. In addition to being a thorough Arabist who thought he knew the region better than anyone else—along with what America’s foreign policy absolutely should be—his hair was too blond, his teeth were too white, and his skin was too tan for a man of his age and stature. Harvath chalked a certain amount of that up to his parents’ having named their male child Leslie.

If [the heavyweights] become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust…Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like Marciano were mystified by a power which seemed to have been granted them. With the advent, however, of the great modern Black heavyweights, Patterson, Liston, then Clay and Frazier, perhaps the loneliness gave way to what it had been protecting itself against—a surrealistic situation unstable beyond belief. Being a Black heavyweight champion in the second half of the twentieth century (with Black revolutions opening all over the world) was now not unlike being Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Frank Costello all in one…

Bread and Music Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you, all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver, And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, belovèd, And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them, And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; And in my heart they will remember always,— They knew you once, O beautiful and wise. D. H. Lawrence is better known today for his novels, which include the then-infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover, but he was one of the better early modernist poets

You branded my virginity with the Union Jack, your English accent, your Welsh heritage. I look from your face to your genitals…..You look so ugly there! But can’t you make me come, like you do? Can’t I have that too? Words are hieroglyphics for much bigger events. I make light of my disappointment. “I don’t know. I was a virgin a minute ago and don’t know if I still am. What happened?” I caress your penis only to discover I am pulling on your Puritan horrors. I recall all your careers and wonder if you still want to be an oceanographer, journalist, radio-TV newsman, reporter, electrician, electronics specialist or a Star Trek crew member. It is as if I live on Joseph Conrad’s lifeboat and you on Fellini’s Romaluxury liner, insisting you do not need luxury, but find it comfortable. “Is that all you think about? Your precious baby-free sex?” I wonder that what you feel for me (is)… some nebulous middle-class sense of “This is okay for a while relationship but nothing serious.” Color is as necessary to the soul as food is to the body. “When will you learn we were all young then? We’ve grown up and changed. We all hurt each other, but we all loved each other.” “I tried to live how other people say life should be lived, but I tired of it too quickly. It drains the soul to live a conventional life.” “God, I love Americans! They have such damn awful energy! Canadians just sit back on their arses and bad-rap Americans because they’re so jealous.” “I walk around for years,” you say, “for years, a virgin! But now, I am not. And in lovely San Francisco with a beautiful, older American woman!” you say and kiss my mouth.