Quotes from Bradford Morrow

Names are doors to ideas

How often do we use other people as screens upon which to project our obsessions? Our discontents, dreams, desires, and fears? Well, I always thought, often enough that its a wonder the whole waking world isn't simply viewed as an endless improvised film. One with as many screenwriters, producers, and directors as there are actors

If, as Emerson wrote, every word was once an idea, every cliché was once a revelation.

At that moment, as I looked this man in the eye, I was reminded of Hanlon's razor, a philosophical notion that states one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. It occurred to me just then that, conversely, one ought never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by malice.

she told him she'd grown up in a household where music was the religion and composers were its saints. Cantatas were chapels. Pavanes were prayer. Fugues were the firmament and God existed in every note.

After a second pint, I entered a pocket of time in which life seemed good, secure, not threatened by the past or "things to come." I knew I had been living on a kind of sine curve, a rolling wave of ups and downs, now hopeful now doomed, now asleep now insomniac, now cocksure now deeply uncertain. If such a roller coaster of moods and dispositions had taken its toll on me, I thought, imagine what it must have been like for

Books make us feel alive, and though we obviously won't live forever, they make us feel as if we might.

History is subjective. History is alterable. History is, finally, little more than modeling clay in a very warm room.

being a survivor meant that you lived to some degree in a chronic state of mourning, like a low-level fever that waxes and wanes but is never truly eliminated.

quoting Tacitus's epigram "Omne ignotum pro magnifico"—everything unknown is wonderful

I know the Commies were choirboys by comparison—the Nazis at least had a modicum of appreciation for the art they plundered during their days here.

Uma vez mortos, os segredos que tão cuidadosamente acalentámos, quais plantas carnívoras no meio de um jardim florido, ficam com frequência expostos à luz, onde têm oportunidade de se desenvolver. Cultivados pela verdade, fertilizados pelo rumor, florescem, mas as flores são tóxicas para quem quiser conhecê-las mais de perto e cheirar o seu perfume venenoso

There is a bookseller out there for every bibliophilic obsession known to humankind. You want a seventeenth-century book on microscopy with engraved illustrations on the life cycle of mosquitoes? There is a dealer who can provide you with that. You fancy rare volumes on Antarctic exploration or the history of ancient Egyptians?

She knew her husband to be an understanding man. Allowing people their eccentricities, faults, and mess-ups was one of his virtues, something best learned early by anyone who would presume to work with animals.