Quotes from Jack London

Now it happens that I am a fluid sort of an organism, with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in 'most anywhere.

The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.

Who Has Won to Mastership

The champagne is already flat.  The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.

Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a huge financial success from writing. Source: Wikipedia

That the work of a drinker who had no intention of stopping drinking should become a major propaganda piece in the campaign for Prohibition is surely one of the ironies in the history of alcohol.

E quando, nelle silenziose notti gelate, puntava il muso a una stella e ululava a lungo come un lupo, erano i suoi antenati, ormai ridotti in polvere, a puntare il muso a una stella e ad ululare lungo i secoli attraverso di lui

No one knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was preeminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him.

Got to take a gamble. The only way to find out is to find out.

And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: I heard Youth calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky— Yea, I am Youth because I die!

Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.

He talked to White Fang as White Fang had never been talked to before. He talked softly and soothingly, with a gentleness that somehow, somewhere, touched White Fang. In spite of himself and all the pricking warnings of his instinct, White Fang began to have confidence in this god. He had a feeling of security that was belied by all his experience with men.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Ch.1)

Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.

Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetish before which they fell down and worshipped.

Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.

So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. WORK PERFORMED. The phrase haunted his brain.

He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.

His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be.  The cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience.  Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.  He would have to learn the reality of a thing before he could put his faith into it.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.

John Barleycorn was blunting me.

I have sometimes held forth (facetiously, so my listeners believed) that the chief distinguishing trait between man and the other animals is that man is the only animal that maltreats the females of his kind. It is something of which no wolf nor cowardly coyote is ever guilty. It is something that even the dog, degenerated by domestication, will not do.

So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a madman through those memories. I had my Golconda but could not mine it.