Eleanor Clark Quotes

If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. [They] shiver you for a split second.

The fresh start is always an illusion but a necessary one.

Doubt remains a luxury I won't do without.

Anybody who's against birth control and abortion has to be a criminal idiot.

Rome is ... an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn.

You are eating the sea, that's it, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by some sorcery, and you are on the verge of remembering you don't know what, mermaids or the sudden smell of kelp on the ebb tide or a poem you read once, something connected with the flavor of life itself.

It is like a party all the time; nobody has to worry about giving one or being invited; it is going on every day in the street and you can go down or be part of it from your window.

Even the stupidest cat seems to know more than any dog.

How smartly September comes in, like a racing gig, all style, no confusion.

Shame can be self-indulgence too.

Even a tourist can tell in a Roman street that he is in something and not outside of something as he would be in most cities. In Rome to go out is to go home.

The Roman form of serenade is to race a motorcycle motor under the girl's window, but mufflers are not common in any situation; the only things as dearly loved as a good noise are breakneck speed and eye-splitting lights, preferably neon - all expressions of well-being, like a huge belly-laugh.

Music or the color of the sea are easier to describe than the taste of one of these Armoricaines.

To be first-rate at anything you have to stake your all. Nobody's an artist 'on the side'.

Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster.

I think you write only out of a great trouble. A trouble of excitement, a trouble of enlargement, a trouble of displacement in yourself.

Rome is everybody's memory.