Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Pip Williams

Quote by Pip Williams

Work

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Pip Williams

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Pip Williams. more

You May Also Like

“In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”

TraditionConvention
Book:No Man Is an Island
Create image

“Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.”

PowerConvention
Book:Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems
Create image

“Our mother tongue, so far ahead of me, Displays her goods, hints at each bond and link, Provides the means, leaves it to us to think, Proffers the possibles, balanced mutually, To be used or not, as our designs elect, To be tried out, taken up or in or on, Scrapped or transformed past recognition, Though she sustains, she’s too wise to direct. Ineffably regenerative, how does she know So much more than we can? How hold such store For our recovery, for what must come before Our instauration, that future we will owe To what? To whom? To countless of our kind, Who, tending meanings, grew Man’s unknown Mind.”

PoetryHistoryTraditionConvention
Author:Ivor A. Richards
Create image

“[A] generation ago ... the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one's equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one's entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policeman.”

EducationYouthConvention
Book:Mosquitoes
Create image