Quotes from Giles Goat-Boy

“Self knowledge is always bad news.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“When you look at this mirror I hope you'll remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“innocence is ignorance; ignorance is illusion; and Commencement, while it certainly is a metaphor, is no illusion. Commencement's for the disillusioned, not for the innocent.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

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Popular quotes

“Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven.
The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you'd think it was a flashlight.Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around.”
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“: إن البشر يفقدون تطلعاتهم العالية لأنهم يفقدون أذواقهم الفكرية وذلك بسبب ضيق الوقت أو عدم توفر الفرص السانحة لهم بالتدليل عليها. فيدمنون على اللذات الحسية ليس بسبب أنهم يفضلونها بعد المداولة، بل لأنها هي الوحيدة التي لديهم إمكانية الوصول إليها أو الوحيدة التي يمكن الاستمتاع بها”
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“For a moment, I believed you.” He ordered me, dryly, recovering his usual poise again.
He does not only have a selective hearing, but a selective understanding as well. I confessed. If he believes me or not, is his problem. Forewarned is not forearmed.”
― Tionne Rogers, quote from The Substitute

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