By Bill Marx

For over a decade, Harvey Blume provided “some quotes to keep in mind for the New Year.” Harvey, a fine writer, tenaciously professional arguer, and a good friend of mine and the magazine, passed away in 2023. I have decided to continue the feature in his honor. So, though not nearly as pithy or pointed as his selections, here are a few quotes, words that have stung or sustained me over the past 12 months.

Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and worked in the Vermont town of Cavendish from 1976 to 1994. Photo: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago

“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” — Susan Sontag in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster”

“For everybody’s life begins at a level where races, armies and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken many lives.” — James Baldwin in his 1960 story “The Morning, This Evening, So Soon”

“Yet to regress into an infantile myth is merely to be dying backward instead of forward, with your bib instead of your boots on.” — John Simon in “Should Shubert Alley Be Renamed Memory Lane?” in Singularities: Essays on the Theater, 1964-1974

“How much time do you devote each day to thinking?” — Simone Weil

“One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping. — E.M. Cioran in Drawn and Quartered

Poet Alice Oswald. Photo: Poetry Book Society

“Simply because no machinery can be provided, under a democracy such as ours, for the protection of genuine skill and information against ignorant and vicious attack, and the standing menace of that attack causes the man of sound knowledge to withdraw within himself, leaving the field to the quacks and dupes.” — H. L. Mencken in A Saturnalia of Bunk

“We had fed the heart on fantasies,/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,/More substance in our enmities/Than in our love” — W.B. Yeats, “VI-The Stare’s Nest By My Window”

“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, that all safety is an illusion.” — James Baldwin in his essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

“Without art the crudeness of reality would make life unbearable” — George Bernard Shaw

“the sea in its dark psychosis dreams of your death” — Alice Oswald in her poem “Nobody”

“As long as poets speak, there remains hope in the world” — Byung-Chul Han

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.