10 Quotes & Sayings By Macdonald Harris

MacDonald Harris is the author of the essay collection, The Pocket History of American Slang and author of many articles and reviews on slang and the language and its history. He has also written for publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. He lives in New York City.

1
I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will. MacDonald Harris
2
Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist. MacDonald Harris
3
We only betray ourselves. No one is betrayed except by himself. One way to betray yourself is to try to be too many people at once." How many people should a person try to be in your opinion?" One at the most. Most people don't even succeed in that. MacDonald Harris
4
We only betray ourselves. MacDonald Harris
5
But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness, death, some of us will find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of sheer boredom. MacDonald Harris
6
The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities. MacDonald Harris
7
I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics. MacDonald Harris
8
Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves. MacDonald Harris
9
It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me.. MacDonald Harris