Weekend Words: Gold
"In the gloom, the gold gathers light against it."
This week, the news broke that Maurizio Cattelan will come out of retirement to make a solid gold toilet for a restroom at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
You got my heart you got my soul
You got the silver you got the gold
You got the diamonds from the mine
Well that’s all right, it’ll buy some time
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, “You Got the Silver”
Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless brakes;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it.
―William Shakespeare, King Lear
Gold’s father is dirt, yet it regards itself as noble.
—Yiddish Proverb
Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold.
—Thomas Hood
If gold rusts, what then can iron do?
―Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust – of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold – smells of nothing
―Anna Ahkmatova, “Wild Honey Smells of Freedom”
To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.
―Adam Smith
In the gloom, the gold gathers light against it.
―Ezra Pound, Draft of XXX Cantos
Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.
―Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason ― its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
―Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise
They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master — I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov — my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That’s for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.
―Maxim Gorky, Mother
The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half-closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey, upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat–as if the sun had forced his worshippers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other’s pagan faces–the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.
―Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
In spite of all romantic poets sing,
This gold, my dearest, is an useful thing.
―Mary Leapor, “Mira to Octavia”
Silver’s sweet and gold’s our mother, but once you’re dead they’re worth less than that last shit you take as you lie dying.
―George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
