The Bohemian Club Quotes

Study is the child of silence and mystery. ~ Henri Murger

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents. ~ Anne Waldman

Frederick Ward thought novels immoral and had been known to leave the room rather than subject himself to "bohemian" opinions. ~ Donald McCaig

They were all brilliant. They wrote books and painted pictures, and if they ever stopped talking, which I was sure they would never do, they planned to change the world. ~ Gloria Whelan

My dad has always been the bohemian ... ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had ... maybe I could even quit renting. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

It was my mom and I against the world. We lived in New York in this bohemian lifestyle where an extended group of artists and photographers were like my aunts and uncles. ~ Brooke Shields

I was drawn to the arts because I sensed that I was by nature Bohemian, and yet very conservative. ~ Frederick Lenz

We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled around, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in loose waves, like a letter "W". He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought - he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head , and rattled. I didn't run because I didn't think of it - if my back had been against a stone wall I couldn't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten - now he would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia, barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and windi ~ Willa Cather

Many bowdlerized versions indicated a Victorian-minded censorship, which feared that Little Red Riding Hood might some day break out, become a Bohemian, and live in the woods with the wolf. ~ Jack D. Zipes

Donald Trump said he wanted to punish women who do abortions and then retracted saying he'll punish the providers. With this moral measure, we can expect civilized Terrorism being held responsible for supplying bohemian Terrorism with weaponry. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

Sometimes, when we cannot attain the freedom we are fighting for, we free ourselves b carving a new path to freedom. ~ Christina Westover

The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time - it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine. ~ Richard M. Nixon

It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27 ~ Andrew Coe

They saw themselves as rear-guard individualists, making a last-ditch stand against the twentieth century. They gave thanks loudly from morn till eve that they had escaped the soul
destroying commercialism of the city. They were tacky and cheerful and defiantly bohemian, tirelessly inquisitive about each other's doings, and boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at least it was with fists and bottles and furniture, not lawyers. ~ Christopher Isherwood

It's plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we're literary Gypsies, all of us, and it's only recently that we're starting to realise we're not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked.

I've always loved wild people. ~ Karl Wiggins

She was born to be free, let her run wild in her own way and you will never lose her. ~ Nikki Rowe

I urge you to sit with yourself for 5 minutes and pour your heart out, ask yourself the serious questions ~ not the day to day duties we get caught up in. I can assure you, the 5 minutes spent reflecting on the life you have lived and how much more you're yet to achieve will spark something in you that we all forgot we have. ~ Nikki Rowe

I really like the bohemian look, and I'm a great fan of mixing vintage and modern. ~ Kierston Wareing

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city's most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors.

In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of "bohemian Paris," where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on fl ~ Jeffrey H. Jackson

I make body chains that come from the neck, cross in the middle of your chest, then go around your waist. I mix them with feathers for a gypsy, bohemian style. ~ Sofia Boutella

Wild Times
Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920's and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were "Fellow Travelers" and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party's existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, "Frida," who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico. ~ Hank Bracker

It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl - somebody in my dorm, for example, - he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know, not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making.
And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way. ~ J.D. Salinger

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. ~ William Gibson

I am thrice homeless, as a bohemian, as an Austrian, and all over the world, you guessed it right I am Jewish ~ Gustav Mahler

It's not like I'm the first siren to ever make it big… Play 'Bohemian Rhapsody' on a road trip some time and tell me everyone in the car doesn't stop what they are doing to sing. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings. ~ Rainn Wilson

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation. ~ Anne Waldman

The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever
in short, to be the bohemian. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Art can help a town by attracting a certain Bohemian population that adds life to the bars, character to the streets and a buzz to the name. Employers may then follow. But art can't do much if every town does it. There aren't enough Bohemians. ~ Evan Davis

The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled.
Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby -
Talk about yr hot peace. ~ Jack Kerouac

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music. ~ Dave Grohl

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The idea of trust-fund guys who live in Brooklyn in their 30s is really interesting to me. There's a time and a place where that kind of bohemian lifestyle is appropriate, soon after college, in your 20s. But there are people still living that many years later; they haven't evolved to the next phase. ~ Tim Heidecker

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. ~ Charles De Lint

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent. ~ Philip K. Dick

We are against the glorification of "the People," as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren. ~ Wyndham Lewis

You would have loved Jackson. He was a downtown guy, a real Bohemian. No banker's hours for him, believe you me. Every night the drinking and the talking and the fighting and the dancing and the staying up late; like everyone's romantic idea of what an artist ought to be: the anti-Rothko... At his worst you still loved him though; you loved him because he loved art so much... He thought it mattered. He thought painting mattered... Does not the poignancy stop your heart?... How could this story not end in tragedy?

Goya said, 'We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.'... Pollock saw some truth. Then he didn't have art to protect him any more... Who could survive that?

I was walking up to my house last week and this couple was passing. Lady looks in the window, says: 'I wonder who owns all the Rothkos.'... Just like that I'm a noun. A Rothko. ~ John Logan

In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the 'Bohemian' style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry's painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d'Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.
Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as 'lack of money'. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ' ~ Graham Robb

All this "confusion" came to an end twenty years after the Royal Visit, when two Bohemian brothers, claiming to be the illegitimate grandsons of Prince Charlie himself, appeared on the scene with their own tartan pattern book, portentously titled Vestiarum Scoticum. James and Charles Sobieski Stuart, as they called themselves, had selected seventy-five different setts, each linked to a specific clan, from a sixteenth-century manuscript they claimed had once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots's father confessor - although they could never quite produce the manuscript when others asked to see it. ~ Arthur Herman

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw
that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian. ~ Rebecca Mead

Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism ~ Harold Bloom

I am a bohemian person. I don't speak German, and I live in a foreign country where all the signs are in German. I did that deliberately. I'm like a ghost. Look at how much media and advertising you're subjected to, this mindless chatter of advertising. I just block it out so effortlessly because it's all a foreign language to me. It's really a good thing for my head, living in Berlin. ~ Anton Newcombe

And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself. ~ Julian Barnes

The Bohemian who tires of life, who gives up by retirement into insamity or suicide, is not necessarily one who had failed in what he wants to express. ~ Emily Hahn

I like to dress pretty basic during the day, but with a sophisticated bohemian spin, and sometimes a little rock chic. At night I like to go glamorous. ~ Alessandra Ambrosio