Quote your favourite author!!

[*Classic*Charm*]

What does/did your favourite author have to say about writing or literature?

This quote by one of my favourites struck me the fist time I saw it. I think that for one phrase, it holds so much character:

"Give me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy"

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

[jon1jt]

"But didn't you know that god is pooh bear?" -Jack Kerouac, On the Road

[Adudaewen]

"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. " JRR Tolkien on Lord of the Rings

[Scheherazade]

Charles Schulz:

“Try not to have a good time...this is supposed to be educational.”

"I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."

[DogFaceJoe]

"My independence is my wealth; it is my literature. I have written to please myself, no matter who should be hurt." -Ambrose Bierce

[Orual]

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." - C. S. Lewis

And I love that quote by Tolkien. Brilliant man.

[bazarov]

To get things clear; firstly they have to be very unclear. But if you get them too early, you probably got them wrong - Dostoevsky

[apophenia]

"Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons." -- Aldous Huxley

[HannibalBarca]

Seek and you shall find.

[Dante Wodehouse]

"Are your antisocial tendancies the product of your berserk pituitary gland?"

"Your simian countenance suggests a heritage unusually rich in species diversity."

"I don't know whether your grasp of theology or meteorology is more appalling.
I guess I'll go light some candles around the tobagon and beg for mercy."
~Bill Waterson

"Choosing doubt as a strategy for life is akin to choosing immobility as a strategy for moving."~Yann Martel

"In certain times, trying times, desperate times, profanity offers a relief denied even to prayer."~Mark Twain

[cuppajoe_9]

"One cannot love well, think well, sleep well if one has not dined well."

- Virginia Woolf (accuracy not guaranteed)

[dramasnot6]

"One cannot love well, think well, sleep well if one has not dined well."

- Virginia Woolf (accuracy not guaranteed)

Very true!

Well, he's not my favorite(comes close though) but after his passing I felt a bit of his wisdom was neccesary to post-


High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.

Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants.


How embarrassing to be human.

[Scheherazade]

Well, he's not my favorite(comes close though) but after his passing I felt a bit of his wisdom was neccesary to post-Is that by Vonnegut, Dramas?

[Hyacinth42]

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

-Ambrose Bierce

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

- Douglas Adams

[Miss Madison]

"For I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
The irony of Blanche Dubois' words always strikes me, Tennessee was a genius.

[bazarov]

To get things clear; firstly they have to be very unclear. But if you get them too early, you probably got them wrong - Dostoevsky

It's not that often that somebody quotes himself, but this will be an exception. I've read thread theme, and not whole first post, so I've missed writing part...:(
As a true realist, I find truth more important than success, but the problem is today many find success more important than truth!

[Set of Keys]

"'Why do you want to write poetry?' If the young man answers, 'I have important things I want to say,' then he is not a poet. If he answers, 'I like hanging around words listening to what they say,' then maybe he is going to be a poet." W. H. Auden

Pretty much most of 'Strong Opinions' by Nabokov.

[Set of Keys]

Also-

"It takes one to know one"

Leo Tolstoy.

[Bebbin]

This is one of my tops from William Faulkner:

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

[nps_marina]

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

- Byron

[kiz_paws]

..."Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another..."

--Siddhartha

[Uncle Lar]

"To thine own self be true."
(William Shakespeare, HAMLET)

[Amanda29]

This is just one of the best quotes from my favorite novel - Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

"She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." [partial quote]

Of course a person really needs to read the novel to understand what the quote, uttered by a disdainful character named Mr. Darcy, fully means. In short, it was a very rude and hateful thing to say about any lady in those days of gentility. Yet, it's smart and sophisticated, and I apreciate it more in light of the novel's ending - in which Mr. Darcy has to eat his words and swallow his pride.

[quasimodo1]

E.M. Cioran on friendship: " Friendship is a pact, a convention. Two beings tacitly promise never to broadcast what each really thinks of the other. A kind of alliance based on compromises. When one of them publicly calls attention to the other's defects, the pact is declared null and void, the alliance broken. No friendship lasts if one of the partners ceases to play the game. In other words, no friendship tolerates an exaggerated proportion of honesty". Not much of an optimist, but worth reading. quasimodo1

[Kara Ortiez]

"I desire a society which selects its rulers, from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself - whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any one class is fatal to the
welfare of the whole." Scaramouche Rafael Sabatini

[Enchanted]

"Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence"

-Salman Rushdie in "Midnight's Children"

[F.Emerald]

Pretty much most of 'Strong Opinions' by Nabokov.

Precisely

[whitetree]

the last place which i want to go is where i come from,but i forget where it is
Tagore

[Telegram Sam]

He's not quite my favorite, but there's a Vonnegut quote about writing which I've always found funny, insightful, and encouraging all at once:


This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

[Demian]

"Immature poets borrow. Mature poets steal." -T.S Elliott

"Life does not consist mainly-or even largely of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head." -Mark Twain

"The problem with being educated is that it takes a lifetime to accomplish and all that you learn in the end is that it would have better benefited you to have gone into banking." -Phillip K. Dick

[singin4jesus]

[QUOTE=Amanda29;378761]This is just one of the best quotes from my favorite novel - Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

"She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." [partial quote]

QUOTE]

I was going to add this as well...Jane Austin is my favorite author and pride and prejudice is my fave book!

Some other quotes by my favorite authors...

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
Jane Austen

"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."
Jane Austen

"It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?" :p
Jane Austen

He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions.
Louisa May Alcott

[Remarkable]

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

-James Joyce

[FacialFracture]

"Poetry is not an expression of personality, it is an escape from personality; it is not an outpouring of emotion, it is a suppression of emotion--but, of course, only those who have personality and emotions can ever know what it means to want to get away from those things."

-T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

[Sylph]

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Benedict Spinoza

[Jane Jane]

L iterature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis

[kelby_lake]

I don't really have a favourite author but here you go. Can you identify the author?:
'I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes'

this is a playwright (a character in one of their plays):
'Now we settle for half, and I like it better. I no longer keep a pistol in my filing cabinet.And my practice is entirely unromantic'

[Dimturiel]

"But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said before it ends, for things fair and wonderful while still they endure for eyes to see are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken forever do they pass into song." J.R.R. Tolkien in the "Silmarillion". I find this very moving and very true as well.

[kelby_lake]

'First the man takes the drink, then the drink takes the man, then the drink takes the drink' F. Scott Fitzgerald

[TH3 HAT3D ON3'S]

"You have a piece of my soul in your heart, why you gotta take us both through pure Hell?"
L.A. Banks

[TH3 HAT3D ON3'S]

.....

[Rakthor]

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.
- Charles Bukowski

[chasestalling]

At the moment King Lear's fool's "Fool have ne'er less grace than a year/ For wise men are grown foppish/ And know not how their wits to wear/ Their manners are so appish."

[Mike Field]

.
Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might-have-been." -- Arthur Ransome
.

[ForKnowledge]

And in the next instant he was one of the deadest men that ever lived

Mark Twain

Fleeting silence envelops my past, yet i still walk in a feild of arrogance.

Roland Mirth

[Mugwump101]

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.~Victor Hugo :P

[rajeevacklamon]

"if i can stop one heart from breaking i shall not live in vain".

this is a famous quote by famous poet emily dickinson

[rajeevacklamon]

"for arts sake alone i would not face the toil of writing a single sentence"

said G.B.Shaw

[Shya]

"In a gentle way, you can shake the world." - Ghandi
"Today's thinker has a great duty: to auscultate civilization." - Victor Hugo
(I LOVE Les Mis!!!!!)
And see my siggy...

[book_jones]

If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job.
- Woody Allen

[Emil Miller]

If you haven't got a wastepaper basket full of rejected pages at the end of each day, then what you are writing is probably not worth reading.

W. Somerset Maugham.

[Pf. HS Dimple]

"To be or not to be, this is the question!"
This quote is not concerned with literature or literary expression, as it is with general life style, but I my self face this piquent situation, when ever I had to write or I wanna write as I am always short of time, and that is not the only reason for putting this quote here, as I did not think much as it is my first post and I wanna check if it can really be posted or not.......

[Pf. HS Dimple]

"To be or not to be, this is the question!"
This quote is not concerned with literature or literary expression, as it is with general life style, but I my self face this piquent situation, when ever I had to write or I wanna write as I am always short of time, and that is not the only reason for putting this quote here, as I did not think much as it is my first post and I wanna check if it can really be posted or not........

[Genejo]

My favourite quote is :
"Life is a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and fury
signifying nothing"

- Macbeth

[Guinivere]

We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine.

W.H.Auden

[mmaria]

And yet, what rapture to be loved!
And, Gods, to love - what ecstasy!

Goethe

[Sk8ynat]

It takes so little to make a child happy that it is a pity, in a world so full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts. - Louisa May Alcott- (Little Men)

This quote is so true, and so sad.

L.M.A. is my favourite Author.

[mmaria]

I'd rather say that this is my favourite subject.

"At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet." (Plato)

"To love another person is to see the face of God." (Victor Hugo)

[weltanschauung]

senhor jose looks again at what is written on the card, the handwriting, needles to say, is not his, it's an old-fashioned hand, thirty-six years ago another clerk wrote the words you can read here, the name of the baby girl, the names of her parents and god-parents, the date and hour of her birth, the street and the number of of the apartment where she first saw the light of day and first felt pain, the same beginning as everyone else, the differences, great and small, come later, some of those who are born become entries in encyclopedias, in history books, in biographies, in catalogues, in manuals, in collections of newspaper clippings, the others, roughly speaking, are like a cloud that passes without leaving behind it any trace of its passing, and if rain fell from that cloud, it did not even wet the earth.
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e341/brokenglostick0/Jose_Saramago.jpg

[ballb]

We dare not because it is difficult. Rather, it is difficult because we dare not.


Seneca

[Peggy-O]

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
- Jack Kerouac (from On the Road)

[jorgis]

"imagine being 80 years old and ****ing an 18 year old girl, if theres one way to cheat death, thats it"

bukowski

[Tsuyoiko]

Not from my favourite writer, Dostoevsky, but from Tolstoy:

"So many memories of the past arise when one tries to recall the features of somebody we love that one sees those features dimly through the memories, as though through tears."

[weltanschauung]

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Jack Kerouac



(well, i dont actually like kerouac, BUT even he had his moments...)

[Ivory_Flower]

Even if he's not my favourite autor...but I like this sentence by Salinger (from The Catcher In The Rye), I feel more or less the same

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the autor that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it"

[ksotikoula]

My favorite author is Charlotte Bronte. Here are some quotes from her letters to her publishers:

"I would say to the critics: To you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come
before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a
right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment."

"If I don't have something to say or a different way to say it, then I don't
see the reason of writing at all" (this maybe somewhat differently expressed)

"...nor can I write a book for its moral"

From her books;

"Better to be without logic, than without feelings" (The Professor)

"I have taken notice, monsieur, that people who are only in each other's company for amusement,
never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so highly,
as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together." (The Professor)

"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;
--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood
at God's feet, equal,--as we are!" (Jane Eyre)

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an
independent will, which I now exert to leave you." (Jane Eyre)

"...and the second Mrs. Helstone, inverting the natural order of insect
existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon a bright, admired
butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid, trampled worm." (Shirley)

"I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me." (Shirley)

"Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on
the state of things within as on the state of things without and around us." (Shirley)

"No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being
told to _cultivate_ happiness. What does such advice mean?
Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with
manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven." (Villette)

"Two hot, close rooms thus became my world; and a crippled old woman,
my mistress, my friend, my all. Her service was my duty--her pain, my
suffering--her relief, my hope--her anger, my punishment--her regard,
my reward. I forgot that there were fields, woods, rivers, seas, an
ever-changing sky outside the steam-dimmed lattice of this sick
chamber; I was almost content to forget it. All within me became
narrowed to my lot." (Villette)

And of course my signature from Villette :)

[ksotikoula]

posted twice sorry!

[kevinthediltz]

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

George Orwell

[amb]

"I sometimes wonder if we are not all insane, and what we name sanity no more than a collective agreement to behave in the same mad ways."

Charles Palliser, from The Quincunx. Not my favourite author, but I just love the quote.

[jon1jt]

"I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way. And suddenly Mississippi Gene turned to me from his crosslegged patient reverie, and opened his mouth, and leaned close, and said, "These plains put me in the mind of Texas." "Are you from Texas?" "No sir, I'm from Green-vell Muzz-sippy" and that was the way he said it." ~ Jack Kerouac, On The Road

[jon1jt]

"imagine being 80 years old and ****ing an 18 year old girl, if theres one way to cheat death, thats it"

bukowski


Bukowski, yes! :thumbs_up

[whatsername]

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

[ClaesGefvenberg]

"The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up".

Douglas Adams on how and when the idea about the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy first occurred to him.

/Claes

[Trystan]

I know the feeling. But I can't say any great ideas came to me, heh.

[Ophelia20]

" ... but he had left his mark on her, a mark that had dulled, but never quite been erased over the years. A mark of caution, if not pain, a fear of getting too close, of believing too much, of holding anyone too dear.." Daniell Steel, Changes

[chrysalis_stage]

Not my fave author but one a enjoy alot:

'That moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the contraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.' - Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'urbervilles

I love this quote because I personally feel mentally free and relaxed when the light is fading but its not quite dark. :) (Through the day its too busy and my head can't concentrate very well)

[Annabelle]

"I believe you are right," he replied, "and yet I have always set her down as a lively girl."
"I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes," said Elinor, "in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid man they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."

"But I thought it was rignt, Elinor," said Marianne, "to be guided wholly by the opinion of other people. I servient to those of our neighbours. This has always been your doctorine, I am sure."

"No, Marianne, never. My doctorine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding. All I have ever attempted to influence has been the behaviour. You must not confound my meaning. I am guilty, I confess, of having often wished you to treat our acquaintance in general with greater attention; but when have I advised you to adopt their sentiments or conform to their judgment in serious matters?"

[MissScarlett]

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."

Jane Austen

[kiki1982]

'According to my humble opinion, everything that is not life, is literature... Music has tried to fight that ever since it has existed, it goes up and down, it wants to free itself from the word, out of jealousy I think, but in the end it always prostrates itself anyway.' (José Saramago, The Siege of Lisbon, 1989, the corrector to the writer about literature)

It is an unbelievable arrogant thing to say about your own art, but it is so deeply thought...

'Women all think that they are oracles and sybils and get it finally wrong as the biggest simpleton on whom they look down with quiet and patient mockery.' (José Saramago, same book)

These two about women I found the best:

'Whosoever wants to make a lasting impression on a woman, pose as a rebus and never give the solution.' (Marcellus Emants (Dutch naturalist author), Monaco, Mastazza, 1878)

'A woman kneels for manly superiority, and mysteriousness is a handy tool to either gain it, or give the impression to be it.' (Marcellus Emants, Monaco, Mastazza, 1878)

With Byronic heroes, we think twice... I am a woman, but still I like the two last ones... I guess we shouldn't be so prone to mystery and puzzledness...

[jinjang]

I enjoyed reading all your favorite quotes and here is mine. It is a shame I do not have the book in French. I can read a little bit of French.

The toilers of the sea by Victor Hugo(1802 ~ 1885)

"Penetrate into the remote fastnesses where the mountains offer the greatest solitude and the forests the greatest silence; Choose, let us say, Andernach and its surroundings; visit the obscure and impassive Laacher See, so unknown that it is almost mysterious. No tranquility can be found more august than this; universal life is here in all its religious serenity; no disturbances; everywhere the profound order of nature's great disorder; walk with a softened heart in this wilderness; it is as voluptuous as autumn; wander about at random; leave behind you the ruined abbey, lose yourself in the moving peace of the ravines, amid the song of birds and rustle of leaves; drink fresh spring water in your cupped hand; walk, meditate, forget."

[a_little_wisp]

"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."

-Neil Gaiman

[Stargazer86]

"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words." -Edgar Allen Poe

[Hurricane]

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way--Tolstoy

“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so?”--Hemingway

[Raphael Lambach]

"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her." Wilde

"Everything that I don't know to say is most important than things I say" - Clarice Lispector

"In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.” Machado de Assis

[itskatemate]

"Everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly [...] what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person."

-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

[Il Penseroso]

"The poem has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you."

- John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons"

[Tantalus]

"It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything."

F. Pessoa, Book of disquiet.

[haraf_ish]

I really love Emily Dickinson's poem on books...

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

[Barbarous]

'Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.'
-Joyce

[Red-Headed]

'In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her Eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!'

~ Joyce: Finnegans Wake

[Three Sparrows]

"I walked into the bath house, strait into Hell."

~The House of the Dead

"Question: What does a man most like to talk about?"
"Answer: Himself."

~Notes From the Underground

There are a ton more Dostoevsky quotes I love even more, I just can't remember them. O well.

O yeah, can't forget Shakespeare.;)
"And the native hue of resolution, is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
Love that one.

[Abdiel]

Behind every successful man is a woman. Behind her is his wife.
--Oscar Wilde

Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,
That you would have me seek into myself
For that which is not in me?
--Brutus from Julius Caesar

If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honour in one eye and death i' the other,
And I will look on both indifferently,
--Brutus from Julius Caesar

[giventofly]

"On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, "924-3130." Or he would say, "757-1366." We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime."

-Amy Hempel from The Harvest

If you haven't read this story, do it right now!!!!! It may possibly be the best short story ever written (in my humble opinion).

http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/413/

[Dante80]

"To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that’s someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot!" - Dostoevsky

[DanielBenoit]

"In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen." - James Joyce

[wlz]

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

[keilj]

"Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing! As long as no one is listening!"

-Frank Miller

[keilj]

"It's all bulls**t, folks. And it's bad for you"

George Carlin

[keilj]

"here's my counteroffer to your counteroffer: Go f**k yourself."

Al Swearengen - Deadwood

[aliengirl]

A man is as great as his daydreams--or his nightmares! --LEONID ANDREYEV

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. -- HAMLET


My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. -- HAMLET

[wlz]

"Better one hour's stour than a year's peace". -Pound

[Dogbrick]

Ray Bradbury on where his ideas come from:

"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."

[Caribbean Dream]

Albert Camus- The Fall


A single sentence will suffice for modern man; he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted." pp. 6-7

[Shatov]

From The Idiot:



How can you tell, Bakhmutov, what significance such a communion of one individual with another will have in the latter's destiny? For here you have a whole lifetime, with an infinity of ramifications which are hidden from us. The best chess player, the very cleverest, can think only a few moves ahead; a French player who could calculate ten moves ahead was written about as a marvel. But how many moves are there here and how much is unknown to us? In planting your seed, in offering your "alms," your good deed in whatever form, you are giving away part of your individuality and receiving part of another's; you are communign one with another already with a certain mutual consideration, andyou will be rewarded by knowledge and by the most unexpected discoveries. You will certainly in the end come to look upon what you do as a science; it will absorb your whole life and perhaps fill it entirely. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds planted by you, which perhaps you have forgotten, will take root and grow; whoever received them from you will pass them on to another. And how will you know what part you will have played in shaping the destiny of mankind?

[wokeem]

"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." - The Judge
(Blood Meridian; Cormac McCarthy)

[The Book]

Never mistake activity for achievement.
- John Wooden

[quasimodo1]

SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows. In literature, and particularly in poetry, the elements of success are exceedingly simple, and are admirably set forth in the following lines by the reverend Father Gassalasca Jape, entitled, for some mysterious reason, "John A. Joyce."
The bard who would prosper must carry a book,
Do his thinking in prose and wear
A crimson cravat, a far-away look
And a head of hexameter hair.
Be thin in your thought and your body'll be fat;
If you wear your hair long you needn't your hat.

[The Book]

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
~Leonardo Da Vinci

[quasimodo1]

"I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores."
Victor Hugo

[cgrillo]

"I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge."

"He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great."

- Melville

[William of Waco]

From the 1966 book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina:


The sky changed, the entire translucent dome stunned by the swiftness of the shimmering atomic flash. The light drove their once tiny shadows to a terrifying distance in the desert, making them seem like titans. Then it shrank, the aurora crashing insanely backward, like a film in reverse, toppling, swimming into a single white-hot bulge, a humming lump, a festering core. It hovered inches above the horizon, dancing, waiting almost as if it were taking a stoked breath, then swelled in puffing spasms, poking high into the stratosphere, edging out the pale skyrocket vapor trails at either side, the ball going sickly yellow, the shock wave releasing its roar, the entire spectacle catching fire, blazing chaotically, shaming the paltry sun.


Hours later, at the end of a tangled spool of red registration tape, Gnossos was in the office of the dean himself. A roomy, leather-chaired kind of library, filled with mineralogical specimens. Obscure varieties of limestone, quartz, shale from the gorges, chunks of coal from Newcastle seams, spongy layers of igneous Hawaii, silica, granite, semi-precious stones. All the wrack and refuse of a ridiculous career interrupted by colleagues who sensed incompetency. Instead of dropping him into Maeander with a slab of Carrara marble tied to his leg, they made him a dean. Molder of men.


There were marks on the wall from strips of masking tape, where he'd torn away the landlord's quaintly familiar Degas, Renoir, Soyer, Utrillo and Mary Cassat prints in a narcotized rage. A nail had been driven into the French doors that separated him from the alcoholic Rajamuttus, and on it was hung the rucksack. It emanated a faint odor of month-old rabbits' feet and Oriental goods from the Greco-Turkish supply company in the negro section downtown. Two rubber plants stood by the fireplace, still in the dappled, plastic pots he'd meant to disguise with flat-black spray. Spilled textbooks everywhere, notes scrawled in the margins, faces drawn on the covers. All horizontal surfaces were occupied by at least one open beer can stuffed with cigarettes saturated in some reeking liquid. And dominating the entire white-walled living room, hanging over the mantel by the number-fifteen housewire anchored to the molding, was the tapestry-like Blacknesse painting of the man cutting away his own head.

[Motherof8]

Charles Schulz:

“Try not to have a good time...this is supposed to be educational.”

"I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."

What do you think of considering comic strips such as Peanuts as literature? Charles Schultz said a lot of profound things in it. I think. Motherof8

[SamApples]

"Seven stars and seven stones, and one white tree."
J.R.R. Tolkien

[Gregory Samsa]

"I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe." - Franz Kafka.

[Phaedra's Love]

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
--Haruki Murakami

[Jeremydav]

"The air was saturated with the finest flower of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I could move through it only with a sort of greed, especially on those first still cold mornings of Easter week when I tasted it more keenly because I had only just arrived in Combray." -Marcel Proust

[DanielBenoit]

"It's wot's behind me that I am."

"When is a door not a door, and the answer is, when it's a jug - which is all a joke."

-Krazy Kat

[life]

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -F.S. Fitzgerald

[Technophile]

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting - Edgar Allan Poe.

[RaoulDuke]

The quote I like so much I came here with it as my signature ¬ (Henry David Thoreau)

[WyattGwyon]

After stating that he envies Tourette and Hodgkins, Anselm, from William Gaddis's The Recognitions says:

"I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him."

Of course Anselm may have been quoting someone else for all I know.

[hoope]

“Too often we under estimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”


Leo Buscaglia (1924-1998);
author, professor

[Sine_lege]

I became insane with long intervals of terrible sanity - Edgar Allan Poe

[ReadAll]

'Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.'

William Shakespeare, 'Julius Caesar', I.2

[hoope]

“We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing.”
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888);
novelist

[keilj]

Behind every silver lining is a dark cloud

-George Carlin

[yuka]

for now:
to be, or not to be. ---Shakespeare

[Emil Miller]

There is some guy called Anon who gets quoted a lot. This is one of my favourites;

Start the day with a smile and get it over with.

[weltanschauung]

"sure, the picture is in my eye, but i am also in the picture."
(lacan, the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analisis, pg63)

[faithosaurus]

"Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult."

-Anne Rice

[Varenne Rodin]

I became insane with long intervals of terrible sanity - Edgar Allan Poe

I love that. :)

[Varenne Rodin]

...but I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart - Stephen Crane

[lellyvigni]

'When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other' Chinese proverb

[LostGeneration]

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed. ~Hemingway

[parmindersingh]

"Mother died today, may be yesterday. I cannot be sure."
ALBERT CAMUS in The Outsider

[Greta Kin]

"California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that"
~Saul Bellow
:)

[weltanschauung]

when i am trying to discover myself
my thoughts seek one another in the regions of new space.
i am up in the moon, dreaming,
while others sit at home.
i partake in planetary gravitation
within the fissures of my mind. (antonin artaud)

[missmeadowsweet]

Here is a little gem I found while perusing through my list of quotes the other day which I hadn't done in quite awhile:

"A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white." ~ Edmund in Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.

Here's another one from one of my favorite books by sci-fi author Sylvia Engdahl: "Why, if nobody believed anything except what they understood, how limited we'd be."

[deguonis]

"How often has the human race been warned to breathe properly!"

[JamesBelvoir]

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

[literary lew]

"Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires." Marianne Williamson in Housekeeping.

[Helga]

this may not be his most influential quote but I read it the other day and liked it.

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace."


Milan Kundera

[Lokasenna]

There are so many days when this sums up my life:

"No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist." - Borges

[Vonny]

There are so many days when this sums up my life:

"No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist." - Borges

I've seen this quote before on the forum, and I don't understand what it means. It puzzles me.

Helga, I understand yours. I love that, I'll pass it on to my brother.

[Delta40]

Jeanette Winterson:

"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help."

[Motherof8]

Here's a quote I like from Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield": "There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability in mind and purpose."

[Cole]

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget." - Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

[xtianfriborg13]

“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”

― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

[Miles Goetz]

"In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived."
-Knut Hamsun.

[NedSiegel]

“Shut your eyes and see.” -- James Joyce

[cafolini]

History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to wake up. ~ James Joyce

[Nate]

from which i'm trying to awake

a small difference, but it sounds so much better.

joyce is my favorite, but it's hard to quote him because the context is so important. for example, it's cool when he says "shut your eyes and see" because he's closing his eyes while he muses on the nature of visual and aural experience

[sherlockian]

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

Sherlock Holmes quote from "The Naval Treaty" - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[krishna_lit]

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." quote from "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" by J.K.Rowling

[deguonis]

"THE truth is, our clothes make us to a great extent what we are."
Robert Wilson Lynd

[free]

The main stories do not have to be tyrannical.

- Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History

[Sweetgirl]

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” - The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka