Quotes from Books

[Scheherazade]

Here is a thread to share the sections you like in the book you are reading at the moment.

I have been reading The Name of the Rose, which I find a little hard because it is full of religious references (Christianity), some of which I don't understand (practical) and some of which I don't care about (historical). However, it is a good book to make one consider and reconsider blind obedience to religion -or any teaching for that matter.

Here are some quotes I really like:

If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.

For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.

[Schokokeks]

This is a very nice idea for a thread, thanx for opening!
I'd like to share my favourite passages from Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Godfather about man's fall from paradise:

whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

(III, l.96-100)

Raphael to Adam:

that thou art happy, owe to God;
That thou continuest such, owe to thyself

(V, l.520f)

[Pensive]

A Walk To Remember

I breathe deeply, taking in the fresh spring air. Though Beaufort has changed and I have changed, the air itself has not. It’s still the air of my childhood, the air of my seventeenth year, and when I finally exhale, I’m fifty-seven once more. But this is okay. I smile slightly, looking toward the sky, knowing there’s one thing I still haven’t told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen.

EDIT: I am reading nothing now a days but this is the book I have read recently so I hope that you did not mind me quoting it.

[genoveva]

"Mercedes was silent. In her fourty years, she knew two things with certainty: From the minute we are born there is danger. In the end, it is up to the women to shield and protect." p.7 Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez

[RobinHood3000]

"Darwin settled in the country, fathered ten children, corresponded wtih Lyell and a hundred other scientists and wrote books--among them a journal of the voyage of the Beagle, a treatise on volcanos and another on the geology of South America, and a masterful study of barnacles that consumed seven years of work and left him fuming that 'I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before.' "

--Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris

[rachel]

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la via diritta era smarrita.

In the middle of our life's walk
I found myself in a dark wood
for the straight road was lost]


I am overwhelmed by Dante, his brain must have been continually smoking.

[Scheherazade]

Another quote from The Name of the Rose:

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man or Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

[chmpman]

From Hamlet

Ghost:
I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

[subterranean]

" Would you like to be grown up?"

"Yes, I would... But I don't really want to grow up. Old people can be so disagreeable... I'd rather stay the way I am, and sometimes I'd like to be able to fly... Then I'd laugh at everybody."

Rosshalde - Hermann Hesse

[bhekti]

" I sing of arms and of the man"
Daved West's Translation of Virgil's Aeneid

What a wonderful sentence!

[Virgil]

For Mother's Day on Sunday. From Joyce's Portrait of the Artist:

That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two five-shilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:
-- Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

-- Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

[Broken]

“What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?"

- The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard

[Truth Untold]

The Ghost Road

'Too fussy to live, Prior thought. There you are, nowhere near France and an epitaph already.'

' "Sleeping all right?"
"Not last night. Bloody tent leaks."
"Generally?"
"I sleep alright"
Mather sat back in his chair. "How did you get in?"
"Throught he flap."
Mather's forefinger shot up. "Watch it, laddie. How did you get into the army?"'

[Eagleheart]

Right now poems of a prominent Bulgarian poet along with Some works of W.Blake...I will try to translate some lines of him/I do not mean Blake/:
.....
The struggle is mercilessly cruel
The struggle,as they say, is epich
I have fallen. Someone else will replace me ...
and that is it
What does here a single person mean?
....
A shooting,and after it-worms
This is so simple and logical.
But in the storm we will be together again with you-
my people
because we loved you
2 o'clock 23.07.1942
.....
He wrote it in his cell three hours before being shot

[Idril]

This is from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and I just think it's one of the funniest lines I've ever read,

"The main problem is Pontius Pilate. But the underwear doesn't help."