Quotes from Books

[ChicagoReader]

"The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy."

Death of a Salesman

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Then stretched I forth my hand a little forward,
And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn;
And the trunk cried, 'Why dost thou mangle me?"
After it had become embrowned with blood,
It recommenced it's cry; "Why dost thou rend me?"

Dante Alighieri - "The Inferno"; Canto XIII, Longfellow translation

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[Fafnir]

thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new professor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Paradise Lost, Book I

This is my first encounter with Milton and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm reading in preparation for a course I hope to take next semester.

[bouquin]

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

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"You have to let other people be right ... It consoles them for not being anything else."

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"Possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can't say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, all my health."

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"What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth ..."

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"The things you repent were delicious once . . ."

[Dark Muse]

Who is John Galt?

[Dark Muse]

"Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal-for a mind to respect and achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them-while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors-hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom-there terrible hopeless, draining, parlaying boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[bouquin]

And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die.

[Snowqueen]

I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more-at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

[Dark Muse]

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire-until the day when men withdraw their vultures.

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[bouquin]

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

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Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.

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It's strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving the directions.

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"If you always drink vinegar, you don't know anything sweeter exists."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"In Bol we had heard that a few papyrus boats were built large enough to carry forty tons or more, and Mussa claimed thast he had once helped to build a kaday big enough to transport eighty close packed cattle across the open lake. Another had navigated with two hundred men on board. They could be built in any size."
Thor Heyerdhal - The RA Expeditions

[Dark Muse]

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one the immediate purpose of the lie the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on.

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[Ome]

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

J.R.R. Tolkien

[Ome]

"You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!"

Bulgakov

[Dark Muse]

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man."

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand