Quotes from Books [Archive] - Page 3 - Literature Network Forums

wilbur lim

09-14-2008, 01:19 AM

ACCORDING to the promise given above, I shall commence this book with. a brief account of the evidences which the venerable man gave of his power. By virtue of his prayer, and in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, he healed several persons suffering under various diseases; and he alone, by the assistance of God, expelled from this our island, which now has the primacy, innumerable hosts of malignant spirits, whom he saw with his bodily eyes assailing himself, and beginning to bring deadly distempers on his monastic brotherhood. Partly by mortification, and partly by a bold resistance, he subdued, with the help of Christ, the furious rage of wild beasts. The surging waves, also, at times rolling mountains high in a great tempest, became quickly at his prayer quiet and smooth, and his ship, in which he then happened to be, reached the desired haven in a perfect calm.Adapted from The Life of ST Columba

Idril

09-14-2008, 10:51 AM

"The straight lines, the uniform size of the surfaces converted his thoughts into squares, ruled lines through his soul and, by simplification, turned the freedom of it's organic life into a pattern and brought the rich, primaeval forest vegetation of his brain, full of varying impressions, back to nature's first child-like attempts at organization."

From By The Open Sea by August Strindberg

Dark Muse

09-14-2008, 04:50 PM

I really liked this passage

If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): "Here I am, the One and they don't know it." If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize, and move on, even though you're God and with a snap of you're fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.

From Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

wessexgirl

09-14-2008, 06:28 PM

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity".

"When I began to write I said this was a story of hatred, but I am not convinced. Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love. I looked up just now from writing and caught sight of my own face in a mirror close to my desk, and I thought, does hatred really look like that? For I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright, unobtainable objects within".

From The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. My first Greene, but certainly not my last. Brighton Rock is calling me.... :thumbs_up

Bvalltu

09-14-2008, 09:56 PM

"Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless." -Confucius and the Madman

Dark Muse

09-15-2008, 07:51 PM

I thought this conversation about blushing was quite amusing

MIRA. Are you? Pray then walk by yourselves. Let not us be
accessory to your putting the ladies out of countenance with your
senseless ribaldry, which you roar out aloud as often as they pass
by you, and when you have made a handsome woman blush, then you
think you have been severe.

PET. What, what? Then let 'em either show their innocence by not
understanding what they hear, or else show their discretion by not
hearing what they would not be thought to understand.

MIRA. But hast not thou then sense enough to know that thou
ought'st to be most ashamed thyself when thou hast put another out
of countenance?

PET. Not I, by this hand: I always take blushing either for a sign
of guilt or ill-breeding.

MIRA. I confess you ought to think so. You are in the right, that
you may plead the error of your judgment in defence of your
practice.

Where modesty's ill manners, 'tis but fit
That impudence and malice pass for wit.

The Way of the World by William Congreve

bouquin

09-17-2008, 03:50 AM

"We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice."

-----------------------------------------------------

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

-----------------------------------------------------

Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

-----------------------------------------------------

... it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy ... it is impossible to rehearse life.

-----------------------------------------------------

"... and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old."

-----------------------------------------------------

"There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light ... We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."

-----------------------------------------------------

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended ...

mangueken

09-17-2008, 03:07 PM

That night, after she returned from Tatsumara's shop, Chieko had a dream. SChools of all colors of carp gathered as knelt at the edge of the pond. The carp piled one on top of another, dancing as they stuck their heads out above the surface of the water.
That was all there was to the dream. It was midday. The fish drew closer when Chieko put her hand in the water and made ripples on the surface of the pond....
"I wonder what kind of fragrance, what kind of spirit, emanates from your hand?" Ryusuke said.

The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata

subterranean

09-19-2008, 02:59 PM

A fight between two bald men over a comb

Borges on Falklands War between England and Argentina, quoted in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

Idril

09-19-2008, 09:59 PM

"What's interesting about our society is that everyone knows everything, but everyone pretends to know nothing."

From Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich

Nyx's Child

09-19-2008, 10:24 PM

Abdiel

09-20-2008, 12:56 AM

And day had broken on the streets
Ere it broke upon the brain.
Between us by the peace of God,
Such truth can now be told;
Yes, there is strength in striking root,
And good in growing old.
We have found common things at last,
And marriage and a creed,
And I may safely wright it now,
And you may safely read.

G.K.G

-The Man Who Was Thursday G.K.Chesterton

Awesome; I've wanted to read The Man Who Was Thursday for a while now. How is it? Are you reading it for school or fun, and have you read any of Chesterton's other works?

Nyx's Child

09-20-2008, 02:00 PM

so far it's really good read it!! i'm reading it for fun it took me a little while to get in to it but its really worth picking up i havn't read anything else by him so far but i definitly will now :) enjoy!

Gracewings

09-21-2008, 10:31 PM

"...for they dare not speak the thoughts of their minds. For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if these thoughts are the thoughts of all, and so they fear to speak." ~ from Anthem by Ayn Rand

Nyree Ingle

09-23-2008, 02:15 AM

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. Nyree I like this version:
When I had journeyed half of our life's way
I found myself within a shadowed forest
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
(I think he was having a mid life crisis)

fleaaaaaa

09-23-2008, 06:52 AM

"I COULD MURDER A CURRY" - Death

Mort, Terry Pratchett

Lol not quite as amazing as the rest of the quotes. :lol:

Riesa

09-23-2008, 05:01 PM

"His failure lay in underestimation - in being, if you like, not quite mad enough."

Viriconium ~ M. John Harrison

Dark Muse

09-25-2008, 10:30 PM

From Thee Lives by Gertrude Stein

The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centers of the earth that comes always with the early soarking spring, when it is not answered with an active frevent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.

quasimodo1

09-26-2008, 01:18 AM

Ah, Gertrude Stein...what a writer. Part of the "lost generation".

Dark Muse

09-26-2008, 01:21 AM

Though I do not hate her as I had thought I would based on what I heard of her, when it comes to writers like her, I cannot help but to wonder, is being experimental really enough to qualify one as a "great" writer? Simply becasue they do something that has not been done before, is that merit within itself? To do something just becasue it can be done.

jikan myshkin

09-29-2008, 07:37 AM

...and god created women

ntropyincarnate

09-30-2008, 01:38 PM

Though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.

From Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Sancho

10-01-2008, 08:08 AM

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols:

"Yet Milagro was a town whose citizens had a penchant not only for going crazy, but also for precipitating miracles.
Take for example, an early nineteenth-century sheepherder named Cleofes Apodaca and the scruffy sheepdog he irreverently called Pendejo, which, translated loosely, means 'idiot' or 'fool' - or, translated more literally, means "pubic hair."
Today, Cleafes Apodaca might qualify to be called the Patron Saint Crazy of Milagro."

Scheherazade

10-01-2008, 10:52 AM

I was actually reading another book when I came across this passage from Walt Whitman's "Preface" to Leaves of Grass but thought it is still quote-worthy:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured … others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches … and shall master all attachment.

traytray

10-01-2008, 01:03 PM

"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 1797

curlyqlink

10-15-2008, 02:00 PM

She had the sense that Poppy was one of those girls who very quickly become girlfriends who like to fix up their other girlfriends with their friends and have coffee shop fantasies about the whole thing.

--from Keeping it Real by Justina Robson

If other sci-fi/fantasy books were as literate as this one, I'd read a lot more sic-fi/fantasy.

weltanschauung

10-15-2008, 02:40 PM

"amar uma apenas é demasiado pouco; amar todas é uma imprudência de caráter superficial; porém, conhecer-se a si próprio e amar um número tão grande quanto possível, encerrar na sua alma todas as energias do amor de modo que cada uma receba o alimento que lhe é próprio, ao mesmo tempo em que a consciência engloba o todo - aí está o prazer, aí está o que é a vida." (s. kierkegaard - diário de um sedutor)

Serenity5815

10-19-2008, 07:24 PM

"The reason he was late was that he was enjoying the twentieth century immensely. It was much better than the seventeenth, and a lot better than the fourteenth. One of the nice things about Time, Crowley always said, was that it was always taking him steadily further away from the fourteenth century, the most bloody boring century on God's, excuse his French, Earth. The twentieth century was anything but boring. In fact, a flashing blue light in his rear view mirror had been telling Crowley, for the last fifty seconds, that he was being followed by two men who would like to make it even more interesting for him.

"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

zolasdisciple

10-22-2008, 07:06 PM

"and you just want me to live like the others,get up and move around and go to parties all day?"."thats not living,this is living"

weltanschauung

10-22-2008, 08:49 PM

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?” He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own. (m.proust, swanns way)

im actually reading Within a Budding Grove, but i was going through swanns way and found one of the many highlights with (seriously) "LOL" by it, and
http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/emoticons7/21.gif

Josef K

10-23-2008, 12:45 AM

Honesty does not fear authority.

Inspector Javert from Les Misérables

malwethien

10-28-2008, 08:26 AM

"You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody." ~ The Graveyard Book

andave_ya

10-30-2008, 10:10 PM

"To slur a good man's name with baseless slander is one crime--another is rashly to mistake bad men for good. Cast out an honest friend, and you cast our your life, your dearest treasure. Time will teach the truth of this; for time alone can prove the honest man, one day proclaims the sinner." ~ Oedipus by Sophocles.

Dark Muse

11-03-2008, 05:02 PM

From The Princess by D.H. Lawrence

"My little Princess must never take too much notice of people and the things they say and do," he repeated to her. "People don't know what they are doing and saying. They chatter-chatter, and they hurt one another, and they hurt themselves very often, till they cry. But don't take any notice, my little Princess. Because it is all nothing. Inside everybody there is another creature, a demon which doesn't care at all. You peel away all the things they say and do and feel, as cook peels away the outside of the onions. And in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can't peel away. And this green demon never changes, and it doesn't care at all about all the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person, all the chatter-chatter, and all the husbands and wives and children, and troubles and fusses. You peel everything away from people, and there is a green, upright demon in every man and woman; and this demon is a man's real self, and a woman's real self. It doesn't really care about anybody, it belongs to the demons and the primitive fairies, who never care. But, even so, there are big demons and mean demons, and splendid demonish fairies, and vulgar ones

WrdOrnitologist

11-05-2008, 12:51 AM

"At round rock's top, note: it lies asleep do no disturb it, do not hate it, it senses such voids of the soul, remove the child underneath it, feel love by that time, otherwise it wiil stop your blood and you'll be dead - alive!"

bouquin

11-05-2008, 03:05 PM

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns.

djy78usa

11-05-2008, 08:08 PM

There is love enough in this world for everbody, if people will just look.

-Newt Hoenikker from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

RG57

11-08-2008, 06:48 PM

'When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.'

The opening line to Godbye Mr Chips by James Hilton

weltanschauung

11-08-2008, 09:34 PM

man, why is proust so wonderful??

Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when such a grief has its birth—as was now happening—at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end. The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte's presence. But she would have said to herself: "Back again! Evidently I can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he'll be." Besides, I was irresistibly drawn towards her in thought, and those alternative orientations, that mad careering between them of the compass-needle within me, persisted after I had reached home, and expressed themselves in the mutually contradictory letters to Gilberte which I began to draft.

(...)

I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later, the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those 'nevermores' so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believe them to be false and translate 'nevermore' by 'this very evening, if you want me,' or believe them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations which make so little difference to our lives when the other person is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the next persons whom we shall presently have become, and who will then be in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, so as to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same speeches that she would make if she loved us. When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.

(...)

I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

(within a budding grove) http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/facist_jockitch/sm/106.gif

PabloQ

11-08-2008, 11:06 PM

Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory in the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.

bouquin

11-09-2008, 10:22 AM

There are two choices only. You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery.

-----------------------------------------------------

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
Heaven only knows why we love it so.

Scheherazade

11-09-2008, 12:01 PM

Cailin

11-11-2008, 07:56 AM

"A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there's no river"

Classic line from Chapter 12 of Shantaram

Vintage34

11-14-2008, 02:20 AM

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
Heaven only knows why we love it so.

I've read this paragraph from The Hours, so many times, that the page in my book is actually worn and wrinkled. The older you are, the more you relate to those words. I love that book. I've read it many times and never tire of it.

_Shannon_

11-16-2008, 08:42 PM

"He shut their voices out of his mind. He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, they shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair."

prendrelemick

11-17-2008, 02:43 PM

"Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigour."

From The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

polgara

11-17-2008, 09:17 PM

"Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigour."

From The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

That is such a wonderful sentence! Thank you for sharing it :thumbs_up:D

Jeremiah Jazzz

11-17-2008, 09:29 PM

'It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?' (94)
-Finnegans Wake

Jack_Aubrey

11-18-2008, 12:32 AM

I am sitting over coffee and cigarets at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.

Babyguile

11-19-2008, 03:47 PM

"It's like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now."

"The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."

"Many that live deserve death and many that die deserves life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so quick to deal out death and judgement for even the very wise cannot see all ends."

"Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped."

- The Lord of The Rings, J.R.R Tolkien.

Cailin

11-19-2008, 05:37 PM

I am sitting over coffee and cigarets at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.
Intriguing! Where does this come from?

TheFifthElement

11-23-2008, 01:21 PM

I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honour the wood they rest upon.
I know it's going to rain.
Clouds have been playing with the blue style of the sky all day long, moving their heavy black wardrobes in, but so far nothing rain has happened.

************************************************** *********************

What an abstract thing it is to take your clothes off in front of a stranger for the very first time. It isn't really what we planned on doing. Your body almost looks away from itself and is a stranger to this world.
We live most of our lives privately under our clothes, except in a case like Vida whose body lived outside of herself like a lost continent, complete with dinosaurs of her own choosing.
'I'll turn the lights out,' she said, sitting next to me on the bed.
I was startled to hear her panic. She seemed almost relaxed a few seconds before. My, how fast she could move the furniture about in her mind. I responded to this by firmly saying, 'No, please don't.'
Her eyes stopped moving for a few seconds. They came to a crashing halt like blue aeroplanes.
'Yes,' she said. 'That's a good idea. It will be very hard, but I have no other choice. I can't go on like this forever.'
She gestured towards her body as if it were far away in some lonesome valley and she, on top of a mountain, looking down. Tears came suddenly to her eyes. There was now rain on the blue wings of the aeroplanes.
Then she stopped crying withoun a tear having left her eyes. I looked again and all the tears had vanished. 'We have to leave the lights on,' she said. 'I won't cry. I promise.'
I reached out and, for the first time in two billion years, I touched her. I touched her hand. My fingers went carefully over her fingers. Her hand was almost cold.
'You're cold.' I said.
'No,' she said. 'It's only my hand.'
She moved slightly, awkwardly towards me and rested her head on my shoulder. When her head touched me, I could feel my blood leap forward, my nerves and muscles stretch like phantoms towards the future.
My shoulder was drenched in smooth white skin and long bat-flashing hair. I let go of her hand and touched her face. It was tropical.
'See,' she said, smiling faintly. 'It was only my hand.'
It was fantastic trying to work around her body, not wanting to startle her like a deer and have her go off running into the woods.
I poetically shifted my shoulder like the last lines of a Shakespearen sonnet (Love is a babe; then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow.) and at the same time lowered her back onto the bed.
She lay there looking up at me as I crouched forward, descending slowly, and kissed her on the mouth as gently as I could. I did not want that first kiss to have attached to it the slightest gesture or flower of the meat market.

PabloQ

11-30-2008, 06:07 PM

I found this really funny:
"Her bosom is still a pavement she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness."
And then I found it sad and pathetic.

littlelit

12-02-2008, 11:28 AM

RED- I.A.Sealy

I just started reading this book. I liked the following line in which the narrator describes the colour of a girl's tracksuit:
"...expressly chosen, that shade of blue, to dampen any ardour in the onlooker and possibly in the wearer too. It's not exactly Virgin Mary blue but nor is it water-nymph aqua, or odalisque turquoise, or even a crackling protopunk electric blue. It's by no means that bacchanalian midnight blue that verges on purple, nor a savage sadomasochistic bruised-eye indigo, and it's a long way from the gentian violet of the orgiast.
No. It's a straight-out daytime sky blue, bland as a button."

And later:
"Zach stares helplessly through the window like a prisoner who, after years in his cell, finds there are no bars."

Dr. Hill

12-02-2008, 11:45 PM

"Call me Ishmael."

Take a guess at that one ;)

prendrelemick

12-03-2008, 04:59 PM

Between books at the moment, so as always I like to browse through my dog-eared copy of Homer's Iliad.

Paris had also been quick and had not lingered in his lofty house. Directly he had put on his splendid armour with its trappings of bronze, he hurried off through the town at full speed, like a stallion who breaks his halter at the manger where they keep and fatten him, and gallops off across the fields in triumph to his usual bathing-place in the delightful river. He tosses up his head; his mane flies back along his shoulders; he knows how beautiful he is; and away he goes, skimming the ground with his feet, to the haunts and pastures of the mares. So Paris, priam's son, came down hot foot from the citadel of Pergamus, resplendent in his armour like the dazzleing sun, and laughing as he came.

The Iliad: (trans E V Rieu)

bouquin

12-04-2008, 06:02 AM

If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

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She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

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"Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it... It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."

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"It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying."

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"Most of the time we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do... But the other is better... If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them."

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"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."

Sk8ynat

12-08-2008, 08:24 PM

Anne of Green Gables - L.M.Montgomery

Pretty? Oh pretty doesn't seems the right word to use. Nor beautiful either. They don't go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful- wonderful. It's the first thing I ever saw that couldn't be improved upon by imagination.

I love the way she describes the most simple things:)

Dark Muse

12-11-2008, 09:02 PM

Foucault's Pendulum by Umerto Eco

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one is free to take it and run with it. At the end they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, through, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what is happening, it is too late.

Adagio

12-16-2008, 05:55 PM

"The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can."
- Howards End.
I'm reading it for my English Literature A-Level. Fantastic book so far. Page 173/293

Amlóði

12-17-2008, 03:01 PM

Le premier jardin
Anne Hébert

Au matin, il a fallu demander à Céleste de partir. Elle a sauté hors du lit comme si elle avait un ressort au creux des reins.
—Des draps frais, c’est doux à mort mais, à la longue, ça risque de me faire perdre mon âme, je pars.
Elle a laissé la moitié de ses bagages dans la chambre.

Trilaque

12-17-2008, 03:31 PM

Maximum Ride - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
James Patterson

I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!

*Classic*Charm*

12-18-2008, 02:30 AM

Dostoyevski's The Gambler...

Do you know that I shall kill you one day? I shall kill you not because I shall cease to love you or be jealous, I shall simply kill you because I have an impulse to devour you.

skasian

12-21-2008, 10:40 AM

Yes Howards End is a fantastic book, but not my favourite..
I just finished Midnight's children and one of the memorable quotes is

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me"
Quite a clever book really

weltanschauung

12-24-2008, 05:04 PM

In his little room, with its door of communication blocked with a
wardrobe, his frame of mind remained as uncomfortable as the chair in
which he was seated. His heart ached with a dull, unpleasant
sensation, with a sort of oppressive emptiness.

"The devil take those who first invented balls!" was his reflection.
"Who derives any real pleasure from them? In this province there exist
want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls! How absurd,
too, were those overdressed women! One of them must have had a
thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the
overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her
neighbour. Yes, we all know why bribes are accepted, and why men
become crooked in soul. It is all done to provide wives--yes, may the
pit swallow them up!--with fal-lals. And for what purpose? That some
woman may not have to reproach her husband with the fact that, say,
the Postmaster's wife is wearing a better dress than she is--a dress
which has cost a thousand roubles! 'Balls and gaiety, balls and
gaiety' is the constant cry. Yet what folly balls are! They do not
consort with the Russian spirit and genius, and the devil only knows
why we have them. A grown, middle-aged man--a man dressed in black,
and looking as stiff as a poker--suddenly takes the floor and begins
shuffling his feet about, while another man, even though conversing
with a companion on important business, will, the while, keep capering
to right and left like a billy-goat! Mimicry, sheer mimicry! The fact
that the Frenchman is at forty precisely what he was at fifteen leads
us to imagine that we too, forsooth, ought to be the same. No; a ball
leaves one feeling that one has done a wrong thing--so much so that
one does not care even to think of it. It also leaves one's head
perfectly empty, even as does the exertion of talking to a man of the
world. A man of that kind chatters away, and touches lightly upon
every conceivable subject, and talks in smooth, fluent phrases which
he has culled from books without grazing their substance; whereas go
and have a chat with a tradesman who knows at least ONE thing
thoroughly, and through the medium of experience, and see whether his
conversation will not be worth more than the prattle of a thousand
chatterboxes. For what good does one get out of balls? Suppose that a
competent writer were to describe such a scene exactly as it stands?
Why, even in a book it would seem senseless, even as it certainly is
in life. Are, therefore, such functions right or wrong? One would
answer that the devil alone knows, and then spit and close the book."
(dead souls, n.gogol)

ChinaRose

12-25-2008, 04:50 AM

Anne of Green Gables - L.M.Montgomery

I love the way she describes the most simple things:)

When i was in middle school, this book inspired me very much. Nowadays, I picked up it again, and it still inspires me. ;):D

Snowqueen

12-25-2008, 01:46 PM

Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.
Arms and the Man
(Bernard Shaw)

ryan.778

12-28-2008, 01:08 AM

"in abstract love for humanity one must always love no one but oneself" from the idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. truely an amazing novel.

curlyqlink

12-28-2008, 08:50 PM

Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason. We can conceive of St.Paul or even our Lord Himself drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking a cigarette, or a churchwarden. Earnest could not deny this, and admitted that Paul would almost certainly have condemned tobacco in good round terms if he had known of its existence.

--The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler

Jeremiah Jazzz

12-28-2008, 11:07 PM

'Truth hath no confine'
-Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

bouquin

12-30-2008, 07:45 AM

'Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.'

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'Be honest and poor, by all means - but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich.'

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'I must look down upon any thing contented with obscurity when it might rise to distinction.'

Maletbon

12-31-2008, 05:02 AM

‘I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired.’

from H.M.S Surprise by Patrick O’Brian

For lovers of literature, and sea stories, Patty O is freakin sweet. As you can tell, his humor can be wicked.

Silas Thorne

01-01-2009, 09:29 PM

'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Virgil

01-02-2009, 12:34 AM

The Death of Virgil: A Novel by Hermann Broch, Translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer.

This is one long stream of conscious of Virgil's (yes, the Roman poet) last hours before his death. It supposed to be a great novel by an Austrian writer, but frankly I'm not finding it so great. Well, here's a sample sentence.

The heavy portal of fear had sprung open and behind it the cavern of horror reared up, mighty, and all-encompassing. Something unkown, fearful, ghastly, assailing him simultaneously from within and without, ripped him up; a sudden malignant outbreak, superlatively painful, tore him aloft with all the devastating, convulsive, stiflingly desperate force inherent in the first lightening-and-thunderclap of a rising storm; thus chokingly it drove into him, death-dealing, death-threatening, yet the seconds follwed hard upon each other enriched in flashes the empty space between them with that inconceivable thing called life, and it seemed to him as if hope blinked up once again in those flashes while, with the fleetness of breath or a glance, he was being torn aloft in the clutch of the iron hand; it seemed to him that all this was happening so that the neglected, the lost, the unfinished might still be retrieved if only in this instant of renewed second wind; overcome as he was by pain, by fear, by torpor, he knew not whether it was hope or no hope, but he did know that every second of new-lived life was needful and momentous, he knew he had been hounded for the sake of this up-flickering of life, whether it lasted a short or a long time, chased up and away from the couch of torpor; he knew he had to escape the breath-lack of the narrow-walled and shut-in room, that once more he must send his glance outward, turned away from himself, turned away from the zones of himself, turned away from the dreary field of death, that once more, for a single time, perhaps for the last time, he must come to comprehend the vastness of life, he must, oh he must again behold the stars; and starkly lift up from the bed, held in the clutching fist that gripped into his whole body and yet grasped him from without, he moved himself with stiff-jointed legs, like a marionette conveyed on wires, uncertainly as though on stilts, back to the window against the frame of which he leaned exhausted, a little bent over because of his weakness but despite this held upright so that, as with elbows drawn back he satisfied his hunger for air with deep regular breaths, his being might disclose itself anew, participating in the breath-stream of the yearned-back spheres.
Yes, that sentence is that long. :sick: And that is a typical sentence in the book. In fact that's one of the better ones. One sentence actually went for almost two pages long. I don't know if I'm going to finish this novel. Perhaps I'll have to slug through.

mona amon

01-02-2009, 01:12 AM

LOL, Vigil, I'm curious to know how many pages that novel has!

I'm reading Pickwick Papers.

'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.'

'Ah! I see- in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, sir?'

'An observer of human nature, sir,' said Mr. Pickwick.

'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get. Poet, sir?'

'My friend, Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn.' said Mr. Pickwick.

'So have I,'said the stranger. 'Epic poem,- ten thousand lines- revolution of July- composed it on the spot- Mars by day, Apollo by night,- bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.'

:lol:

bazarov

01-02-2009, 07:21 AM

There are two types of human - kind and animalistic. First will try to achieve happiness for him and for the whole world; and a second one will try achieve his happiness but he will be ready to destroy happiness of all the world for that.

Tallon

01-02-2009, 07:30 PM

At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night. When the young men serenaded only the flute was forbidden. Why, i had asked. Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night. The peasant all called you "Don" and when you met them they took off their hats. His father hunted everyday and stopped to eat at the houses of peasant. They were always honored. For a foreigner to hunt he must present a certificate that he had never been arrested. There were bears on the Gran Sasso D'Italia but it was a long way. Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good because they fed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses. After a while i went to sleep.

A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemmingway.

AshleyMare

01-02-2009, 10:22 PM

"It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into th golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the wierdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy."
-Page 300 from the Historian by Elizabeth Kostovo

Terror Firmer

01-03-2009, 06:11 PM

A book I just finished Blind Voices by Tom Reamy...

The boys tiptoed to the cot, barely breathing. A noise reached their ears, a rustling of bedclothes, and a darker darkness rose from the cot. Jack made a little squeeking noise deep in his throat and they backed away until they bumped against the wall.

"Angel?" Finney said in an almost inaudible whisper.

There was movement from the cot. A match struck, momentarily blinding them. They squinted and pressed against the wall. The match moved to a candle. The lighted candle was lifted and the light fell on a mass of snakes writhing over a pair of glittering eyes.

Finney and Jack shrieked and grabbed each other. They hid their eyes, turned their backs and hunkered against the wall, feeling their flesh already turning to stone. Medusa sat on the cot, watching them curiously.

Finney slowly raised his arm and peeked out with one eye. Jack's arm was only an inch away. It looked , not a bit like stone. Then Jack's arm lowered slightly, uncovering his round eye.They stared at each other in amazement. They turned hesitantly, ready to flee if necessary, and saw the Medusa sitting motionless on her cot watching them.

"I looked at her and I didn't turn to stone," Jack said with a slow exhalation.

"I guess that part of it was just a myth after all," Finney said with some disappointed, "but she's certainly a real Medusa all right."

"How do you know?" Jack asked doubtfully. "She didn't turn us to stone."

Finney sighed and looked at him sideways. "If she was a fake she'd take her snakes off before she went to bed, wouldn't she?"

Jack twisted his mouth, thinking seriously. "Yeah, you're right," he said. "She's a real Medusa, sure enough."

They looked around the wagon. The mermaid floated in her tank, possibly asleep, but appearing to be dead. Beyond her the snake woman lay coiled in her cage.

"Look, Finney!" Jack hissed in excitement. "The Snake Goddess! I want to get a closer look."

"We're supposed to be looking for Angel, Jack," Finney said impatiently, feeling slightly betrayed.

"We've got time to look at the Snake Goddess, haven't we?" Jack demanded, arching his eyebrows.

Finney rolled his eyes and nodded reluctantly.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Jack said to the Medusa, his voice cracking. "Pardon us for bustin'in. We were lookin' for Angel and we got the wrong wagon. Is it all right if we take a closer look at the Snake Goddess?"

"And could you tell us which wagon Angel is in?" Finney added.

The Medusa looked from one to the other, moving her whole head instead of just her eyes. Her face showed only curiousity. Jack and Finney looked at each other.

Jack jerked his head and they moved cautiously to the snake woman's cage, casting wary glances at the Medusa. The snake woman was asleep, but stirred at their approach, candlelight sparkling dully on her gun-metal scales. Medusa followed them with her fascinated gaze, moving nothing but her head. Finney and Jack knelt down and pressed their faces against the bars. The snake woman looked back at them, her silver hair cresting over her head like a startled cockatoo. Her coils shifted slightly and she moved closer to them, her head making quick, birdlike movements. She watched them for a moment, then reached out her little hand and placed it delicately on Jack's brown grubby fingers, grasping one of the bars.

"Hey!" he breathed. "She likes me."

He suddenly reached up and unfastened the latch of the cage.

"You shouldn't do that," Finney protested.

"Ssssssh!" Jack hissed and opened the cage door. The snake woman looked at him expectantly. Jack reached his hand in.

Then Medusa stood up and went to them, leaning over to see what they were doing. Finney and Jack both jerked their heads around and stared into the nest of snakes two inches from their noses. Jack slammed the cage door and they bolted. They clattered across the wagon floor and clumped down the steps and were in the street before they even slowed down.

Medusa turned and watched them go with startled eyes. She heard a squeak behind her and twisted her head around. The door of the snake woman's cage opened slowly under its own weight. One hinge made a thin, rusty protest. The snake woman watched the opening door and swayed slightly. She hesitated for a moment, then flowed from the cage, across the floor, through the wagon door and down the steps, holding her little arms before her, rushing to the meet the night.

Medusa watched her leave and nothing moved but her head.

I'll probably post another episode later from the novel.

bazarov

01-04-2009, 04:55 AM

''Ideas will come; if you think about things enough.''
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath

Silas Thorne

01-04-2009, 05:12 PM

Kress and van Leewen, 2006 'Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design'

Real authors and real readers we cannot ultimately know. This bracketing out of real authors and real readers carries the risk of forgetting that texts, literary and artistic texts as much as mass media texts, are produced in the context of real social institutions, in order to play a very real role in social life – in order to do certain things to or for their readers, and in order to communicate attitudes towards aspects of social life and towards people who participate in them, whether authors and readers are consciously aware of this or not.

Virgil

01-04-2009, 09:03 PM

LOL, Vigil, I'm curious to know how many pages that novel has!

Almost five hundred, and I've read a little over a hundred. I can't make up m mind if I should continue.

wron

01-04-2009, 09:39 PM

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth: That all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her upon the treacherous, slavish shore.

Dr. Hill

01-04-2009, 09:43 PM

There are two types of human - kind and animalistic. First will try to achieve happiness for him and for the whole world; and a second one will try achieve his happiness but he will be rady to destroy happiness of all the world for that.

Is that worth a read?

bazarov

01-05-2009, 06:49 AM

Is that worth a read?

Yes, of course.

JimmyRow

01-05-2009, 10:26 AM

The Sun Over Breda - Auturo Perez Reverte

"Colonels always arrive midmorning," he said, and from his cold, gray-green eyes it was impossible to know whether he was speaking seriously or in jest. "Which is why we ourselves must get up so early."

Emil Miller

01-05-2009, 11:20 AM

From A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh.

'But you know I've felt low for weeks now... bloody low...how about some brandy?'
'Yes, why not? After all there are other things in life besides women and pigs.'

Dark Muse

01-05-2009, 06:32 PM

A Room With A View ~ E. M. Forster

"The Garden of Eden," pursued Mr. Emerson, still descending, "which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies."
Mr. Bebe disclamied placing the Garden of Eden anywhere.
"In this-not in other things-we men are ahead. We despise our bodies less than women do. But not until we are comrades shall we enter the garden."

mystery_spell

01-06-2009, 06:46 PM

From King Lear by William Shakespeare:

"Might I but live to see thee in my touch,/I'd say I had eyes again."

"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:/Had I your tongue and eyes, I'd use them so/That heaven's vaults should crack. She's gone for ever!"

"Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/According to my bond; no more nor less."

Dark Muse

01-08-2009, 01:59 PM

A Room With a View ~ E.M. Forster

"There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light," he continued in measured tones. "We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; becasue the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do very much harm-yes choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."

Zee.

01-08-2009, 02:03 PM

" ' Oh. Brown. Yes. Tall, young. Dark complected; women folks calls him handsome, a right smart do, i hear tell. A big hand for laughing and frolicking and playing jokes on folks. But I...' His voice ceases, He cannot look at her, feeling her steady, sober gaze upon his face.
' Joe Brown ' she says, ' Has he got a little white scar right here by his mouth? '
And he cannot look at her, and he sits there on the stacked lumber when it is too late, and he could have bitten his tongue in two. "

Any guesses?

weltanschauung

01-08-2009, 02:55 PM

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/facist_jockitch/bs/hoss-1.jpg

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/facist_jockitch/bs/hos.jpg

m.foucault- history of sexuality

bouquin

01-10-2009, 09:50 AM

'This is what is called speaking... When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die.'

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'But we have so much to be thankful for. Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night.'

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'... to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent.'

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But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.

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Every life is inexplicable ... No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge - none of that tells us very much.

Pewnut

01-11-2009, 04:00 AM

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."

"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way is was and will be. That way and not some other way."

"When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf."

andave_ya

01-11-2009, 04:48 PM

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life by C.S. Lewis

"And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to "have it again" was the supreme and only important object of desire."

"All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be.'"

"A fear that guarded the road to Faerie was one I could face. No one is a coward at all points."

Remarkable

01-11-2009, 05:31 PM

"To kill a mocingbird" ~ Harper Lee

"...Atticus,he was real nice..."

Remarkable

01-11-2009, 05:33 PM

"To kill a mockingbird" ~ Harper Lee

"...Atticus,he was real nice..."
His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover,tucking it around me.
"Most people are,Scout,when you finally see them."

Cat_Brenners

01-11-2009, 11:33 PM

Mine is a Thesaurus so it's too hard to pick a quote.
Cat

Dark Muse

01-15-2009, 03:50 AM

Paradise Lost ~ Milton

O shame to men! Devil with Devil damn'd
firm conrod holds, men only disagree
of creatures rational, though under hope
of heavenly Grace: and God procliaming peace,
yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
wasting the Earth, each other to destroy:
as it (which might induct us to accord)
man had not hellish foes enow besides,
that day and night for his distruction wait.

Silas Thorne

01-15-2009, 04:08 AM

Mine is a Thesaurus so it's too hard to pick a quote.
Cat

Don't read your thesaurus. It's a story with no end. Every word finds a new one. :)

semi-fly

01-17-2009, 12:12 AM

You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

HumanScream

01-18-2009, 04:58 PM

"All this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud."
- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

wron

01-19-2009, 12:14 AM

I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices
From peak snow-diademed to regal star;
Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices,
The pregnant voices of the Things That Are,

The Here, the Now, the vast Forlorn around us;
The gold-delirium, the ferine strife;
The lusts that lure us on, the hates that hound us;
Our red rags in the patch-work quilt of Life.

Robert W. Service

oopsycandy

01-21-2009, 09:36 AM

If the cult of the head had survived into Jesus' time among the Nazarites, and members of this sect continued the ritual removal and embalming of heads 'touched by the hand of God', then (as the leader of the sect, and as acknowledged Messiah) it is logical to assume that Jesus' own head would have been taken after his death and kept as a relic.
Keith Laidler The Divine Deception

Zee.

01-21-2009, 09:46 AM

" Most people depend heavily on their sense of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch something they know it's real. And it is not an accident that we describe the deepest parts of ourselves - our emotions - in terms of the sense of touch. Sad tales touch our feelings. Bad situations irritate us or hurt us. This is an inevitable result of the fact that we are biological organisms...

You must fight and change this orientation. You're intelligent creatures - each of you has a brain. Use it. Use it to recognize danger.
Use it to train yourself to stay alive. "

semi-fly

01-21-2009, 12:38 PM

Behold the monster with the pointed tail,
Who cleaves the hills, and breaketh walls and weapons,
Behold him who infecteth all the world.

Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
Canto XVII, lines 1-3

Emil Miller

01-23-2009, 11:52 AM

'Admirable! And then there is the Press. We must ring up the Flint and Denbigh Herald and get them to send a photographer. That means whisky.
Will you see to that Philbrick? I remember at one of our sports I omitted to offer whisky to the Press, and the result was a most unfortunate photograph.
Boys do get into such indelicate positions during the obstacle race, don't they?

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

vsopvs

01-23-2009, 03:10 PM

«Droll thing life is- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets.» - Heart Of Darkness

JarethDrakul

01-26-2009, 03:58 PM

"It doesn't matter what they say about me, and it doesn't matter what they say about you. Some people are set apart from everyone else, Cassie. But whatever they say about you, they can never truly hurt you...be true to youself"

The Unwanted by John Saul

aBIGsheep

01-26-2009, 04:16 PM

Being interesting has been replaced with being identifiable.

semi-fly

01-26-2009, 04:35 PM

My grandpa always said that asking questions is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Phangirl7

01-27-2009, 04:27 PM

"She is singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!"
-Erik, Phantom of the Opera

bailo

01-28-2009, 04:36 PM

The Moon and Sixpence by Maugham:

"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."

rimbaud

02-02-2009, 12:20 AM

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face.

O.Wilde "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

JoeLopp

02-02-2009, 02:02 AM

Zoran Zivkovic, Line On The Palm (from: Steps Through The Mist)

I carefully examined the client at my door. This is extremely important in my work. A person's outward appearance says a lot about his future. Or rather, about what he would like to hear about his future.

semi-fly

02-02-2009, 02:50 PM

Marriage...a dead state carried over into and existing still among the living like two shadows chained together with the show of a chain.

William Faulkner, Light in August

bouquin

02-03-2009, 03:45 PM

'But soon we shall die ... and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'

Emil Miller

02-05-2009, 09:45 AM

Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: 'Of course I've got one,' he insisted,'--a man can't live without a moral code. Mine is that I'm against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.'

hellsapoppin

02-05-2009, 06:43 PM

Michener's Fires of Spring hit me like a ton of bricks. It is an extraordinary book that I strongly recommend. Here is a quote for your consideration:

tell yourself the truth ... you'll be miles ahead of those who live on dreams

Phangirl7

02-07-2009, 03:51 PM

This is from Phantom of the Opera. The original novel which I am almost done reading for the 6th or 7th time.

"Three weeks later, the Epoque published this advertisement: Erik is dead."
P.G.7.

Moloko87

02-09-2009, 09:46 PM

"Hold on tight, I'll pull you in. Don't let go. Pull with your eyes while I pull with my hands. In a few seconds you'll be aboard and we'll be together."

I love that line.

Lokasenna

02-10-2009, 06:57 AM

Currently reading the Merchant of Venice, so:

"To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

Sigh... I'd love to play Shylock on the stage...

bailo

02-18-2009, 12:42 PM

I'm reading Don DeLillo and I love how he writes so i've got a bunch. but one is:

"The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in ****face fear."

and

"He imagined the sound waves passing over the land and lapping forward in time, over weeks and months, cross-country, eventually becoming the gentlest sort of rockabye rhythm in a small safe room where a mother nurses a baby and a man stands with his arm over his head, a research fellow, not in fear of shattered plaster and flying glass but only to draw down the shade-- the sky is going dark, and a tangy savor drifts from the kitchen, and there is music in the house."

Underworld by Don DeLillo

bouquin

02-18-2009, 04:10 PM

Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.

semi-fly

02-20-2009, 02:27 PM

I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increase enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

- William S. Burroughs, Junky

Eugenie

02-21-2009, 01:37 PM

The Age of Fable:

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
by the known laws of ancient liberty,
When straight a arbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cucoos, asses apes and dogs,
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latonia' s twin progeny,
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.

semi-fly

02-25-2009, 07:18 PM

Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move it.

- William S. Burroughs, Junky

Tsuyoiko

02-26-2009, 01:26 PM

Idril

02-26-2009, 09:16 PM

From the story, "The Church in Novograd" in the collection called Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel:

"Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixtion. Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican."

bouquin

03-01-2009, 05:22 PM

'I'd take all your troubles from you if I could ... and give you mine instead... Mine you wouldn't find so bad. Other people's troubles never are.'

--------------------------------------------------------

How do you wake up in the morning if you've never been to sleep?

optimisticnad

03-01-2009, 05:29 PM

'I'd take all your troubles from you if I could ... and give you mine instead... Mine you wouldn't find so bad. Other people's troubles never are.'[/I]

Man that's a great line!

seanlol

03-01-2009, 05:30 PM

"In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister."

- Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

jon1jt

03-01-2009, 05:31 PM

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Beautiful quote.

*
*

"One afternoon we were drinking beer, and then we changed to Courvoisier brandy. Then Neal, Jack and a few others started playing baseball in the yard. This time Jack played right field, Neal was pitcher...and I covered first base! It was hilarious, none of us were "feeling any pain," and the game did not last long. Then Tyne suggested we eat. We had a ball sitting on that wonderful porch, looking out at beautiful Lake St. Clair. Jack wrote about it all in On The Road but his editor, Malcolm Cowley, cut out most of what he wrote about his Detroit visits and changed the name of Lake St. Clair to Lake Michigan, which is clear across the state from Grosse Pointe."

You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac
by Edie Kerouac-Parker

Anarchy Device

03-02-2009, 05:36 PM

From Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

"The people will have their light-and every center of habitation goes up in flames! There is the end of the world you used to live in."

Chava

03-02-2009, 05:52 PM

"She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her, and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complementary vibration in him."

Tender is the Night, F.S. Fitzgerald

Sapphire

03-06-2009, 05:59 AM

Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.
(Ch1, P16)

bouquin

03-06-2009, 04:40 PM

"To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."

--------------------------------------------------------

"I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."

Phangirl7

03-11-2009, 01:47 PM

Here's one from a short story called The People of Sound and Slag. One of 20-some stories in a Science-fiction anthology I'm reading.
Last line actually:
"Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled it's shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it."

I hated that story, but this line was it's one redeeming quality.
P.G.7.

MilksABadChoice

03-15-2009, 06:41 PM

Not things I'm currently reading, but I just recently have finished.

2001: A Space Odyssey
"After ten thousand years, man had at last found something as exciting as war."

High Fidelity
"Anyway. Here's how not to plan a career: a) split up with girlfriend: b) junk college; c) go to work in record shop; d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven't let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can't is kind of the point of them). I'm stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, for ever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, ort he nearest abattoir. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way."

Winter Dreams
“’I’m nobody’, he answered. ‘My career is largely a matter of futures.’”

Stella Mica

03-16-2009, 10:50 PM

'A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking and the steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.'

Dickens, 'Bleak House'

say what you will about Dickens, he can write beautifully when he wants to --

Good night, too late for me!

rtc143

03-16-2009, 11:11 PM

"And so we beat on, boats against the current..."

The Great Gatsby~Fitzgerald

Dark Muse

03-17-2009, 11:51 PM

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look to the east at sunset, you can see the night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, a little black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, bushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it is heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.

bazarov

03-18-2009, 03:16 AM

Herman Melville - Moby Dick

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

PoeticPassions

03-18-2009, 03:42 AM

"To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions."

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

and (from the same novel)
(after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo)

"It was Napoleon, still trying to go forward, the giant somnambulist of a shattered dream."

hampusforev

03-18-2009, 03:54 AM

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free."

Sapphire

03-18-2009, 07:49 AM

Still Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
I can't bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way! It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!
(Part 5, p309)

The Comedian

03-18-2009, 01:26 PM

Buddha -- Osamu Tezuka

Scheherazade

03-22-2009, 06:55 PM

"I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, or make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak and erring pal, or make 'em think you're God-Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to give 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try tto improve their minds."

from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

Dark Muse

03-23-2009, 12:12 PM

From All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle of the floor. And kept moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you here that thar is gold in then-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

mmmmmm

03-26-2009, 11:44 PM

"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."

All Quiet on the Western front Remarque.

yeah, i just finished it

Reccura

03-27-2009, 01:54 AM

Come not between the dragon and his wrath. - King Lear

I do desire we may be better strangers. - As You Like It

Zee.

03-27-2009, 05:13 AM

“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.”

bouquin

03-27-2009, 04:22 PM

'Sometimes, when I felt real mean, and got to wondering why things are so queerly fixed in the world, I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere.'

Tsuyoiko

03-30-2009, 08:47 AM

""Dreadful crimes? But I can assure you that crimes just as dreadful, and probably more horrible, have occurred before our times, and at all times, and not only here in Russia, but everywhere else as well. And in my opinion it is not at all likely that such murders will cease to occur for a very long time to come. The only difference is that in former times there was less publicity, while now everyone talks and writes freely about such things--which fact gives the impression that such crimes have only now sprung into existence. That is where your mistake lies--an extremely natural mistake, I assure you, my dear fellow!" said Prince S."

The Idiot by Dostoevsky

I've said pretty much the same thing so many times when people go on about how terrible it is nowadays.

Desolation

03-31-2009, 05:38 AM

"- Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. - There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom."

From The Vanishing American Hobo by Jack Kerouac

Tsuyoiko

03-31-2009, 08:39 AM

"Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice--that's what it is--they are all full of malice, malice!"

The Idiot by Dostoevsky

prendrelemick

04-01-2009, 05:22 PM

Reading, The Eye of the Leopard, by Henning Mankell. ( the Inspector Wallender author)

Its a a book with almost nothing quotable in it. But here goes;

In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in giant catapults across the world. Time allotted to us is no more than that of our fore-fathers, but we have augmented it with our technology.

electricpenguin

04-02-2009, 02:06 AM

Child Ballad #93, Lamkin.

I'd quote the whole thing if I could. The eponymous stonemason Lamkin has build Lord Wearie a castle, but Lord Wearie has refused to pay him for the work. With the Lord away at sea, Lamkin, with the help of the 'fause nourice', has broken into his house and tourtured his baby son in an attempt to get the Lady of the castle to come down from her room. This verse appears after a tension-building exchange between the nurse and the Lady:

'O the firsten step she steppit,
she steppit on a stane;
But the neisten step she steppit,
she met him -- Lamkin.'

See the variants at: http://www.peterrobins.co.uk/ballads/list/titles.html

See the text with accompanying essay at: http://cfmb.icaap.org/content/36.1/BV36.1art10.pdf

EP :D

Tsuyoiko

04-02-2009, 06:15 AM

"We sometimes have strange, impossible dreams, contrary to all the laws of nature. When we awake we remember them and wonder at their strangeness. You remember, perhaps, that you were in full possession of your reason during this succession of fantastic images; even that you acted with extraordinary logic and cunning while surrounded by murderers who hid their intentions and made great demonstrations of friendship, while waiting for an opportunity to cut your throat. You remember how you escaped them by some ingenious stratagem; then you doubted if they were really deceived, or whether they were only pretending not to know your hiding-place; then you thought of another plan and hoodwinked them once again. You remember all this quite clearly, but how is it that your reason calmly accepted all the manifest absurdities and impossibilities that crowded into your dream? One of the murderers suddenly changed into a woman before your very eyes; then the woman was transformed into a hideous, cunning little dwarf; and you believed it, and accepted it all almost as a matter of course--while at the same time your intelligence seemed unusually keen, and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and logic! Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained some real idea, something that belongs to your true life,--something that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. It has left a deep impression upon you, joyful or cruel, but what it means, or what has been predicted to you in it, you can neither understand nor remember."

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Lynne Fees

04-02-2009, 11:31 AM

"Now, we have noticed that judges usually so arrange matters that the day upon which they hold court is also the day on which they are out of temper, in order that they may always have some one upon whom to vent their rage, in the name of the king, law and justice."

I was amazed at how well this 178-year-old quote described one of the judges before whom I practice law:p

Lynne Fees

04-02-2009, 11:41 AM

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:

I've never heard of this book. Who wrote it and when?

blp

04-02-2009, 08:35 PM

'But that perfect happiness is a contemplative activity will appear from the following consideration as well. We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks because it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, every one supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.'

qimissung

04-03-2009, 08:52 PM

qimissung

04-03-2009, 09:17 PM

Book One: Italy:

"How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her."

Book Two: India:

"I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water."

Book Three: Bali:

' "Ketut, why is life all crazy like this?" I asked my medicine man...He replied, "Bhuta ia, dewa ia."
"What does that mean?"
"Man is demon. Man is god. Both true." '

jinjang

04-05-2009, 09:07 PM

Two quotes from Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

"All that was the matter with her was nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness."

"The real troubles in the world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women."

I could apply the second quote to "the misalignment between money and time."

JBI

04-05-2009, 09:14 PM

jinjang

04-05-2009, 09:55 PM

I would compare that with the book Middlemarch by George Eliot, but shorter, less number of characters and events. It is about the whole life of Daisy Goodwill who marries two times and becomes a successful columnist on gardening and others. The author describes well Daisy's inner developments. I would disappoint you if I say, except a few quotes and events, I may not read it again. I will remember it with warmth.

K.K.

04-05-2009, 10:08 PM

I've never heard of this book. Who wrote it and when?

The Name of the Rose was written in the 14th century by Umberto Eco. It was originally written in Italian, and it is a murder-mystery type of book set at a monastery.
(that my be over-reducing it a bit-- but it gives you an idea.) ;)

weltanschauung

04-07-2009, 07:36 PM

"generally we call cruelty that which we do not have the heart to endure, while that which we endure easily, which is ordinary to us, does not seem cruel. thus what we call cruelty is always that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it as soon as it is ours. such weakness suppress nothing but make it a difficult task for anyone who seeks in these byways the hidden movement of the human heart."

"this is not an apology for horrible things, it is not a call for their return. but in this inexplicable impasse where we move in vain, these interruptions - which are only seemingly promises of resolution, which in the end promise us nothing but to be caught in the trap - contain all the truth of emotion in the instant of ravishment: that is, emotion, if the sense of life is inscribed therein, cannot be subordinated to any useful end. emotion that is not tied to the opening of horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night. art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts art without harm at the height of the worst and reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the opening onto all possibility. that is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the vicinity of death."
georges bataille - the cruel practice of art

jinjang

04-07-2009, 09:52 PM

georges bataille - the cruel practice of art

Those were great quotes and I will add that book in my reading list. I just started rereading Death in Venice by Mann.

Introduction by Michael Cunningham to "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann"

"A novel in its earliest form, before it begins to be rendered into language, is a cloud of sorts that hovers over the writer's head, a mystery born with clues to its own meanings but also, at its heart, insoluble. One hopes- a novel is inevitably an expression of unreasonable hopes- that the finished book will contain not only characters and scenes but a certain larger truth, though that truth, whatever it may be, is impossible to express fully in words. It has to do with the fact that writer and reader both know, beneath the level of active consciousness, something about being alive and being mortal, and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us. We are creatures whose innate knowledge exceeds that which can be articulated. Although language is enormously powerful, it is concrete, and so it can't help but miniaturize, to a certain extent, that which we simply know. All the writers I respect want to write a book so penetrating and thorough, so compassionate and unrelenting, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the spectacle of life itself. And all writers I respect seem to know (though no one likes to talk about it) that our efforts are doomed from the outset. Life is bigger than literature."

weltanschauung

04-07-2009, 10:27 PM

Those were great quotes and I will add that book in my reading list. I just started rereading Death in Venice by Mann.

Introduction by Michael Cunningham to "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann"

"A novel in its earliest form, before it begins to be rendered into language, is a cloud of sorts that hovers over the writer's head, a mystery born with clues to its own meanings but also, at its heart, insoluble. One hopes- a novel is inevitably an expression of unreasonable hopes- that the finished book will contain not only characters and scenes but a certain larger truth, though that truth, whatever it may be, is impossible to express fully in words. It has to do with the fact that writer and reader both know, beneath the level of active consciousness, something about being alive and being mortal, and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us. We are creatures whose innate knowledge exceeds that which can be articulated. Although language is enormously powerful, it is concrete, and so it can't help but miniaturize, to a certain extent, that which we simply know. All the writers I respect want to write a book so penetrating and thorough, so compassionate and unrelenting, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the spectacle of life itself. And all writers I respect seem to know (though no one likes to talk about it) that our efforts are doomed from the outset. Life is bigger than literature."

check this out: http://www.sauer-thompson.com/essays/BatailleCruelPractice.pdf

ive heard a lot about death in venice, the book. i did watch the movie and was very disappointed at the acting, though.

Mortis Anarchy

04-08-2009, 11:12 PM

"A degenerate. A filthy degenerate! Arthus, please, for my sake. I know. I know. Leave your brother alone. Please. Brother???) -- O god, theyll bug me. They know I cant stay down. They know it. Nothing to see. To look at. Why me? Why wont somebody help me. I dont want to be alone. I cant stand it. Please help me. At least Goldie has bennie. I cant stay down. Always alone. O jesus, jesus jesus...why me??? Mommy? Mommy? O god I need something. Those sick johns. Always? I dont want to be straight. I just need something. I/ll go crazy. Theyre keeping me down. Down. Why do they want to kill me?"

-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.

(All punctuation is straight out of the book--I had to backspace so many times to type it correctly!):)

Rococo

04-09-2009, 06:07 PM

I've been reading "Heart of Darkness" these past few days. The description at the beginning of the book struck me as being very beautiful:

"The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun"

- god, i wish i could write like that! It just brings the most vivid, beautiful images to mind.

Scheherazade

04-09-2009, 09:24 PM

Happy people exist too. Why should not they?

...

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

...

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you.

from American Pastoral by Philip Roth

parapony

04-09-2009, 10:52 PM

"I consider anybody who borrows a book instead of buying it, or lends one, a twerp. When I was a student at Shortridge High School a million years ago, a twerp was defined as a guy who put a set of false teeth up hes rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs.

But I hasten to say, should some impressionable young person here tonight, at loose ends and from a dysfunctional family, resolve to take a shot at being a real twerp tomorrow, that there are no longer buttons on the back seats of taxi-cabs. Times change!"

Armageddon Revisited, Kurt Vonnegut

bouquin

04-17-2009, 04:05 AM

"We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have more money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him."

Tsuyoiko

04-20-2009, 10:46 AM

"I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws"

- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Dark Muse

04-20-2009, 07:17 PM

The Agony and the Ecstasy ~ Irving Stone

His first lesson had been that the power and the durablity lay in the stone, not in the arms or tools. The stone was master; not the mason. If ever a mason came to think he was master, the stone would oppose and twart him. And if a mason beat his stone and an ignorant contadino might beat his beasts, the rich warm glowing breathing material became dull, colorless, ugly; died under his hand. To kicks and curses, to hurry and dislike, it closed a hard stone veil around its soft inner nature. It could be smashed by violence but never forced to fullfill. To sympathy, it yielded: grew even more luminous and sparkling, acheived fluid forms and symmetry.

Tsuyoiko

04-21-2009, 08:18 AM

"Something stronger than herself forced her to him"

- Madame Bovary

Dark Muse

04-25-2009, 01:44 PM

From Passing by Nella Larsen

She didn't like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudly as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all soft, as like April, as possible.

Phangirl7

04-25-2009, 04:46 PM

From the Watchmen graphice novel:
"The world will look up and shout 'save us!', and I'll look down and whisper, "No."
-Rorscach
P.G.7.

King314

04-26-2009, 12:29 AM

"I reached down to feel my knee, but it wasn't there. I reached further and found my knee in my shin." A Farewell to Arms

Pewnut

04-26-2009, 01:54 AM

The Name of the Rose was written in the 14th century by Umberto Eco. It was originally written in Italian, and it is a murder-mystery type of book set at a monastery.
(that my be over-reducing it a bit-- but it gives you an idea.) ;)

I think you mean "the story takes place in the 14th century"? Because The Name of the Rose was published in 1980...

Mics

04-26-2009, 10:20 PM

I hate intro posts so I figured that this would be a good place to start on the forum :)

"...I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for a millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves."

--Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

lilith44

04-29-2009, 02:12 AM

"If he is not the word of God, God never spoke."

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

Lekter

05-02-2009, 09:53 AM

I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Hunter S. Thompson

IJustMadeThatUp

05-02-2009, 10:14 AM

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.

The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

bouquin

05-02-2009, 02:10 PM

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

curlyqlink

05-10-2009, 07:17 AM

Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No one asks your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.

--The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

Dionido

05-17-2009, 09:10 AM

"I was always embarassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot ... and we had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, ...and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything."

from A Farewell to Arms

Tsuyoiko

05-19-2009, 05:39 AM

"Orthographical
Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry."

- James Joyce, Ulysses

Adagio

05-19-2009, 05:50 AM

"I am that very insect, brother, and those words are precisely about me. And all of us Karamazovs are like that, and in you, an angel, the same insect lives and stirs up storms in your blood. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, more than a storm! Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it's undefinable, and cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles."

- The Brothers Karamazov

BlackPuma

05-23-2009, 09:08 AM

Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?
-Netherland by Joseph O'Neil

lichtrausch

05-23-2009, 10:35 AM

Eryk

05-24-2009, 08:49 PM

"Als Oskar nach Hause kam, stand das Mittagessen schon auf dem Tisch: Falschen Hasen gab es mit Salzkartoffeln, Rotkohl und zum Nachtisch Schokoladenpudding mit Vanillesoße. Matzerath ließ kein Wörtchen hören. Oskars Mama war während des Essens mit den Gedanken woanders. Dafür gab es am Nachmittag einen Familienkrach wegen Eifersucht und Polnischer Post. Gegen Abend bot ein erfrischendes Gewitter mit Wolkenbruch und wunderschön trommelndem Hagel eine längere Vorstellung. Oskars erschöpftes Blech durfte ruhen und zuhören."

- Die Blechtrommel, Günter Grass
Just for fun, I went to Google Translate and translated this from German to French to English:

"Oskar at home, lunch was already on the table: faux rabbit with salt, there were potatoes, red cabbage and chocolate sauce dessert vanilla pudding. Matzerath suggested no word. Oskars Mom was in dinner with the thoughts elsewhere. To do this, there was the afternoon, a family of noise because of jealousy and the Polish position. In the evening, offered a refreshing with storm clouds break and beautiful trommelndem hail a long presentation. Oskars exhausted plate could rest and listen. "

BlackPuma

05-26-2009, 02:20 AM

That virtue which requires to be ever guarded, is scarcely worth the sentinel
- Vicar of Wakefield by, Oliver Goldsmith

Dark Muse

05-26-2009, 12:36 PM

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

As for the certain greif he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being ahere to humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He loved now the soft, delicate vegitation, that was so cool and perfect. He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state.

What a dread he had of mankind, of other people! It amounted almost to horror. To a sort of dream terror--his horror of being observed by some other poeple. If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegitation and be quite happy and unquestioned, by himself.

JoBourne

05-26-2009, 08:17 PM

I have been reading Tanith Lee's 'Saint Fire' and 'Faces Under Water'. Eloquent books with beautiful cadence. The matrix of the words is just lovely.

Not baggage now, but bleeding men were being carried up the passages and stairs of Santa Lallo Lacrima's sister-house.

The nuns pressed back against stone walls. They were in awe. Less at the gravity of wounds, the largess of damage, than at this general peacefulness. Even men writhing in agony, turning to say through pain-black lips, "Bless you, sister, for your charity."

Dark Muse

05-29-2009, 01:27 PM

I love Birkin! Almost everything he says captures the essence of my own beleifs and philsophy at least in regaurds to the human race.

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrecne

Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human begins hanging on the bush--and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall apples. It isn't true that they have any significance--their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.

I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do. Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest and charity is the greatest--and see what they are doing all the time. By their own works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.

It's a lie to say that love is the greatest. You might as well say that hate is the greatest, since the opposite of everything balances. What people want is hate--hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love, they get it. They distill themselves with nitro-glycerine, all the lot of them, out of very love. It is the lie that kills. If we want hate let us have it--death, murder, torture, violent destruction--let us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished to-morrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of moral lies.

Do you think that creation depends on man! It merely doesn't. There are the trees and the grass and the birds. I much prefer to think of a lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. Man is a mistake, he must go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels to go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't interrupt them--and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.

If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvelously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation--like the ictchyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;--things straight out of the fire.

This just sums up the essence of the misantrhope so perfectly.

whatsername

05-29-2009, 06:21 PM

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

I asked myself whether there was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action.

The Moon and Sixpence - W. Somerset Maugham

amarna

05-31-2009, 11:09 AM

The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.

'The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.'

Flann O'Brien: "The Third Policeman". I love this book so much!

Mr Endon

05-31-2009, 11:36 AM

'Is it about a bicycle?'

Dark Muse

06-04-2009, 06:10 PM

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without and real significance.How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be found? No flowers grow on busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a rotary motion, mechanized, cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for in life--it was the same in countries, and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look out onto the great dark sky of death with emotion, as one had looked out the class room window as a child, and seen perfect freedom on the outside. Now one was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner in this sordid vast edifice of life, and there is no escape, save in death.

But what a joy! What gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea they turned into a murderous alley, and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they claimed too, shared it up, parceled it out to certain owners, they trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep between spiky walls to the labyrinth of life.

But the great dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in the face of it.

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward too. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that his remained to look forward to, the pure inhumanness of death.

Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward to like heirs to their majority.

amarna

06-05-2009, 04:44 AM

"So they've done it to us," said the cleaning woman to Mr. Svejk. "They've
killed our Ferdinand."

Svejk had been discharged from military service years ago when a military
medical commission had pronounced him to be officially an imbecile. Now, he
was making his living by selling dogs, ugly mongrel mutants that he sold as
purebreds by forging their pedigrees. In addition to this demeaning
vocation, Svejk also suffered from rheumatism and was just now rubbing his
aching knees with camphor ice.

"Which Ferdinand, Mrs. Muller?" he asked. "I know two Ferdinands. One is the
pharmacist Prusa's delivery boy, who drank up a whole bottle of hair potion
once by mistake. And then, I know one Ferdinand Kokoska, who collects dog
turds. Neither one would be much of a loss."

"But Mr. Svejk! They killed the Archduke Ferdinand, the one from Konopiste,
the fat one, the religious one."

Hasek: Good Soldier Svejk

Cassandra-lee

06-08-2009, 06:06 PM

I'm reading Oryx and Crake and I really like these quotes:
"These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away."

"Why is it that he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?"

tailor STATELY

06-10-2009, 01:04 AM

The Founding Fathers of the USA held Cicero (106-43 B.C.) in high esteem as a great political thinker:

"Cicero's compelling honesty led him to conclude that once the reality of the Creator is clearly identified in the mind, the only intelligent approach to government, justice, and human relations is in terms of the laws which the Supreme Creator has already established. The Creator's order of things is called Natural Law."

The 5000 Year Leap/A Miracle That Changed the World/Principles of Freedom 101: Skousen

Dark Muse

06-13-2009, 01:28 PM

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

In the last resort, she believed in Mammon, the flesh, and the devil--those at least were not sham. She was a priestess without belief, without conviction, suckled in a creed outworn, and condemned to the reiteration of mysterious that were not divine to her. Yet there was no escape. She was a leaf upon a dying tree. What help was there then, but to fight still for the old, withered truths, to die for the old, outworn belief, to be a sacred and inviolate priestess of desecrated mysteries? The old great truths had been true. And she was a leaf on the old great tree of knowledge that was withering now. To the old and last truth she must be faithful even though cynicism and mockery took place at the bottom of her soul.

Enamored Reader

06-19-2009, 10:59 AM

I have just finished George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss". It was beautiful and in some ways inspiring. Here are some lines:

"If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whome...I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes- love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But i see- I feel it is not so now: there are things we must renounce in life- some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me- but I see one thing clearly- that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural- but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I didn't obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don't urge me; help me- help me, because I love you."

qimissung

06-21-2009, 01:18 PM

"So we sit, eternally weaving stories, he on his couch, I in my chair; behind us, the oblong circle of light in front of the rocking chair becomes narrower and smaller, and now it disappears. He turns on the lamp and we continue our talk."

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

Tsuyoiko

06-22-2009, 10:18 AM

"He Who Himself begot, middler the Holy Ghost, and Himself sent himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already."

- James Joyce, Ulysses

I always said the concept of god was incoherent :D

Dark Muse

07-02-2009, 02:03 PM

From the On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some strange, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

lupe

07-02-2009, 02:32 PM

"What is strongly anticipated by the mind, is often supplied by it"

Margaret Atwood ("Alias Grace")

King Mob

07-03-2009, 06:14 PM

"The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?"
-John Barth, short story Life-Story from Lost in the Funhouse

I've just fiinished reading that story. Amazing.

JoBourne

07-04-2009, 10:44 AM

Humpty Dumpty.
Did he fall, or was he pushed, or was it that he jumped?
Or was it, in fact, none of the above?

From Robert Rankin's, 'the hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse.'

It's not Kai Lung and it's not Jasper Fforde, but it's a fast amusing read. Glad I picked it up.

Olga4real

07-04-2009, 04:13 PM

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer." the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."
Paulo Coelho "The Alchemist"

Page Turner

07-08-2009, 12:11 PM

"Even useless rubbish is collected in the courtyards nowadays and used for some purpose,even broken glass is considered a useful commodity, but something so precious, so rare, as the love of a refined, young, intelligent, and good woman is utterly thrown away and wasted."

An Anonymous Story ~ From the Essential Tales of Chekhov.

mikemaster70

07-09-2009, 04:54 PM

Pryderi Agni

07-13-2009, 02:07 AM

What is history? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superflous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the Cambridge Modern History.

From What Is History? by E.H. Carr.

Beautifull

07-13-2009, 11:23 PM

i recently just read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and loved it! one of my favorite quotes is towards the end, so it might be somewhat considered a spoiler:

"He looked around, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant."

I do believe my brother who is currently going to fifth grade has picked up that book, though I doubt that he shall finish it...he tends to pick up large books with millions of words and turns it back in the next week, only reading a couple of pages :p Hopefully this one he'll finish.:sick:

mikemaster70

07-15-2009, 04:28 PM

I do believe my brother who is currently going to fifth grade has picked up that book, though I doubt that he shall finish it...he tends to pick up large books with millions of words and turns it back in the next week, only reading a couple of pages :p Hopefully this one he'll finish.:sick:

haha, i was the same way, although i would pick the book back up in the next year or so and attempt to finish it:D

semi-fly

07-16-2009, 11:37 AM

The Bishop, Anton Chekhov

"You know, your holiness, your mamma arrived while you were away," the lay brother informed the bishop as he went into his cell.

"My mother? When did she come?"

"Before the evening service. She asked first where you were and then she went to the convent."

"Then it was her I saw in the church, just now! Oh, Lord!"

And the bishop laughed with joy.

Mathor

07-18-2009, 07:54 PM

"Sir Walter, without hesitation, declared the Admiral to be
the best-looking sailor he had ever met with, and went so far as to say,
that if his own man might have had the arranging of his hair,
he should not be ashamed of being seen with him any where;"

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Pryderi Agni

07-19-2009, 02:29 AM

The oft-quoted credo ut intellegam is not an intellectual abdication. Anselm was not claiming to embrace the creed blindly in the hope of it making sense one day.

From A History of God by Karen Armstrong.

weltanschauung

07-19-2009, 11:45 AM

What would it be like, he wondered, to really know the Tao? The Tao is that which first
lets the light, then the dark. Occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there
is always renewal. It is that which keeps it all from wearing down. The universe will never
be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly
transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When
the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life. (p.k.dick- the man in the high castle)

Copernicus

07-21-2009, 08:18 PM

"If I found a job, a project an idea or a person that I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and we're all pushed into it by one single desire."

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

curlyqlink

07-22-2009, 04:08 PM

Sejanus was a liar but so fine a general of lies that he knew how to marshall them into an alert and disciplined formation... Tiberius envied him this talent as he envied Neva his honesty: for although he had progressed far in the direction of evil, he still felt hampered by unaccountable impulses towards the good.

--I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Desolation

07-23-2009, 12:46 AM

"A prayer. Sure, one prayer: for sentimental reasons. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book!" - John Fante, Ask the Dust
:lol:

weltanschauung

07-23-2009, 11:31 AM

``Oh! certainly,'' cried his faithful assistant, ``no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.''

``All this she must possess,'' added Darcy, ``and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.'' (j.austen - pride and prejudice)

we must be clowns to entertain the monkeys!
*takes notes*

weltanschauung

07-29-2009, 01:33 PM

Apuleius, at the end of the God of Socrates, expresses his wonder at seeing the carelessness of his contemporaries with regard to themselves: "All men should desire to live most happily, and should know that they cannot so live in any other way than by cultivating the soul, and yet leave the soul uncultivated [animum suum non colunt]. If, however, anyone wishes to see acutely, it is requisite that he should pay attention to his eyes, through which he sees; if you desire to run with celerity, attention must be paid to the feet, by which you run... In a similar manner, in all the other members, attention to each must be paid according to one's preferences. And, as all men may easily see that this is true, I cannot sufficienty... wonder, in such a way as the thing deserves wonder, why they do not also cultivate their soul by reason [cur non etiam animum suum ratione excolant].

(..) it is good to want to correct one's friends, if need be, but reproof is too extreme and gives offense instead of helping: it is good to convince those who don't know, but it is necessary first to choose such people as are capable of being taught.
(foucault, history of sexuality v.3)

Dark Muse

07-30-2009, 06:19 PM

From Fifith Business by Robertson Davies

She knew she was in disgrace with the world, but did not feel disgraced; she knew she was jeered at but felt no humiliation. She lived by a light that arose within; I could not comprehend it, except that it seemed to be somewhat to the splendors I found in books, though not in any way bookish. It was as though she were an excile from a world that saw things her way, and thought she was sorry Deptford did not understand her she was not resentful. When you got past her shyness she had quite posistive opinions, but the queerest thing about her was that she had no fear.

weltanschauung

07-31-2009, 12:42 AM

death's merciless love - slavoj zizek

"Why did Christ die on the cross?

How, then, are we to break out of the deadlock of the thrifty consumption, if these two exits are false? Perhaps, it is the Christian notion of agape that points towards the way out: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."(John 3:16) How, exactly, are we to conceive of this basic tenet of the Christian faith?11 Problems emerge the moment we comprehend this "giving of his one and only Son," i.e. the death of Christ, as a sacrificial gesture in the exchange between God and man. If we claim that, by sacrificing that which is most precious to Him, His own son, God redeems humanity, buying off its sins, then there are ultimately only two ways to explain this act: either God himself demands this retribution, i.e. Christ sacrifices himself as the representative of humanity to satisfy the retributive need of God his father; or God is not omnipotent, i.e. He is, like a Greek tragic hero, subordinated to a higher Destiny: His act of creation, like the fateful deed of a Greek hero, brings about unwanted dire consequences, and the only way for Him to reestablish the balance of Justice is to sacrifice what is most precious to Him, His own son - in this sense, God Himself is the ultimate Abraham. The fundamental problem of Christology is how to avoid these two readings of Christ's sacrifice that impose themselves as obvious:

"Any idea that Gods 'needs' reparation either from us or from our representative should be banished, as should the idea that there is some kind of moral order which is above God and to which God must conform by requiring reparation."12

The problem, of course, is how exactly to avoid these two options, when the very wording of the Bible seems to support their common premise: Christ's act is repeatedly designated as "ransom," by the words of Christ himself, by other biblical texts, as well as by the most prominent commentators of the Bible. Jesus himself says that he came "to give his life as a ransom for many"(Mark 10:45); Timothy 2:5-6 speaks of Christ as the "mediator between God and humanity /.../ who gave his life as a ransom for all"; St Paul himself, when he states that Christians are slaves who have been "bought at a price" (Corinthians 6:20), implies the notion that the death of Christ should be concieved as purchasing our freedom. So we have a Christ who, through his suffering and death, pays the price for setting us free, redeeming us from the burden of sin; if, then, we have been liberated from captivity to sin and the fear of death through the death and resaurrection of Christ, who demanded this price? To whom was the ransom paid? Some early Christian writers, clearly perceiving this problem, proposed a logical, if heretic, solution: since Christ's sacrifice delivered us from the power of the Devil (Satan), then Christ's death was the price God had to pay to the Devil, our "owner" when we live in sin, in order that the Devil set us free. Again, therein resides the deadlock: if Christ is offered as a sacrifice to God himself, the question arises why did God demand this sacrifice. Was he still the cruel jealous God who wanted a heavy price for his reconciliation with humanity which betrayed him? If the sacrifice of Christ was offered to someone else (the Devil), then we get the strange spectacle of God and Devil as partners in an exchange."