Quotes from Books

[Alarum]

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck

[Lullaby]

"He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

[CHEKHOV]

Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, move and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect- the sun gold on its slope. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever-

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring-(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)- for ever desiring - (the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)- for ever desiring truth. Red is the doom; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry 'Iron for sale'- and truth?


Monday or Tuesday- Virginia Woolf

[mal4mac]

"If ... being sick ...man's remedially instinct, his fighting instinct wears out... one great remedy: .... Russian fatalism .... exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow." - Nietzsche, Ecco Homo

[Lynne50]

This jumped out at me at the beginning of Tess of the D'ubervilles. I thought it was such a well written sentence.

...The interior in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl's senses with an unspeakable dreariness. ...

[mal4mac]

Context:

Rosalind: ...I say i will not have you.
Orlando: Then ... I die.

Quote:

Rosalind: Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

- As You Like It

[DanielBenoit]

"They were like birds beating there wings against her window and calling to her every morning, 'Nou t'aimons Marie'."

The Idiot by Dostoyevsky

Tears where in my eyes by then.

[wessexgirl]

"The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched."

A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel

A wonderful book about three of the major players in the French Revolution, Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins.

[Mockingbird_z]

what crap people believed freedom to be.
On a night like this you could understand why people robed banks.
Rich man, Poor man - Irwin Shaw

[Zee.]

What is/are your favourite, from any book you've read.

Quotes that have spoken what you couldn't quite put together in your head, quotes that have changed you, etc


"They're all the same, women like her. It's not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven't changed, we're just young. It's the silly new middle-aged people who've got to be young who've changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can't be with us. We don't want them to be with us. We don't want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can't respect them"

^ From The Collector



"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep.And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and that loss is too empty to share"

House of Leaves

[LitNetIsGreat]

Oh, I don't know about ever, or that have changed me, but I'll throw in this one, as I thought about it (again) the other day:

Work is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Oscar Wilde (of course).

Particularly APT, as that foul thing is upon me soon once again.

[Adagio]

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

- Shakespeare

That has got to be my all time favourite. Absolutely perfect.

[Dark Muse]

From Fifth Business by Robertson Favies


How happy they might have been if they had recognized and gloried in their talent, confronting the world as gifted egoists, comparable to painters, musicians, or sculptors! But that was not their style. They insisted on degrading their talent to the level of mere acquired knowledge and industry. They wanted to be thought of as wise in the ways of the world and astute in politics; they wanted to demonstrate in themselves what the ordinary fellow might be if he would learn to think straight and be content to reap only where he had sown. The and their wives (women who looked like parrots or bulldogs, most of them) were so humorless, and except when they were drunk, so cross that I thought the ordinary fellow as lucky not to be like them.

[latimeri]

I am quite sure if this book had some other title it could have been not called as the book of adventure, or the book for youth, yet one could ask, how many adult really understand the contest of this book and the social history where this book is connected.

There is the philosophical and ideological message of the master Larsen which – not doubt, is titled wrong making the book looking like some imaginative word apart –which it wasn’t, it was real word telling story about average men at their average work at that average contest during the era which have lasted for centuries until the when the new era with the new morder ro-on ro-off stated

These quotations here could have sound just the same if it has been taken twenty year ago,

Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas. I talked with Johansen last night – the first superfluous words with which he has favored me since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was eighteen, now thirty- eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once. He had met a townsman couple of year before, in some sailor boarding -house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.” She must be a pretty old woman now, he said staring meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison who was steering a point off the course.
“When did you last write to her”?
He performed his mental arithmetic aloud, “Eighty – one; on – eighty –two, eh? no –eighty three? yes eighty three. Ten year ago, from some little port in Madagascar. I was trading.
You See,” he went on , as though addressing his neglected mothers across half the girth of the earth.” each year I was going to home. So what the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something happened, and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money; and the I will pay my passage home,

[Hira]

"Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'some one,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must need pity the Opera ghost..." ~ Gaston Leroux in the Phantom of the Opera

[Scheherazade]

Santa: You know Angelo. You shoulda seen how them sisters beat up on him when he was a kid. One sister throwed him right into a blackboard. That's how come Angelo's such a sweet, considerate man today.

from A Confederacy of Dunces

[Snowqueen]

"It is not to be conceived that a man of three or four-and-twenty should not have liberty of mind or limb to that amount. He cannot want money—he cannot want leisure. We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom. We hear of him for ever at some watering-place or other. A little while ago, he was at Weymouth. This proves that he can leave the Churchills."

Emma by Jane Austen

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Sometimes he lies so much that you wonder, why is he doing it? Two years ago he lied that his wife was dead and that he'd already married another one, and imagine, not a word of it was true: his wife never died, she's still alive and beats him once every three days." - The Brothers Karamozov

[curlyqlink]

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-- delightful if it happens to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

--Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

[Pollopicu]

"The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl with whom I had conversed in the veranda, dismissed in disgrace, by Miss Scatcherd, from a history class, and sent to stand in the middle of the large school-room. The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl----she looked thirteen or upwards. I expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but to my surprise she neither wept or blushed : composed, though grave, she stood, The central mark of all eyes.
"how can she bear it so quietly---so firmly?" I asked of myself.
"were I in her place, it seems to me I should wish the earth to open and swallow me up. She looks as if she were thinking of something beyond her punishment----beyond her situation : of something not round nor before her. I have heard of day-dreams-----is she day-dreaming now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it-----her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart : She is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present. I wonder what sort of girl she is---Whether good or naughty".

Jane Eyre

[Permenides]

I don't know if this has been posted yet, I'm not about to go through all those pages to make sure either so...

-
They say that there's a broken light for every heart on Broadway, they say that life's a game and they take the board away. They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story, then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret. In no longer pretty cities, there are fingers in the kitties, there are warrants, forms, and chitties, and a jackboot on the stair. There's sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thine dime, and at least the trains all run on time but they don't go anywhere. Facing their responsibilities either on their back or on their knees, there are ladies who just simply freeze and dare not turn away. And the widows who refuse to cry will be dressed in garter and bow-tie, and be taught to kick their legs up high in this vicious cabaret. At last the 1998 show! The ballet on the burning stage! the documentary upon the fractured screen, the dreadful poem scrawled on the crumpled page! There's a policeman with an honest soul that has seen whose head is on the pole and he grunts and fills his brier bowl with a feeling of unease. Then he briskly frisks the torn remains for a fingerprint or crimson stains and endeavors to ignore the chains that he walks in to his knees. While his master in the dark nearby inspect the hands with brutal eyes that have never brushed a lovers thigh but have squeezed a nations throat. And he hungers in his secret dreams for the harsh embrace of cruel machines but his lover is not what she seems and she will not leave a note.At last the 1998 show! The situation tragedy! Grand

[oslemxoslem]

''The only authentic ending is the one provided here :
john and mary die. john and mary die. john and mary die.
So much for endings. beginnings are always fun.... That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Now try How and Why...'' Margaret ATWOOD

[sadparadise]

Then as all souls be emparadised in you, in whom alone I understand, and grow, and see. The rafters of my body, bone, being still with you, the muscle,sinew and vein, which tile this house, will come again.
First came across this in Look Homeward Angel by, Thomas Wolfe. However, this comes from the poem A Valediction of my name in the window by, John Donne.

[bouquin]

"And maybe there's a value to being yoked to your enemies. You have more opportunity to learn to love them."


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"Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know."

[bazarov]

Why would world care for me when I don't care for him?

Victor Hugo in Hunchback of Notre Dame

[Babyguile]

I didn't choose this at random but I really like it:

If that old philosopher Schopenhauer is right, happiness is not a human possibility, since it means the absence of pain, which, as an uncle of mine used to say, only occurs when you're dead or dead drunk. So there's Myra with all her closed doors, and here's me with all my open ones, and we're both miserable. - The Women's Room by Marilyn French.

[Scheherazade]

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to be love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

from Beloved

[sadparadise]

Quote from the The Thin Red Line.

What is this great evil? How did it steal into this world? From what seed , what root did it spring? Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of love and life. Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known.

James Jones, The Thin Red Line.

[isabel+]

- And who are you? said he.
- Don't puzzle me, said I.

Currently reading: Tristram Shandy.

[CollegeGal09]

All morons hate it when you call them a moron. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 6

[Olympus21]

“Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should forever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me.

Regards

Olympus

____
dossier surendettement (http://dossierdesurendettement.net/dossier-de-surendettement/dossier-de-surendettement)

[bouquin]

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.


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To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is a sort of revenge which fills into the scale of virtue ...


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There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows - in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain - in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine - it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt ...


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'It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.'


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All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality ...


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... what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

[jimmygatz]

"If personality was an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him."

(Nick describing Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby.")

[Lynne50]

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.


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To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is a sort of revenge which fills into the scale of virtue ...


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There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows - in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain - in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine - it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt ...


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'It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.'


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All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality ...


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... what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

Oh Bouquin I haven't read Mill on the Floss in a very long time, but I always remember that it was one of my favorite books. Your quotes makes me want to read the book again.

[Phaedra's Love]

"That is some outfit you're wearing -- you look like something out of the Arabian Nights. You appear to have an erection, as well."
"Of course I have an erection. I'm in love."

from The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst


On a graver note:
"Last line of defence for the honest man.
Free will is what distinguishes us from the animals.

And I have no intention of behaving like a ****ing animal."
-- from Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane

[Kell]

This description from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment really struck me-

"he was uncommonly jovial, a frank fellow, and kind and soft hearted. But under all was was concealed a depthof worth and merit. The best of his comrades knew this, and all loved him. His appearance arrested attention: he was ill shaven and black haired."

[Return Journey]

Coming up for Air by George Orwell

"The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without you thinking of things
that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts
that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell,
especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past."

"The old English order of life couldn't change. For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook
Yorkshire pudding and apple dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woolen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plumb jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda's Home Companion in the afternoons,
with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea, bad legs, and happy endings."

(Mmm. Reminds me of me gran!)

[Warwick]

Cider with Rosie: Laurie Lee

They leaned over me – one, two, three – their mouths smeared with red currants and their hands dripping with juice. “There, there, it’s all right, don’t you wail any more. Come down ‘ome and we’ll stuff you with currants.”

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: Laurie Lee

The stooping figure of my mother, waist – deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep’s wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world. She stood old and bent at the top of the bank, silently watching me go, one gnarled red hand raised in farewell and blessing, not questioning why I went. At the bend of the road I looked back again and saw the gold light die behind her; then I turned the corner, passed the village school, and closed that part of my life forever.

[Dark Muse]

From Howards End by E.M Forster


The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much--they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian--and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates. One visualizes it as a tract of quivering gray, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything: Nature with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself: the earth is explicable--from her we came and we must return to her.

[Kell]

This quote from Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' struck me as it really reminded me of someone close to me-

"He was uncommonly jovial, a frank fellow, and kind and soft hearted. But under all was concealed a depth of worth and merit. The best of his comrades knew this, and all loved him. His apperance arrested attention: he was ill shaven and black haired."

[Snowqueen]

"Lucy was naturally clever; her remarks were often just and amusing; and as a companion for half an hour Elinor frequently found her agreeable; but her powers had received no aid from education, she was ignorant and illiterate, and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars, could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her constant endeavour to appear to advantage. Elinor saw, and pitied her for, the neglect of abilities which education might have rendered so respectable; but she saw, with less tenderness of feeling, the thorough want of delicacy, of rectitude, and integrity of mind, which her attentions, her assiduities, her flatteries at the Park betrayed; and she could have no lasting satisfaction in the company of a person who joined insincerity with ignorance; whose want of instruction prevented their meeting in conversation on terms of equality, and whose conduct towards others, made every shew of attention and deference towards herself perfectly valueless."

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

[nocturnal_90s]

I really liked the quote:

"For you, a thousand times over!"

by the character of Hassan in The Kite Runner. For me, that one quote of 6 words had more of an emotional impact than almost any other part of the novel. It made me idolize Hassan as a friend of noble character (and later a quasi-martyr of sorts) and it made me hate Amir for his lack of respect to his friend/brother that would do anything for him.

[bouquin]

You can have your cake and eat it; the only trouble is, you get fat.


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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously.


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The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?


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When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements - the invention of some new valve or sprocket - while remaining heedless of the world's barbarism. I don't say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn't notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

[Ceebeeetc]

The big problem is, he's a mate n aw. Whit kin ye dae?

From Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. I chose to leave the first part out, for the sake of keeping my comments mostly kid-friendly. :D

[Barbarous]

"There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka. Haftung blinks and shudders. Wolfgang is on his back, sucking at a gurgling bottle he is clutching with his feet. Some of the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight."
-Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"These were the questions that immediately tormented his inexperienced and virgin heart, that this most righteous of righteous men should be given over to such derisive and spiteful jeering from a crowd so frivolous and so far beneath him." - The Brothers Karamazov; "An Opportune Moment"

[Emil Miller]

This deterioration in public behaviour had been caused by a naive belief in the post-war political consensus that, because what had happened in Germany was wrong, the right way to govern a country was to renounce punitive sentencing and rely on the theory of rehabilitation to uphold the rule of law. The significance of this miscalculation was not lost on either the criminal fraternity or the legal profession, for the obvious consequence of such a policy was that criminality would flourish to the benefit of both.


From Pro Bono Publico by Emil Miller

[Miss Juventus]

Adam, the most honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. Now Aron his son, who tried to be so pure, living all his life on the profits of a whorehouse.

From "East of Edan" for Steinbeck.

[Dark Muse]

I cannot say enough how much I love Camus. Reading some of the things he says, is like listening to my own thoughts.

From The Fall


This is true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves, or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged by default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue. We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. Do you know Dante? Really? The devil you say! Then you know that Dante accepts the idea of neutral angels in the quarrel between God and Satan. And he puts them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule of his Hell. We are in the vestibule, che ami.

[Dirtbag]

Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become
enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation,
'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident truth, one on
which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen
to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no
bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But
since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it
becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable,
moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--
what is that but magic?

Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley

This book is charming.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

“…About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it’s the same damned thing, the questions are all the same only from the other end. And many, many of all the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk about the eternal questions, now, in our time. Isn’t it so?” – Book V; Chapter 3 “The Brothers Get Acquainted”

[wessexgirl]

I've just bought The Brothers Karamazov Gilliat, and am really looking forward to reading it, after all the rave reviews.

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

It's that time of year again, Good old Charlie! :thumbs_up

[AliceTwists]

i wish i could remember one from lord of the rings.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Wessexgirl, I'm happy to learn that you will be reading TBK. I'll try not to spoil it too much for you.

“Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with suffering. Why do they get thrown into the pile, to manure someone’s future harmony with themselves? – The Brother Karmazov, Book V; Chapter 4 “Rebellion”

__________________
The following is from “The Raven” – A biography of Sam Houston
by Marquis James; Copyright 1929

“The brothers paddled up to find the runaway lying under a tree, scanning lines of the “Iliad”. He was invited to return home. Sam relates that he stood “straight as an Indian,” and (with a creditable touch of Cherokee imagery for a beginner) replied that he “preferred measuring deer tracks to tape” and “the wild liberty of the Red Men better than the tyranny of his own brothers” He begged to be excused as “his translation from the Greek” claimed his interest and he desired to read it in peace.” – Book I; Chapter 2: Deer Tracks and Tape”

[marcolfo]

just off the top of my head.

so it goes. k vonegunt

oh god we know what we are, but not what we can be. d alligieri

por su experiencia sabia que uno no se muere cuando debe sino cuando puede. g g marquez ( sorry for the spanglish)

and therefore he willed that the hearts of men should seek beyond the world, and should find no rest therein, but they should have a virtue , to shape their lives amid the powers and chances of the world. j r r tolkien

always in motion, the future is. yoda


i'll be back with more

i promise

[Dark Muse]

From Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh


Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

[Dinkleberry2010]

(a paraphrase) Ariel to Prospero in The Tempist: Be of good cheer, sir, our revels are ended."

[quasimodo1]

from Olympio: The Life of
Victor Hugo
by Andre' Maurois
translated by Gerard Hopkins

Chapter 18 ANANKE'

"Notre-Dame is very old; but maybe she will
attend the funeral of that Paris which saw her
birth."
Gerard De Nerval

HUGO finished NOTRE-DAME de PARIS at the beginning of January, 1831. He had written the whole of this long novel in six months, bringing it to conclusion at the very end of the time-limit set by Gosselin. It had been, as a matter of fact, merely a question of the actual writing and composition. The documentary material had been accumulated over a period of three years: histories, chronicles, charters, inventories. Hugo had read widely. He had explored the Paris of Louis XI, and examined what remained of its old houses. In particular, he had made himself familiar with every nook and cranny of the cathedral -- its spiral staircases, its mysterious closets hollowed out of the stones, its inscriptions, both ancient and modern. Everything about the book, he hoped, would be historically correct: the scene-painting, the persons, the language. "But that is what matters least in it. Its sole merit, if it has one, lies in the fact that it is a work of the imagination, whim and fancy." In strict truth, if the erudition is real, the characters seem to be more than real, larger than life. The archdeacon Claude Frollo is a monster; Quasimodo, one of those hideous, bulbous-headed dwarfs with which Hugo's imagination teemed; Esmeralda, a vision of grace rather than a woman.

[Dark Muse]

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens


Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.

[MarkC]

hi,

This quote is from Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare
Good Night, Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow." - (Act II, Scene II)

This quote is from Candida by George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Candida, Act I (1898)

MarkC

[MarkC]

Here is a famous quote from mark Twain's work
"The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say".
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

[Snowqueen]

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies. . . . And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

[I]I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents...
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Thanks for sharing Snowqueen. I had read "Grapes of Wrath", "Of Mice and Men", "Travels With Chrley" and "The Wayward Bus" but not "East of Eden". perhaps one day I will come back around to Steinbeck and give that one a go.

Here is another from TBK

"Marfa Ignatievna cooked dinner, and the soup compared with Smerdyakov's cooking, came out "like swill", while the chicken was so dry that teeth could not chew it. In reply to the bitter, though just, reproaches of her master, Marfa Ignatievna objected that the chicken was a very old one to begin with, and that she had never been to cooking school."
The Brother Karmazov, Book V; Chapter 7 “Its Always Interesting”

[marcolfo]

i wish i could remember one from lord of the rings.

here's my favorite

"forth rode the king, fear behind him, fate before him."

[quasimodo1]

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

[bouquin]

Many things are interesting, fool, but nowhere near true.


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... your life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments.


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Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.


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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?


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Is the thing that's happening so far outside experience that you're forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?
Is reality too powerful for you?
Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life.

[Pensive]

"She in her madness wished for a storm, hoping the storm would bring her peace."
- Family Happiness

[Snowqueen]

Thanks for sharing Snowqueen. I had read "Grapes of Wrath", "Of Mice and Men", "Travels With Chrley" and "The Wayward Bus" but not "East of Eden". perhaps one day I will come back around to Steinbeck and give that one a go.

East of Eden is a brilliant novel I'll soon post more quotes. I haven't read Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men but I'm looking forward to read these two as well.

[Dark Muse]

From Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut


The most imporant thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to be dead. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very sill for people to cry and his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Fralfamadorians can look at different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. The can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

[Jeremydav]

One of my new favorite quotes:

But what is this inscription on mine arm?
Homo fuge! Whither should I fly?
If unto God, He'll throw me down to hell.
My senses are deceived, here's nothing writ.
Oh yes, I see it plain! Even here is writ
Homo fuge! Yet shall not Faustus fly!

[Albion.]

This lesson in life spoken by Polonius in Hamlet should i think be taught to every child

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear 't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

[lillottezobel]

I'll quote Leroux today:
"One must get used to everything in life, even to eternity."
"All that belongs to the past...but there is the present, and you are responsible to me for the present..."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

From Victor Hugo; "Toilers of the Sea"

"Being respectable implies a multitude of observances, from Sunday well sanctified, to a cravat properly tied. "Don't get yourself pointed at," that is a terrible law. To be pointed at is the diminutive of the anthema. Little towns, hotbeds of gossips, excel in this isolating malignity, a curse viewed through the small end of a a telescope. A man faces grapeshot, he faces a hurricane, but he beats a retreat before Madame Pimbeche."

[Nietzsche]

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships; each of which has its goal and course. Our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did —and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. --- From part 279 of The Gay Science by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The greatest weight -- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This Life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable time more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everthing unutterable small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and inumberable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?" Part 341 from The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche

[Desolation]

"Star Friendship" is one of the most beautiful passages in Nietzsche's entire oeuvre. It reminds me of a good friend that I lost a couple of years ago.

[bouquin]

"It's a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?"


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I suddenly felt peaceful again, as if I were a lake and the world could only form ripples on my surface while the calm beneath continued in solitude.


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All those years gone so quickly that even describing them does not take long. Big things do not happen to you and so you think time is not passing. You jiggle the years in your pocket, thinking you are a rich man, and suddenly you have spent everything.


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To be angry without power is to be ridiculous.


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"People cry with you one day, two days. Then they say, 'She's always crying. Why does she bring her unlucky face here?'"


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When unhappiness is so great, how can one separate mine and yours?


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"No matter how much love you need, I can love you more."

[ozhansean]

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Salman Rushdie

[Idril]

From Gösta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöff

"For we were thinking of the wonder-stricken spirit of self-analysis which had already taken possession of our minds; we were thinking of him with the icy eyes and long, knotted fingers - he, who sits in the darkest corner of our souls, and pucks our being to peices as old women pluck scraps of wool and silk. Piece by piece, the long, hard fingers have dissected us till our whole being lies there like a heap of rags - till all our best feelings, our innermost thoughts, all we have said and done is examined, ransacked, disintegrated, and the icy eyes have watched, and the toothless mouth has sneered and whispered, "See, it is but rags, nothing but rags."

[bouquin]

'God takes long and punishes hard.'


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"Who would punish if not God?"


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"Well, you can't make a fur hat out of a pig's tail."

[sammyuk]

Liberty and power, but above all power! Over all trembling mortals and over the whole antheap!

From Crime and Punishment

[cgrillo]

One of my favorite quotes is a simple one that comes from the brief introduction of Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies:

"I could say much more. But it is wisest often to be most silent on the very points on which one longs most to speak."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Another from TBK:
(I'm actually very near the the end after months of sporadic reading)

"The deceased, your saint here", he (Father Farapont) turned to the crowd, pointing at the coffin with his finger, "denied devils. He gave purgatives against devils. So they bred here like spiders in the corners. and on this day he got himself stunk. In this this we see a great sign from God."
Part III; Book 7, Chapter 1 - "The Odor of Corruption"

[Silverblue]

"Listen, my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, will someday become Buddha. Now this 'someday' is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carried grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people-eternal life."

Siddhartha
Herman Hesse


loved that book !! i was abit disappointed by other Hesse stories but this novel was just fantastic.

:yesnod:

[Silverblue]

"But there are no small events for The Heart : it heightens everything ; it puts in the same balance the fall of a fourteen years-old empire and the fall of a woman's glove, and almost everytime the glove is heavier than the empire"

Balzac "The duchess of Langeais"

[bouquin]

I don't know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of things to think about. When it comes to thinking, life is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides.


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'And when a person doesn't read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and clichés.'


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'But pain is much harder on the mind than ignorance.'

[Ashbe Maeur]

I'm re-reading 1984 right now. And this struck a certain chord with me this time through -

"They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail, everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Entirely random! :

"Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Full account of de big f-i-r-e!
Here ye are!
Wuxtry!
"Woild, Joinal, Sun, Telegram!
Here ye are, mister!
Git de latest wuxtry!
"Wuxtry!
Wuxtry"

Jimmy Small was only one of a dozen newsboys crying the same thing in City Hall Park, New York. The lads, ragged little chaps, were rushing at all in whom they saw possible customers, thrusting the papers in their very faces, a fierce rivalry taking place whenever two of the boys reached the same man at the same time. But of all who cried none shouted louder than this Jimmy Small, and none was more active in rushing here and there with papers"

From "The Newsboy Partners" by Frank Webster.
Couples and Leon Publishers, New York
Copyright 1909.

Gilliatt

[slipperyyoke]

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went great quivering thrusts like golden lances, the gleam became a glare; without a sound, with godlike violence, glow and glare and rolling flames streamed upwards, and with flying hoof-beats the steeds of the sun-god mounted the sky. The lonely watcher sat, the splendor of the god shone on him, he closed his eyes and let the glory kiss his lids. Forgotten feelings, precious pangs of his youth, quenched long since by the stern service that had been his life and now returned so strangely metamorphosed--he recognized them with a puzzled, wondering smile. He mused, he dreamed, his lips slowly shaped a name; still smiling, his face turned seawards and his hands lying folded in his lap, he fell asleep once more as he sat.

[pooteeweet]

"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."

Slaughterhouse-Five

[Dark Muse]

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained -- an urn in daylight.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, cry 'Caesar!".
Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the Ides of March.

Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Act I, Scene II

[L.M. The Third]

From "The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot



"I think all women are crosser than men," said Maggie. "Aunt Glegg's a
great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
father does."

"Well, _you'll_ be a woman some day," said Tom, "so _you_ needn't
talk."

"But I shall be a _clever_ woman," said Maggie, with a toss.


"Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable
aphorisms,--"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have
a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good
old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive
Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a
reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody
sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the
frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

[Mariner]

Anthem, Any Rand:

"It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect."

[Dark Muse]

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

"How absurd those words are, such as beast, and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men."

"Well look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a puma, or a giraffe. You can't help seeing all of them are right. They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky."

[Dark Muse]

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, fare more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties, and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures, and religions overlap. A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization.

[JhKreisler]

The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett
First lines:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

[marcolfo]

- who had pity for you, when you were sad among the strangers

James Joyce

[bouquin]

"Oh, it's miserable to be human. You get such queer diseases. Just because you're human and for no other reason. Before you know it, as the years go by, you're just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it?"


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The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnaper - this gipsy? It is the strangeness of life - a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood.


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I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.


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"Fear is a ruler of mankind. It has the biggest dominion of all. It makes you white as candles. It splits each eye in half. More of fear than of any other thing has been created ... As a molding force it comes second only to Nature itself...
It applies to everyone. Though nothing may be visible, still it is heard, like radio. It is on almost all the frequencies. And all tremble, and all are wincing, in greater or lesser degree."


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"We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects but endless fire."


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"Oh, you can't get away from rhythm ... You just can't get away from it. The left hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole talks back to the diastole, the hands play patty-cake, and the feet dance with each other. And the seasons. And the stars, and all of that. And the tides, and all that junk. You've got to live at peace with it, because if it's going to worry you, you'll lose. You can't win against it. It keeps on and on and on... we'll never get away from rhythm..."

[Aragorn Elessar]

"The first and the best victory is to conquer self." - Plato, The Republic

[DougSlug]

Hi,

New here; first post. I offer a few quotes from The Sound and the Fury, which I'm about halfway through right now:

"The day like a pane of glass struck a light, sharp blow."

"On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand."

"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"The watch ticked on."
(only meaningful in context of novel, but so forceful and symbolic)

[englishpk]

"The English take and do nothing"

The above quotation is taken from "A passage to India" by E. M Forster.

It's a narration of the author about how English ruled in India in the eighteenth century.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the Russians extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they charish them, but they don't hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary they are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with enthusiam, a sweeping abundance with such an aptness of application sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can't defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they say."
---Joseph Conrad; "Under Western Eyes"

[myhouse]

Famous quotes compilation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tkhoEzwt4Y

[BellaRose]

"Poor, unhappy erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be "some one," like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius OR USE IT TO PLAY TRICKS WITH, when, with an nordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera Ghost."

~Gaston Leroux, "Le Fantome De L'Opera"

*sighs* my poor, poor Erik... Yes, we must needs pity him. :)

[Dark Muse]

The Portrait of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde


Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion.

[RaoulDuke]

A few of my favourites:


It is no honest and blunt tu-whit-tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to here their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins in the scenery of their transgressions.

- Henry David Thoreau, listening to owls outside his cabin in Walden woods and letting his imagination wander.


There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of victory over the forces of Old an Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

- Hunter S. Thompson on the collapse of the 60's hippy movement.


He says my daughter and all the love he has wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all of the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

- Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

[coolnice]

will someday become Buddha. Now this 'someday' is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection.

[Manalive]

Herman Melville- Moby Dick


Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."


William Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury

"I seed de beginning, en now I sees de ending."

Absalom, Absalom

"You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."

Shakespeare- Hamlet

The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.


G.K. Chesterton- Orthodoxy

"That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point- and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching on a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionist choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, but let the atheist choose themselves a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

[Dark Muse]

The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde


It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us.

[Cygnus X-2112]

I started reading Paradise Lost today and this one line said by Satan really struck me as a pretty awesome quote.


The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

[bouquin]

'The past has all the time in the world. It's only the future which is running out.'


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Nobody ever died of feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

[jessicapall]

and the best quote ever
"no hell is colder then the house where my soul is clogged"
from David L. Swift in Canon (2001).
a damned good novel.

[Elentarri]

Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien :D

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."

'All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.'

“I do not love the bright sword for it's sharpness, nor the arrow for it's swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend” - Faramir

“Courage is found in unlikely places.”

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"...a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought - devil knows what foreign nations. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully - and I take liberty to call myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word as far as I know."
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"

[Scheherazade]

"...a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought - devil knows what foreign nations. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully - and I take liberty to call myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word as far as I know."
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"I really enjoyed reading that book; more so than Heart of Darkness.

[The Comedian]

The grafting of fruit trees has always interested me. Here's a couple of lines on this topic from one of the many great books by John McPhee.


In Florida, most orange trees have lemon roots. In California, nearly all lemon trees are grown on orange roots.

From Oranges by John McPhee

[Kafka's Crow]

'Politics,' the author resumes, 'are a stone attached to the neck of liter-
ture, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of
imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The
noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with the
sound of any of the instruments.

Stendhal The Red and the Black

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Stendhal The Red and the Black

Thanks for the ammunition!
My wife and her family are notorious for wedging politics into any conversation killing the moment.
I cant't wait to use that one.

[Lost_Souls]

I'll throw in a few quick bursts of prose from E. M. Forster's Howard's End:


'You and I have built up something real, because it is purely spiritual. There's no veil of mystery over us. Unreality and mystery begin as soon as one touches the body. The popular view is, as usual, exactly the wrong one. Our bothers are over tangible things--money, husbands, house-hunting. But Heaven will work of itself' (Ch. 23)

---


'Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.
[...]
She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.' (Ch. 22)

This book is so surprisingly beautiful and touching that I couldn't believe Forster wasn't a woman. He is a man isn't he? ;)

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The one's that don't make it are those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies"

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Gilliatt

[bouquin]

Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.


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But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?


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No shortage of explanations for life's mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find.


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"The true miracle of reason ... is reason's victory over the miraculous."


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We leave home not only to make room for ourselves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don't want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in our turn. Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.


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When the impossible becomes a necessity, it can sometimes be achieved.


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"Find your enemy. When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for."


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If the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend.


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The problem is not technical. You're worried about wings? Look on your shoulders. There they are. The problem, pal, is not wings but balls.


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What's the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where's the nearest edge? Jump off it.


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A man's worth reveals itself in the hour of his greatest adversity. What is our value when the chips are down? Do we merely flatter to deceive, or are we the real thing, the stuff of alchemists' dreams? These, too, are questions to which most of us, mercifully, are never required to supply answers.


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The world is irreconcilable, it doesn't add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can't make judgements or choices. We can't live.


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In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles... Beatitude is the prisoner's surrender to his chains.


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Down with a world where the guarantee that we won't die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom!


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A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host's best rug.

[bouquin]

"So listen ... what do you really want to do with your life? ... Just briefly, you know, summarize... And don't tell me you enjoy working with children, okay?"

[bouquin]

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved... The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind... It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.


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The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.


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Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches . . . .


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'Everyone has a demon ... but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it.'


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Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.


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'Things get in the way ... that's what's sad about life.'


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People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much... Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, they treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.


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There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to proceed from that thing like a ballonn he carried under his overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat nape of neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge of horror and laughter."

Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"

[ktm5124]

"Miss Schlegel, the real things' money and all the rest is a dream."

"You're still wrong. You've forgotten Death."

Leonard could not understand.

"If we lived for ever what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say 'I am I.'"

[bouquin]

"Our reaction to the beautiful occurs in the face of every single one of our intellectual pretensions. We may be very well aware that the call of beauty is a siren-call, but that doesn't stop it from arresting us, seizing us, rendering us helpless. A soul-beguiling face will make anybody stop in their tracks, in spite of themselves."


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"Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust."


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"There's nothing - and I mean nothing - that doesn't look less serious if confessed, or shared... Tell the truth, and you'll see how the world carries on. Just try it."


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"You have to have time to create art. If you are busy surviving, then art doesn't probably get much of a look in."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

---SPOILER---The conclusion:

"Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He'd had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn't put him in the cells; they hadn't sent his squad to the settlement; he'd swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he'd built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he'd smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he'd earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he'd bought that tobacco....

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.
Three thousand six hundred and fifty three days.
The three extra days were for leap years"

[bouquin]

"Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy."


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"One has to take the world as it comes. If we're here, it's surely to make the most of life."


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"... and even if the dream doesn't come true it's rather thrilling to have dreamt it."


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"You know, often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."


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"In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy."


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"... you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable ..."


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"You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth."


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"We're not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don't believe in."


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"... self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son."


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"... if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled ..."

[bouquin]

"I think you might do something better with the time . . . than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."


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"Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"


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"You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it'll encourage me, you see."

[Patrick_Bateman]

The Stranger has possibly one of the best opening lines and final lines in 20th century literature

[EJMathews]

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
"Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."

[Patrick_Bateman]

Also my signature is a pretty damn good quote (1984)

[Scheherazade]

"Do you know why you are such a help?" she said. "It's because you have never grown old - because you've never allowed yourself to grow absolutely certain about anything in life." A smile half sad and half perplexed came on her father's heavy face.

"You consider that a strong point?" he asked.

"I do," she replied, "compared to being a bundle of creeds and prejudices."

"Oh, I've got prejudices enough."

"Yes," she said. "And so have I. But we're not even sure of them these days."

~ His Family by Ernest Poole.

[bouquin]

'One mustn't make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it turns out that I'm not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it's not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it's not so bad.'


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'And fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.'


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'You and I speak different languages ... but the things we say don't change for all that.'


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Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps! He who has wondered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over the earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it. And without regret he leaves the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, with a light heart he gives himself into the hands of death, knowing that she alone can bring him peace.

[fetish]

“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”

ANNA KARENINA

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

“Let it be admitted, then, that I was thinking of Natalia Haldin’s life in terms of her mother’s character, a manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy, overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly somber youth given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious antagonisms.”

Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"


.

[Fuzzy_duck]

Every time I read this I cry, I actually cry...

Petronius: [in his dying letter to Nero] "To Nero, Emperor of Rome, Master of the World, Divine Pontiff. I know that my death will be a disappointment to you, since you wished to render me this service yourself. To be born in your reign is a miscalculation; but to die in it is a joy. I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive - the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero - murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects if you must; but with my last breath I beg you - do not mutilate the arts. Fare well but compose no more music. Brutalize the people but do not bore them, as you have bored to death your friend, the late Gaius Petronius."

[marcolfo]

...
in the first place, at home, I spent most of my time reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by external sensations. And the only source of external sensation possible for me was reading. Reading was a great help, of course, it exited, delighted and tormented me. But at times it bored me terribly. .....

Notes from underground.
Dostoyevsky

[spookymulder93]

Every time I read this I cry, I actually cry...

Petronius: [in his dying letter to Nero] "To Nero, Emperor of Rome, Master of the World, Divine Pontiff. I know that my death will be a disappointment to you, since you wished to render me this service yourself. To be born in your reign is a miscalculation; but to die in it is a joy. I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive - the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero - murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects if you must; but with my last breath I beg you - do not mutilate the arts. Fare well but compose no more music. Brutalize the people but do not bore them, as you have bored to death your friend, the late Gaius Petronius."

That's very funny. Is the rest of the Satyricon that funny?

[Fuzzy_duck]

It's not Satyricon. It's Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz :p

[bouquin]

We submerge our truths and have our sunsets on untroubled waters.


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The helpless are the cruelest lot of all: they shift their burdens so.


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Do we dislike happiness? We manufacture such a portion of our own despair . . .


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It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without . . . that the one body you've wrapped your arms around . . . and the only skin you've ever known . . . is your own - and it's dry . . . and not warm.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Ill fares the land, to hasteneing ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied"


.

[hack]

from Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins


"At birth, we emerge from dream soup.
At death, we sink back into dream soup.
In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.
Life is a portage."

[RaoulDuke]

"That we were slaves I had known all my life - and nothing could done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold - but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves." - Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

[bouquin]

I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people. And how they can't always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition... Then there were the nice people who weren't interesting, and you didn't want to know what they thought of anything... they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones ... who ended up with everything ...


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'It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That's how I knew it was good. I judge all art by its effect on my neck.'


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'I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.'

[Gregory Samsa]

"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."
"Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it."
Game, my ***. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right — I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.

[Aragorn Elessar]

"Not all those who wander are lost."
- J.R.R. Tolkien

I don't remember which book.

[Gregory Samsa]

delete this

[Gregory Samsa]

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

[iamnobody]

Stranger fiends hide here, in human form, than reside in the valleys of hell. But goodness, kindness, and love arise in the heart of the beast as well. (don't remember where I read that)

[Feddie]

Here are some words from the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov that I read months ago and still cannot get out of my head. They struck me as so profoundly true, beautiful and sad at the same time in their relevance to my own feelings especially.

"There is a silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing ... But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

I had to stop reading when I came across this. It is so lovely in it's melancholy that it actually made me cry. It's the only time a book or words have ever made me feel so strongly. The wording from this great master of literature is truly exquisite.

[keilj]

"Every patriarchal society is either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war."

George Carlin - When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

[RaoulDuke]

"Outlaws, like lovers, poets and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon."

"Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the nature of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We raise it a little bit when we fail."

- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

[bouquin]

"Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't."
"Except when it does."


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. . . one could do nothing right without also doing something wrong, so wrong, in fact, that ... one might be better off to wait and do nothing - except that to do nothing was also to do something...

[bouquin]

For even day-dreams need an element of hope to give satisfaction to the dreamer.

[Gregory Samsa]

"You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"I can sum up in one sentence what my life here has been-physically, so far as the appetites are concerned, paralysis; socially, exile; ethically, theoretically, a feast, a peace of mind unapproached in all previous experience"

from "Zuni - Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"You must not touch one of them, nor utter a single word in Spanish or American, nor whistle. But you must behave very gravely, for it is ak-ta-ni [fearful] in the presence of the gods. If you should happen to forget and say a Spanish word, hold out your left hand and then your right, one foot and then the other, and they will strike them very hard with a yucca wand." - "Zuni Selected writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"



.

[bouquin]

"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about."


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It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven.

[Gregory Samsa]

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

[RaoulDuke]

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
- Picture of Dorian Gray.

[bouquin]

Doubt could be preferable to sure knowledge if the difference between the two was a large sum of money.


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"There are a lot of things that make you what you are ... But the most important thing is your mother's womb."


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"An inside servant sees everything. A maid sees into the bed of the husband and wife, does she not? A cook sees into their stomachs. Servants are always there, watching, watching. They will talk to another servant. Servants know everything."


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We do need somebody else in this life ... we need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth... Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.

[bouquin]

Everything in nature is good: trees grow, rivers flow, birds sing, stars shine; but man in his torment twists and turns, rushes around, cuts down forests, overturns the earth, launches out to sea, travels, runs, kills animals, kills himself, perhaps, and weeps, and roars, and thinks about hell, as if God had given him a mind to conceive even more evils than those he endures!


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Oh, to travel, to travel, never stopping, and, in this immense waltz, to see everything appearing and vanishing away ...

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Here now young one, get up! For shame that you should be lying here, still nesting, and the day already grown aged and warm!"

(No matter either, if his own eyes were masty, his bodily consciousness of parasitical activity so acute as to cause his constant prosecution of vengeance on its perpetrators - all the same he would continue) :

"Up, up I say! Run to the river and wash your winkers in cold water; it will brighten your vision and lighten the footfalls of the itch makers, whom you only encourage to travel by lying in bed so long!"
Frank Hamilton Cushing "Zuni - Selected Writings"

.

[grace86]

From a Sherlock Holmes story called A Case of Identity

"My dear fellow...life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence...Depend upon it, there is nothing as unnatural as the common place."

[Silas Thorne]

'Giraffes do not wind people's hair three times around their throat and strangle them.'

'...I do not have to get inside your brain to know that when I see you rolling at my feet with your hair on fire emitting strange noises, you are clearly not happy.'

from Terry Eagleton, 'How to Read a Poem', p 105, but wildly out of context.

[weltanschauung]

"materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which i myself am included in the picture constituted by me - it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bear witness to my 'material existence'. materialism means that the reality i see is never 'whole' - not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it." (s.zizek, the parallax view, pg17)

[hazelk]

"His hatred for his wife glittered in and sparked in every word he spoke to her.The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices."

From Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

[bouquin]

"So I tell you that you better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without kindness."


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"You shouldn't be angry for hearing the truth, if you're lucky enough to find somebody to hear it from."


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You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts.


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"There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together."


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God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.


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You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.


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"Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love - or what good is it?"

[Dark Muse]

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.


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


I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering.

~The Adventures of Augie March-Saul Bellow

[Snowqueen]

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

[bouquin]

He went on talking, his eyes fixed on a framed text hanging on the dirty white wall, 'Vengeance is Mine'.
'You take too long, Lord,' he told it. 'I hurry you up a bit.'


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'Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.'

[Mariamosis]

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

[Dark Muse]

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

OMG that is awsome! I laughed out loud when I saw that.

[Crass the head]

"I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate."
— John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little

[Gregory Samsa]

"Precisely so, precisely so," he cried, and his green left eye, which was focused on Berlioz, sparkled. "That's the very place for him! As I told him that time at breakfast, 'As you please, professor, but you've contrived something totally absurd! True, it may be clever, but it's totally incomprehensible. People will laugh at you.'"
Berlioz's eyes popped. "At breakfast... with Kant? What kind of nonsense is this?" he thought.

[Dark Muse]

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

~Mobdy Dick, Herman Melville

[KilgoreT]

"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."

The Moon and Sixpence- W. Somerset Maughaum

[Snowqueen]

The limits of human life are determind, one may not live beyond them.

War and Peace

[Gregory Samsa]

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.

[bouquin]

"Life. It's a strange gift and I don't know how we're supposed to use it but I know it's the only gift we get and it's a good one."

[Dark Muse]

Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why when we ponder--as sooner of later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade thier souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to beleive that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in thier vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.

Villa Incognito~Tom Robbins

[scotta.clark]

I really appreciate all the quotes, its really fun to read. I don't remember any quote but I know quoted by Shakespeare "Nothing is impossible it is you who make it so."

[bouquin]

But where hope rises, fear must lurk behind ...


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'It is nonsense to talk about injuring no one but yourself; it is impossible to injure yourself ... without injuring hundreds, if not thousands, besides, in a greater or less degree, either by the evil you do or the good you leave undone.'

[Gregory Samsa]

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

[Venerable Bede]

The love of battle is the food upon which we live - the dust of the melee is breath of our nostrils! We live not - we wish not to live - longer than while we are victorious and renowned.

[iamnobody]

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.-Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

[Mariner]

Doc got back to the beach just at early evening, coming up the back slope of the dunes and over, to a hazy view of bay and headlands, a pure sunset of the colors steel takes on as it heats to glowing, lights of airliners, some blinking and some steady, ascending silently from the airport in short clears curves before setting out to traverse the sky, sometimes finding brief conjunction with an early start, then moving on...He decided to stop in at the office, as he was letting himself in, the phone started ringing, quietly, as if to itself."

(Wow)

--Thomas Pynchon, "Inherent Vice"

[Gregory Samsa]

"It's all over, so let's not burden the telegraph system."

[bouquin]

The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress!

[KatnissEverdeen]

"It takes ten Times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart."
-Mockingjay; Finnick Odair.

[Pierre Menard]

An interesting one from Camus:

"But too many people now scale the cross merely to be seen from a distance, even if they have to trample him who has been there so long in the process. Too many people have decided to dispense with generosity in order to practice charity. Oh, the injustice, the injustice that has been done him, it rends my heart."

–Albert Camus, The Fall

[Gregory Samsa]

'Sure, that's what I mean,' Doc Daneeka said. 'A little grease is what makes this world go round. One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'
Yossarian knew what he meant.
'That's not what I meant,' Doc Daneeka said, as Yossarian began scratching his back. 'I'm talking about co-operation. Favors. You do a favor for me, I'll do one for you. Get it?'
'Do one for me,' Yossarian requested.
'Not a chance,' Doc Daneeka answered.

[m2vihand]

"I will work harder!"
"Napoleon is always right."
(George Orwell, Animal Farm)

[bouquin]

'The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.'


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'If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. '

[ChicagoReader]

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

Death of a Salesman

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

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

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

.

[Fafnir]

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

Paradise Lost, Book I

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

[bouquin]

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


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


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


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


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

[Dark Muse]

Who is John Galt?

[Dark Muse]

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

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[bouquin]

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

[Snowqueen]

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

The Picture of Dorian Gray

[Dark Muse]

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

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[bouquin]

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


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


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


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

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

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

[Dark Muse]

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

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[Ome]

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

J.R.R. Tolkien

[Ome]

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

Bulgakov

[Dark Muse]

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

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

[fb0252]

i know full well the earthly view of man
The yonder view is blocked to mortal ken.
The fool who squints beyond with blinking eye,
Imagining his like above the sky.
Let him stand firm and gaze about alert.
To able man the world is not inert.
What need for him to seek eternities.
What he may seek, that he may seize.
When spirits haunt, let him not change his pace.
Find bliss and torment in the onward stride.
Aye, every moment stay unsatisfied.
--Goethe, Faust Part II, Act V

[bouquin]

"'Man makes plans . . . And God laughs.'"


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"Because you and I, we know, . . . that the story is whatever we decide it is, and however nice and neat we make it, in the end a story is never going to make a damn bit of difference to the dead."


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I would rather fight to take a prize however doubtful than wait to see what scraps I may be fed


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"'Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.' Right? I mean, those are Jesus, words. The man could be fairly harsh when he needed to be. . . He was kick-***."

[Pierre Menard]

"But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."

- Satan

[Pensive]

To drink is nothing, what's important is to get drunk

- For Whom The Bells Toll

[bouquin]

We are not to judge of the feelings of others by what we might feel in their place. However dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome.


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'I never learned Greek, and I don't find that I've ever missed it. I have had a Doctor's cap and gown without Greek; I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; I eat heartily without Greek; and, in short, as I don't know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.'

[bouquin]

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

[Kayaan]

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of precious ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects ?

[tonywalt]

“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

[Gregory Samsa]

"Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers." - Roberto Bolaño, 2666.

[Snowqueen]

The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others
indication of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

The Devil - Leo Tolstoy

[Gregory Samsa]

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

[Chris 73]

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'.

[Austin Butler]

My mother is a fish.

[Dark Muse]

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction -- every kind of evidence in the logician's list -- have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

~Far From the Madding Crowd -Thomas Hardy

[Dark Muse]

Water was a state of mind. If you think it your friend when you swim in the river or wash away the dirt, why call it your enemy when it comes from the heavens? From the cup of the gods themselves.

The Russian Concubine ~ Kate Furnivall

[Darcy88]

"O, reason not the need [deed]! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need --
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man [fellow],
As full of grief as age, wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely [lamely]. Touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall -- I will do such things --
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! You think I'll weep
No, I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!"

From Shakespeare's King Lear

[Gregory Samsa]

In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer - Albert Camus.

[Gregory Samsa]

"The life with you was lovely – and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink “v” in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering “l”. Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has disolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist…" - Vladimir Nabokov

[irishpixieb]

"Better to have no sense than misuse it as you do, Emma." Mr. Knightley

"I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to "Yes," she ought to say "No" directly." Emma

From "Emma" by Jane Austen

[Wolffman]

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:

Not so much a quote, but a small excerpt I love from Alasdair Gray's "Lanark":



"I took Judy to a party. I got rather drunk and started kissing the host's daughter on the floor behind the sofa. She was drunk too. Then Judy found us and was furious. The trouble is I was enjoying myself so much I couldn't even pretend to be sorry."
He frowned, and said, "That was bad, wasn't it?"
"If Judy loves you, yes, of course it was bad."
McAlpin looked gravely at Thaw for a moment, then flung his head back and roared with laughter.

[Patrick_Bateman]

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion.

The Great Gatsby

Though the sun by clouds be covered,
In the soul a light can rise;
In our hearts can be discovered
What the sullen world denies.
--Chorus – ‘Faust’ – von Goethe

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
--Nabokov – Lolita

Your king is in check,' said Woland.
Very well, very well,' responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.

--Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita

[Snowqueen]

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
War and Peace

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingured about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
Frederick Douglass; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave

[Pierre Menard]

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”

~ Yeats


“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?”

- McCarthy (Blood Meridian)

[Snowqueen]

"Spring, love, happiness!" this oak seemed to say. "Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my back or my sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes and your lies."

As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to look at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak, too, were flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid, misshapen, and grim as ever.

"Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right," thought Prince Andrew.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Our house stood within a few rods of Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition."

Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and American Slave

[fb0252]

That ancient truth, we will recite it. Give way to force, for might is right.
And who would boldly offer strife, than risk your house, estate and life.

--Chorus Faust Part 2 Act V Goethe as translated by Walter Arndt.

[hawthorns]

Time Regained, Proust

"If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the, contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time."

Villette, Bronte

"Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses, if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whirling in the very vortex of life. That void interval which passes for him so slowly that the very clocks seem at a stand, and the wingless hours plod by in the likeness of tired tramps prone to rest at milestones — that same interval, perhaps, teems with events, and pants with hurry for his friends.The hermit — if he be a sensible hermit — will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter. He will know that Destiny designed him to imitate, on occasion, the dormouse, and he will be conformable: make a tidy ball of himself, creep into a hole of life’s wall, and submit decently to the drift which blows in and soon blocks him up, preserving him in ice for the season.Let him say, “It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is.” And, perhaps, one day his snow-sepulchre will open, spring’s softness will return, the sun and south-wind will reach him; the budding of hedges, and carolling of birds, and singing of liberated streams, will call him to kindly resurrection.*Perhaps*this may be the case, perhaps not: the frost may get into his heart and never thaw more; when spring comes, a crow or a pie may pick out of the wall only his dormouse-bones. Well, even in that case, all will be right: it is to be supposed he knew from the first he was mortal, and must one day go the way of all flesh, “As well soon as syne.”

“All great and precious things are lonely.”*―*John Steinbeck,*East of Eden

[Snowqueen]

Young men read books before attending Helene's evenings, to have something to say in her salon, and secretaries of the embassy, and even ambassadors, confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that in a way Helene was a power. Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At these parties his feelings were like those of a conjuror who always expects his trick to be found out at any moment. But whether because stupidity was just what was needed to run such a salon.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

[Chris1991]

Never forget who you are, for surely the world will not.Make it your strength.Then it can never be your weakness.Armor yourself in it,and it will never be used to hurt you
~~Tyrion Lannister - A game of thrones by George R.R. Martin

[begirl001]

Least common denominator



http://www.herfree.com/avatar2.jpg

[ave d]

According to Fleetfin's research, if you sun-dry the sexual organs of a male and female squid and bring them into contact at the rate of three hundred fifty feet per fifteen seconds or less (the average running speed of a third-year junior high school student), you'll create an explosion surpassing dynamite.

Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook (1991)

[Snowqueen]

Rostov was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, which to his amazement had gained him the St. George's Cross and even given him a reputation for bravery, and there was something he could not at all understand. "So others are even more afraid than I am!" he thought. "So that's all there is in what is called heroism! And heroism! And did I do it for my country's sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George's Cross.... I can't make it out at all."

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

[TylerDurden]

"A strange metaphysical question arises: Whether, when the object of an impassioned love has herself faded into a shadow, the fiery passion itself canstill survive as an abstraction, still mourn over its wrongs, still clamour for redress."

"Even now thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers: but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders" - personal favorite

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Despite my Dutch education, a blue hill to me is as a friend, and a roaring torrent like the sound of a domestic song that hath soothed my infancy. I never felt the impulse so strongly as in this land of lakes and mountains, and nothing grieves me so much as that duty prevents your being with me in my numerous excursions among its recesses."

From Scott's Guy Mannering

[Snowqueen]

On the Sunday afternoon she stood at her bedroom window, looking across at the oak-trees of the wood, in whose branches a twilight was tangled, below the bright sky of the afternoon. Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and dreaded.

Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Zakhar Fyodorovich was used to doing business in the crazy city of Rostov-but not that sort of business. His usual reason for going there was machinery: all the latest machines turned up Rostov. You could take a good look at them, run a hand across them, and someone would explain how they worked in a way you could understand."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn August 1914

edit
I meant to add this one as well from The Travels of Marco Polo:

(click on thumbnail)

http://i963.photobucket.com/albums/ae114/tabuka1/Books/th_MarcoPoloquote.jpg (http://s963.photobucket.com/albums/ae114/tabuka1/Books/?action=view&current=MarcoPoloquote.jpg)

[bouquin]

"But as de old folks always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' what Ah'm liable tuh do yet."


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It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.


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"If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all."

[Emil Miller]

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

[cacian]

"Zakhar Fyodorovich was used to doing business in the crazy city of Rostov-but not that sort of business. His usual reason for going there was machinery: all the latest machines turned up Rostov. You could take a good look at them, run a hand across them, and someone would explain how they worked in a way you could understand."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn August 1914

edit
I meant to add this one as well from The Travels of Marco Polo:

(click on thumbnail)

http://i963.photobucket.com/albums/ae114/tabuka1/Books/th_MarcoPoloquote.jpg (http://s963.photobucket.com/albums/ae114/tabuka1/Books/?action=view&current=MarcoPoloquote.jpg)

This one is interesting. Ulau shutting himself in the tower amongst his wealth.
Why on earth would he do such a thing?