Quotes from Books

Gunter Grass Peeling the Onion "In the debate among the gods of the existentialist

doctrine of salvation, a debate ranging over years and borders, I took sides--first gingerly,

then vehemendtly--with Camus. But I went further: mistrusting all ideologies and rejecting

all faiths, I made stone rolling my daily discipline. I liked that Sisyphus. Damned by the

gods, as sure of the absurdity of human existance as he was of the sun's coming up and

going down, and thus aware that the stone he rolled up the hill would not stay put--he

became a saint to me, a saint I could worship. A hero beyond hope or despair. A man made

happy by a restless stone. A man who never gives up."

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She was my incubus, but she filled my house. I was like a dazed fly alone in the empty rooms.

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Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author Act I

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Originally Posted by Dark Muse

A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to bewaiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then almostat the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standimng far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the floor far away and begining again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfation shook his soul to know he had not yielded nor undone all.

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Hey Dark Muse, how did you find the book? Are you still reading it? Read it several weeks ago, truly liked it.

The catcher in the rye
It's not too bad when the sun's out but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
and this one:
Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody.

From Jim Harrison's Memoir "Off to the Side"

On writers and drinking:

"For instance, Hemingway scholars have not been quite up to the fact that his accident-proneness was a result of getting pie-eyed everyday after his morning work"

"My thesis is that the language of all poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry."
Robert Graves - The White Goddess

O fleeting soul of mine, my body's friend and guest, whither goes thou, pale, fearful, and pensive one? Why laugh not as of old?
[Lat., Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis!
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, frigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis joca?]
- Hadrian (Adrian), Aelius Publius Hadrianus Aelius,
Ad Animam,
according to Aelius Spartianus
{introductory expression in Latin, From "The Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar}

From "The Memoirs of Hadrian" (first chapter, Animula Vagula Blandula) "Already certain portions of my life are like dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy in its entirety. I can hunt no longer: if there were no one but me to disturb them in their ruminations and their play the deer in the Etrurian mountains would be at peace. With the Diana of the forests I have always maintained the swift-changing and passionate relations which are those of a man with the object of his love: the boar hunt gave me my first chance, as a boy, for command and for encounter with danger: I fairly threw myself into the sport, and my excesses in it brought reprimands from Trajan."

Marguerite Yourcenar..."Memoirs of Hadrian" From personal notes titled "Reflections on the Composition" "This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F. ...and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to efface the personal. But even the longest dedication in too short and too comonplace to honor a friendship so uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique: that in the whole adventure of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even inn the entire life of some fortunate writers, there must have been sometimes, in the backround, perhaps, someone who will not let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain, out of fatigue; someone who would re-read with us for the twentieth time, if need be, a questionable page; someone who takes down for us from the library shelves th heavy tomes in which we may find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse rthem long after weariness has made us give up: someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes, our ideas; who shares with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless work which both require, never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque."

There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him.
(Chapter 9)

To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.
(Chapter 13)

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age.
(Chapter 13)

And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life.
(Chapter 13)

Nothing is too bloody much. You just have to take it and fight out of it and now stop prima-donnaing and accept the fact...
(Chapter 14)

How simple it is when one knows nothing.
(Chapter 14)

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
(Chapter 43)

"You will never know the truth, and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones."

Iris Murdoch

from "Memoirs of Hadrian" chapter title..."Varius Multiplex Multiformis" "And it was then that the wisest of my good geniouses came to my aid: Plotina. ... Both of us had a passion for adorning, then laying bare, our souls, and for testing our minds on every touchstone. She leaned toward Epicurean philosophy, that narrow but clean bed whereon I have sometimes rested my thought. The mystery of the gods, which haunted me, did not trouble her, nor had she my ardent love for the human body. She was chaste by reason of her disgust with the merely facile, generous by determination rather than by nature, wisely mistrustful but ready to accept anything from a friend, even his inevitable errors. Friendship was a choice to which she devoted her whole being; she gave herself to it utterly, and as I have done only to my loves. She as known me better than anyone has; I have let her see what I carefully concealed from everone else; for example, my secret lapses into cowardice. I like to thinnk that on her side she has kept almost nothing from me. No bodily intimacy ever existed between us; in its place was this contact of two minds closely intermingled."

"Something well said is something well said, something said superbly is a poem."
- Reality of Fiction

from "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar Chapter: Tellus Stabilita

"I should say outright that I have little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken,

and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip

easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. Respect for ancient laws

answers to what is deepest rooted in human piety, but it serves also to pillow the

inertia of judges. The oldest codes are a part of that very savagery which they

were striving to correct: even the most venerable among them are the product of

force."

I just finished up a rereading of Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five." Kilgore Trout is one of my favorite characters and this quote is in reference to one of the books he published.

"Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. So it goes."

...forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

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Originally Posted by bouquin

...forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

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That was the first Fowles book I read (about 20 years ago) and loved it. Hope you enjoy it too! :)

When you finish reading, maybe you can post a review for us?

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning."
Haruki Murakami "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

'He made out that he was the only real horrorshow prestoopnick in the whole zoo, going on that he'd done this and done the other and killed ten rozzes with one crack of his rooker and all that cal. But nobody was impressed, O my brothers.' - A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.

'why was too black for the newspaper to print and too deep for Giovanni to tell'

But there is reason to suspect that a people are waning to decay and ruin, the moment that their life becomes fascinating either to the poet's imagination or the painter's eye.
Chapter XXXII: "Scenes By the Way"

One of two or three passages in this book that might be called 'funny.'

I won't give you all of the details, but I will tell you that the Candide & his fellow traveler are found sleeping on the ground by 'Oreillons'. The Oreillons have Candide, who is wearing a Jesuit hat, and his fellow traveler tied up, as they all begin to cry out, one and all, "A Jesuit! a Jesuit! we shall be revenged; we shall have excellent cheer; let us eat this Jesuit; let us eat him up." Needless to say it put a big smile on my face.

Sure enough, below the big embankment, along the river, in a little street of old houses, youths were standing outside or sitting in doorways, chatting with one another across the road and asking about the battle. Until the bullets hit them in the head, they couldn't help being curious, even excited, by it all.

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I won't give you all of the details, but I will tell you that the Candide & his fellow traveler are found sleeping on the ground by 'Oreillons'. The Oreillons have Candide, who is wearing a Jesuit hat, and his fellow traveler tied up, as they all begin to cry out, one and all, "A Jesuit! a Jesuit! we shall be revenged; we shall have excellent cheer; let us eat this Jesuit; let us eat him up." Needless to say it put a big smile on my face.

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I think an even more memorable part of Candide would have to be "I was in this state of weakness and languor, between life and death, when I felt myself touched by something which moved over my body. Opening my eyes, I saw a white man, rather attractive, who was groaning and saying under his breath: O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni (Oh what a misfortune to have no testicles!)

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I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

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-George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, from a collection of his essays.

In the essay he describes a time that he shot an elephant, which he did not really want to shoot, in colonial Burma. He only shot it because that is what the "natives" expected him to do after the elephant killed an Indian resident. He would look like a fool if he grabbed his rifle, headed down to the paddy where the elephant was, and then left without having killed it.

Earlier in the essay he mentions that the worst thing that could happen to a white man in the Asian colonies was being laughed at by the local population. When he is contemplating what would happen if the elephant charged him, he says he is not scared of the thought of dying, just the thought of how his dying would reflect on the Empire:

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The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong, those two thousannd Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

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Won't you let me try to make up a little for all I've failed to do in the past?
(Painted Veil by S. Maugham)

" Start bravely, not to reason but to act.
As soon as you begin to act you will immediately become aware
of the necessity of justifying your actions."

Stanislavski - An Introduction

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens

"Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mamnals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plent of time for silence. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

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Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure to be talked of.

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- Jane Austen, Emma

'What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?'
(Last line of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell)

The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne

Chapter XVI: Leave-Takings

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When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred past with any show of those common-place civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead henceforth to him, and he to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtsey with eyes that were inpenetrable beneath the glaze and film. We passed, therefore, as if mutuall invisible.

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Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world! - and unfortunately, there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late.

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Miss Smith, Persuasion (Austen)

This is very strong expression.

‘Yet when six o’clock comes and I touch my hat to the commissionaire, being always too effusive in ceremony since I desire so much to be accepted; and struggle, leaning against the wind, buttoned up, with my jaws blue and my eyes running water, I wish that a little typist would cuddle on my knees; I think that my favourite dish is liver and bacon; and so am apt to wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there are frequent public-houses, and the shadows of ships passing at the end of the street, and women fighting. But I say to myself, recovering my sanity, Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty. The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.’
The Waves , Woolf

"...je suis las de tuer tout tes amants, c'est toi que je tuerai."
"J'ai toujours pensait que tu me tuerais. La premiée fois que je t'ai vu, je venais de rencontrer un prétre à la porte de ma maison. Et cette nuit, En sortant de Cordoue, n'as tu rien vu? Un liévre a passé entre les pieds de ton cheval. C'est écrit." Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.
It was said by Carmen to Don José.

a young man named adam, on the run from the law, trying to survive in the desert..."To starve was nothing, but to eat while starving was hell!"

"Great events have incalculable results" pg 8 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo

"It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one."

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

"[The soldiers] moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they has evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure."

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

I know how but I do not know why

1984 by George Orwell

Hi, it's nice and comfortable to be here in this forum :) I'm currently read the eccentric Strindberg's A Madman's Defense and here's a passage from it:

"And while I, completely absorbed in my daily toil, lived unsuspectingly from day to day, a false legend took shape and form, grounded on nothing but the talk of the envious and the rumormongering of the café crowd. And I, idiot that I was, believed everybody except myself. Ah!..."

It's a paranoid and melodramatic piece, but not without it's charm.