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[QUOTE=zarathustra2007;367090]"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. "
Friedrich Nietzsche
helotsoftware.co.uk/friedrich-nietzsche.htm
I like it :nod:
"The universe," he continued, "this universe that we know, began in almost absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex for about fifteen billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex than it is now. It is moving toward ....something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. We might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet, to that ultimate complexity. And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to is what I choose to call God. If you don't like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving towards it.
........(para phrasing)
It was my turn to laugh.
"Okay,okay. And you want to say--let me guess--that everything that helps this along is good , right? And anything that goes in the other direction--your spin on it is that it's evil, na?"
Shantaram by Gregory Roberts.
"Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
Animal Farm, finished the book- but it's recent as I am currently studying it. Fantastic little book- a definite must read, literary classic.
Falling Angel:
Seated there in a custom-made blue pin-stripe suit with a blood-red rosebud in his lapel was a man who might have been anywhere between forty-five and sixty. His hair was black and full, combed straight back on a high forehead, yet his square-cut goatee and pointed moustache were white as ermine. He was tanned and elegant; his eyes a distant, ethereal blue. A tiny, inverted golden star gleamed on his maroon silk necktie. "I'm Harry Angel," I said, as the maitre d' pulled out my chair. "A lawyer named Winesap said there was something you wanted to speak to me about."
"I like a man who's prompt," he said. "Drink?"
I ordered a double Manhattan, straight up; Cyphre tapped his glass with a manicured finger and said he'd have one more of the same. It was easy to imagine those pampered hands gripping a whip. Nero must have had such hands. And Jack the Ripper. It was the hand of emperors and assassins. Languid, yet lethal, the cruel, tapered fingers perfect instruments of evil.
" until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent"
in the book the sentence was not positive at all, it was just one of the countless wicked words mrs Reed adressed to Jane, but being quite a short-tempered person, keeping this sentence in my mind is a great help! :)
He went on till he came to the first milestone, which stood in the bank, half-way up a steep hill. He rested his basket on the top of the stone, placed his elbows on it, and gave way to a convulsive twitch, which was worse than a sob, because it was so hard and so dry.
"If I had only got her with me--- if I only had!" he said. "Hard work would be nothing to me then! But that was not to be. I ---Cain---go alone as I deserve---an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!"
Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
Please tell me who wrote the book! I'm a big romantic/lover!
Umberto Eco.Quote:
Originally Posted by Countess
From Slaughterhouse-Five
Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he said.
Derby asked him who all was on the list and Lazzaro said, "Just make ****ing sure you don't get on it. Just don't cross me, that's all." There was a silence, and then he added, "And don't cross my friends."
"You have friends?" Derby wanted to know.
"In the war?" said Lazzaro. "Yeah - I had a friend in the war. He's dead." So it goes.
"That's too bad."
Lazzaro's eyes were twinkling again. "Yeah. He was my buddy on the boxcar. His name was Roland Weary. He died in my arms." Now he pointed to Billy with his one mobile hand. "He died on the account of this silly ****sucker here. So I promised him I'd have this silly ****sucker shot after the war."
Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to say. "Just forget about it, kid," he said. "Enjoy life while you can. Nothing's gonna happen maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell rings, have somebody else answer the door."
Alittle more:
Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed after the war, and rackets he was going to work, and women he was to make **** him, whether they wanted to or not. If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes.
Furthermore from Slaughterhouse-Five, an account of English and American POWs:
Somewhere in there was a lecture on personal hygiene by the head Englishman, and then a free election. At least half the Americans went on snoozing through it all. The Englishman got up on the stage, and he rapped on the arm of the throne with a swagger stick, called, "Lads, lads, lads - can I have your attention, please?" And so on.
***
What the Englishman said about survival was this: "If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die." He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: "They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is much to be said for it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go." So it goes.
I have around 60 pages left, the book has been a hit and miss personally for me but does have keen high moments of anti-war sentiments and morality. And poignant pieces of the human soul too.
From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people's home he had put her in only a month before. She had caught pneumonia, and wasn't expected to live. She did live, though, for years after that.
Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.
"How . . . ?" she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn't have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her.
But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. "How what, Mother?" he prompted.
She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence:
"How did I get so old?"
This is a little something from C.S. Lewis's Perelandra. It's a good book if you haven't read it. Sort of a creepy imagining of a demon.
For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. ON the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness? (p. 123)
Friedrich Nietzsche is a creepy guy. He advocated a couple of weird ideas: notably that all of humanity was progressing, or should be progressing toward the Ubermensch (over-man, or super man for the German illiterate), a man who "overcomes" (I don't know if it's intentional, but Nietzsche's continual use of "overcoming" echoes eerily of Revelation), and the idea that all values and morals are temporary, and that new morals must be created in each age. He also believed in "the will to rule," a sort of idea corrupted by the Nazis, but already a little too close to their ideas for comfort.
"To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's a rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come." -Hamlet
I'm not actually reading Hamlet at the moment but is my favorite quote.
"Why do you despise yourself?"she asked, hardly knowing that she spoke, as though she were continuing without a break the earlier conversation.
He put down his book and observed her reflectively. He seemed to gather his thoughts from a remote distance.
"Because I loved you."
I just finished it too!
I don't have my book in front of me but I loved the part where Townsend told Kitty that women often think men are more in love with them than they really are.
From The Stars My Destination
It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fifth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution ... that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the Solar System was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.
It is against this seething background of the twenty-fifth century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins.