I can't wait to start Melon. I'll probably start this weekend. Thanks for the inspiration. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by thelastmelon
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I can't wait to start Melon. I'll probably start this weekend. Thanks for the inspiration. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by thelastmelon
....
But he said none of these things. He was an Afghan, with an Afghan's dignity. He was not used to explaining himself. Or perhaps he saw little purpose in presenting his point of view to these foreigners. For reasons of his own, the singer had stated simply the practice of his own culture. He stood there under darkening trees, .... and what he said was "Afghans do not sing in the garden."
--from Ann Jones' Kabul In Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan (2006)
This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for so long... Along with couple of other books based on Afghanistan.Quote:
Originally Posted by Logos
Oh well! put it on the top of your pile! because it's an amazing non-fiction work about, ermmmm, current politricks :D Very informative and enlightening, but profoundly sad about the state of education programs in Afghanistan ;)
"What an idiot!"
from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself."
The Count of Monte Cristo
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."
Also from The Count of Monte Cristo
"It was the men that made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads."
--p. 202, "Lying Under the Apple Tree", from Munro's The View From Castle Rock
:lol:
:DQuote:
Originally Posted by Logos
__________________
"The story we tell of these circumstances (largely at the prompting of Rilke's own letters) goes something like this: Afer more than a decade of free, uninterrpted productivity, Rilke was gradually drawn by his work on "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" into a realm of conflict and self-doubt--to such a degree that after that prose work's publication in 1910 he found himself directionless and existentially exhausted, a beginner unable to begin, feeling more and more estranged from the "task" of poetry and yet looking to it increasingly for some difinitive, life-answering statement." from the introduction by Edward Snow, Uncollected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke
I asked her what was wrong. "It's Jeannot." Her voice was toneless. "His mother says he can't play with me anymore."
"Oh?" Neutrally. "What does she say?"
"She says I'm a bad influence." She flickered a dark glance at me. "Because we don't go to church. Because you opened on Sunday."
You opened on Sunday.
-Chocolat
"I believe in Him who is conscious of Himself in me only."
--The Possessed, by F. Dostoyevsky.:thumbs_up
How's this for genius?:
"This matter of distribution is important, because two of the rules for a valid syllogism involve distribution of terms and because many of the fallacies in deductive reasoning are the result of an inference being drawn from undistrbuted terms."
Ed Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student -- great for beach reading, sure.
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
Quote:
"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. "There's nothing mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about-a country bumpkin, a clumsy bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Surpreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phelgm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control thier bowl movmeents? Why in the world did He ever create pain?
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What a colossal immortal blunderer! When you consider the oppertunity and power He had to really do a job, and than look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead. His sheer incompotence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never met a payroll. Why no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!"
"And what we fear we often rage against."
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"Nobody, nobody in their right mind would go back to them hard, hard times. People was only kind because life was so dirty you couldn't afford to have any enemies. It was all swim or all sink. A situation that makes people very sweet."
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Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure.
"Three things a man needed: faith, practice, and luck."-Bukowski
"You know, I, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory like perfume and it never faded never got stained. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and, and live the memory all over again."- "Rebecca"
"Nizar Qabbany "Quote:
20 years on love road , but it still unknown
one time I was killer, but more than time I was killed
20 years love book , but I still on first it page !
arabic poet
"I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, i loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." - H.H.
fell in love with it as soon as i read it. im finished reading it now. :] great book.
Youth, Beautiful Youth Hermann Hesse
Quote:
To be up and about outdoors at night, beneath the silent sky and beside quietly flowing water, is always mysterious and stirs the soul to its very depths. At such times we are close to our origins; we feel a kinship with animals and plants, feel dim memories of a primeval life before houses and town were built, when man, the homeless wanderer, could regard the woods, streams, mountains, wolves, and hawks as his equals and could love them as friends or hate them as deadly foes. Night also removes our customary sense of community life, when lights are no longer heard, one who is still awake feels solitary and sees himself parted from others and thrown upon his own resources.
I hate to post twice in a row, but I just came upon this quote in my reading and found it very interesting.
The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco
Quote:
Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
"To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable of it."
--Tolstoy, War and Peace
:thumbs_up Excellent quote from the very book I'm currently reading. In fact, I just read that a few days ago. Here's a companion:Quote:
Originally Posted by curlyqlink
Quote:
Originally Posted by War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
"Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."
Moby-Dick
The Fountainhead ~ Ayn Rand
Quote:
This is pity, he thought, and than he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
PROCTOR, laughs insanely, then:A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud-God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!"
-The Crucible, Arthur Miller
A small collection of quotes from Dune
Quote:
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
Quote:
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
Quote:
The concept of progress is a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
"Welcome to the bickering world of theoretical physics, where one professor's theory is claptrap to all the others and 1,000 rival theories abound."
Time by Alexander Waugh, quite readable and entertaining as well as education-based
"'Don't feel sorry for yourself,' he said. 'Only arseholes do that.'"
from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
From 'The Plague' by Albert Camus.Quote:
"Since the order of world is regulated by death, perhaps is it better for God we do not believe in him and we fight with all our might against death, without raising our eyes heavenward where he keeps silent."
from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
(title by permission of Raymond Carver's widow)
"No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel kind of lethargic and don't want to run. Actually it happens a lot."
"Up till then I'd made it a point of pride that no matter how hard things might get, I never walked. A marathon is a running event, after all, not a walking event. But in that one race, even walking was a problem."
"In most cases lerning something essential in life requires physical pain."
2008 book trans. Japanese to English from this apparently famous author; found it in the new book section at a college library entrance.
A combo of a writer's and runner memoir; a meditation about life and the passage of 20-25 yrs. or so. Very pleasant reading.
Yeah, that's a good one (and reminds me I should better go and finish the other half of Norwegian Wood that needs to be completed)Quote:
"'Don't feel sorry for yourself,' he said. 'Only arseholes do that.'"
from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
"Forgetting is not something you do. It happens to you. Only it did not happen to me."
- The Collector by John Fowles.
The quote
This is from 'Mencius'.Quote:
The descendants of Shang
Exceed a hundred thousand in number,
But because God so decreed,
They submit to Chou,
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Quote:
The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God, or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Quote:
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, becasue the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passaion for the truth.
Sometimes when Sirius was out on the hills alone in the winter dawn, examining the condition of the snow and looking for sheep in distress, the desolation of the scene would strike him with a shivering dread of existence. The universal carpet of snow, the mist of drifting flakes, the miserable dark sheep, pawing for food, the frozen breath on his own jaws, combined to make him feel that after all this was what the world was really like.
Olaf Stapledon
A small collection of quotes from the Dune Series -Heratics of Dune-
Quote:
Most dicipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask "why?" Be catious with "how?" Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.
Quote:
Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person
Adapted from The Life of ST ColumbaQuote:
ACCORDING to the promise given above, I shall commence this book with. a brief account of the evidences which the venerable man gave of his power. By virtue of his prayer, and in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, he healed several persons suffering under various diseases; and he alone, by the assistance of God, expelled from this our island, which now has the primacy, innumerable hosts of malignant spirits, whom he saw with his bodily eyes assailing himself, and beginning to bring deadly distempers on his monastic brotherhood. Partly by mortification, and partly by a bold resistance, he subdued, with the help of Christ, the furious rage of wild beasts. The surging waves, also, at times rolling mountains high in a great tempest, became quickly at his prayer quiet and smooth, and his ship, in which he then happened to be, reached the desired haven in a perfect calm.
"The straight lines, the uniform size of the surfaces converted his thoughts into squares, ruled lines through his soul and, by simplification, turned the freedom of it's organic life into a pattern and brought the rich, primaeval forest vegetation of his brain, full of varying impressions, back to nature's first child-like attempts at organization."
From By The Open Sea by August Strindberg
I really liked this passage
From Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto EcoQuote:
If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): "Here I am, the One and they don't know it." If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize, and move on, even though you're God and with a snap of you're fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.
"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity".
"When I began to write I said this was a story of hatred, but I am not convinced. Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love. I looked up just now from writing and caught sight of my own face in a mirror close to my desk, and I thought, does hatred really look like that? For I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright, unobtainable objects within".
From The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. My first Greene, but certainly not my last. Brighton Rock is calling me.... :thumbs_up
"Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless." -Confucius and the Madman