Quotes from Books

I thought this conversation about blushing was quite amusing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Way of the World by William Congreve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata

Quote:

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A fight between two bald men over a comb

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

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

From Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich

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

G.K.G

-The Man Who Was Thursday G.K.Chesterton

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nyx's Child

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

G.K.G

-The Man Who Was Thursday G.K.Chesterton

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

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

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

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Originally Posted by rachel

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la via diritta era smarrita.

In the middle of our life's walk
I found myself in a dark wood
for the straight road was lost]


I am overwhelmed by Dante, his brain must have been continually smoking.

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

"I COULD MURDER A CURRY" - Death


Mort, Terry Pratchett

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

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

Viriconium ~ M. John Harrison

From Thee Lives by Gertrude Stein

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

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

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

...and god created women

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

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From Tess of the D'Urbervilles

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols:

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

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

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

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

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

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

--from Keeping it Real by Justina Robson


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

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

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

"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

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

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

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

Honesty does not fear authority.

Inspector Javert from Les Misérables

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

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

From The Princess by D.H. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

The opening line to Godbye Mr Chips by James Hilton

man, why is proust so wonderful??

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

(...)

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

(...)

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

(within a budding grove) http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...tch/sm/106.gif

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

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

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

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Originally Posted by bouquin

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

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Great book!

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

Classic line from Chapter 12 of Shantaram

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Originally Posted by bouquin

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

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

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