Quotes from Books

The last sentence on the page of text prefacing the beginning of Michael Ondaatje's new novel Divisadero ~ "For I have taken myself away from who I was with them, and what I used to be. When my name was Anna."

I was reading on the train this morning, and felt very guilty, when I had to cut at page 37, but I could not very well miss my stop... So far, the book has all of the atmosphere of time and place, and poetic narrative cadence, of Ondaatje's previous novels. Taking the passage quoted above into consideration, the book so far appears to relate most closely to The English Patient.

"She has claws all over her, you don't know how to get at her."
-Père Ubu, about Mère Ubu

"Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?"

"The man without a purpose."

--Quite possibly my favorite quotation of Ayn Rand, taken from "Atlas Shrugged."

The first three pages of I, Zombie:


I remember how the bottom of the lake looked as I was drowning. The thought of being buried in the mud frightened me more than the sensation of suffocating. My throat was jammed shut so that no water could go down but I wasn't thinking about air. I could feel my heart slow where at first it had thundered and leaped against my ribs as if it were trying to escape what was happening to it. It couldn't and neither could I. After a while I relaxed and drifted with the cold current while silence came to put me to sleep.


Funny how that nightmare was with me when I woke up in the cargo bound for Land's End. I apologized to Fry for being on top of the pile, not that I could help the way they stacked us in the crate, but she was in a snit and wouldn't respond to me.


Thoughts of death and life were in my mind, disturbing me, so I concentrated on the creaking and swaying cargo. My head felt strange, as if one piece of my brain were in a kind of trance while the other, smaller portion bellowed in terror and tried to attract attention. I didn't know which piece was me. Maybe both, maybe neither.


The packs were implanted in our brains on Earth so that all the driver had to do was think what he wanted us to do. Quidler got us moving as soon as the ship landed in the cradle. The compound was short of workers and had been waiting for the four of us for .... I don't know, a long time, I guess.


Frye began squirming beneath me so I told her to take it easy and wait a minute until I rolled over and opened the lid. Inside of me the little piece of brain was doing a lot of yelling, as if it were scared and not sure of what was happening.


I shoved the lid too hard and broke the hinges. Frye came out behind me and I stuck out my hand and said "Hi." I knew the difference between someone it was okay to talk to and someone it wasn't. Frye, LeMay, and Zottinger were big dumb bunnies without much personality and not enough looks to make me feel self-conscious, so I felt right at ease with them, even when they ignored my greeting and didn't say anything back to me.


Land's End was a world of ice and snow, oases, aliens, factories, people who made me nervous and Peterkin.


"Move it, dum-dums!" said Quidler in a tone that said he was bored out of his mind. He gave me a particularly unfriendly stare as I walked down the ramp from the ship and I knew right away I wasn't going to get along with him. He was one of those insecure people who took an instant dislike to me because I was so big. About five-ten, he was contemptuous of tall women, especially tall and muscular women. Back on Earth at the institution for hopeless cases, an acquaintance told me men liked muscles on women so I took up body building. I found out later she was no friend. Men didn't like muscled women, big women, or freak women. They liked cute little icebergs like Bates.


We were taken to the ground in an elevator, then for a couple of hours we stood on a motorized sled that slid over miles of gray ice until finally we arrived at the compound.


No sooner did we march into our quarters, which was a room fifteen by fifteen, than Zottinger climbed on a chair, slung his belt up over a ceiling beam, buckled it around his neck and did a jig in midair.


Frye selected one of the lower bunks while LeMay chose the other lower, at about the time I was sitting down on it. I threw her out so she climbed onto the bed above me. There were just bare springs and naked matresses. Lying down, I looked up at the rusty metal and knew I could never endure such a view for very long. "Get out," I said. "I've changed my mind. I want that bunk you're on."


LeMay's head appeared over the side and she gave me a steady stare with her coaly eyes.


"No lip," I said. "I want us to be friends but I'll never take lip from anybody ever again. I have to have the top bunk."


We traded places and by and by the place settled down. The only noise was the creaking of Zott's belt as he hung swaying from the rafter.


"They want to freeze me to death," I said. "Are you cold?" LeMay didn't answer so I kicked the wall until she did. No, she wasn't cold.


Quidler and Peterkin came down the hall, looked in and saw Zott, came in cursing and got him down from the rafter.


"When the stiffs go nuts then the whole place is nuts," said Quidler. "How do you account for this?"


"How should I know? This whole business is unnatural so why should any particular part of it seem weird?"


Quidler cut Zott's belt with a knife and allowed the body to drop to the floor. "Maybe he isn't really dead."


"You're always saying that! He's dead!"


"Sure, now that he's hanged himself. He's probably been up there for hours. I wonder why his pack didn't shut down?"


"I suppose the belt wasn't that tight around his neck and he was getting some air."


Hauling Frye onto the floor, Quidler laid Zott on her bunk.


"Why did you do that?" said Peterkin. "Do you think maybe he feels bad and should be made a little comfortable?"


"I'm messed up, okay? I admit it. I can't bear the thought that one of these days they're going to send us a live one."

...

From A History of the End of the World by Jonathan Kirsch. A book about the Book of Revelation. The first two sentences.

"I know the ending," goes the slogan on a license-plate frame that can be spotted here and there on the streets and highways of America. "God wins."

From "Les Miserables":

"What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and sepcially upon their desitinies, as what they do." (Page 11)

"Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfiguresthe wretched." (Page 122)

"No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child." (Page 329)

Those are a few. When I read more, I'll post them.

"It's bulletproof, like my wife, and impregnable. Not like my wife."

- Demon Theory

this is one of my favorite quotes from the estepary wolve by herman hesse

"at nights I dream of him sometimes, And deep down I feel disturbed, upset on his cause, by the mere existance of such a human being, even when I grew to have true affection for him"

Virtue itslef turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometime's by action dignified.

Frair Laurence , Romeo And Juliet, Act II,scene iii ,W.Shakespeare

... you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.
from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

~from Tears of the Giraffe

The maid glanced at her employer. "Oh, you have heard of me," she said. "I am glad that he speaks of me. I would not like to think that nobody speaks of me."

"No," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is better to be spoken of than not to be spoken of. Except sometimes, that is." :p

From A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin:

"Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience." - Ogion

"Ged, have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?" - Ogion

"I know not yet what I shall sing;
I only know the song is there."

from The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader: Recollections of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky.

Taken from chapter 4 of The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Architect Guy Francon is reading a review on his recent work in the August edition of New Frontier. His new understudy Peter Keating is watching him as he reads:

Quote:

---

Francon was smiling over the article, reading it again. Keating had never seen him so pleased; no drawing in the office, no work accomplished had ever made him as happy as these words from another man on a printed page to be read by other eyes.

---

From Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

"What no man may know, nor woman tell."