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The Age of Fable:
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
by the known laws of ancient liberty,
When straight a arbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cucoos, asses apes and dogs,
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latonia' s twin progeny,
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move it.
- William S. Burroughs, Junky
"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
From the story, "The Church in Novograd" in the collection called Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel:
Quote:
"Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixtion. Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican."
'I'd take all your troubles from you if I could ... and give you mine instead... Mine you wouldn't find so bad. Other people's troubles never are.'
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How do you wake up in the morning if you've never been to sleep?
Man that's a great line!Quote:
Originally Posted by bouquin
"In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister."
- Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Beautiful quote.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsuyoiko
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"One afternoon we were drinking beer, and then we changed to Courvoisier brandy. Then Neal, Jack and a few others started playing baseball in the yard. This time Jack played right field, Neal was pitcher...and I covered first base! It was hilarious, none of us were "feeling any pain," and the game did not last long. Then Tyne suggested we eat. We had a ball sitting on that wonderful porch, looking out at beautiful Lake St. Clair. Jack wrote about it all in On The Road but his editor, Malcolm Cowley, cut out most of what he wrote about his Detroit visits and changed the name of Lake St. Clair to Lake Michigan, which is clear across the state from Grosse Pointe."
You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac
by Edie Kerouac-Parker
From Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
"The people will have their light-and every center of habitation goes up in flames! There is the end of the world you used to live in."
"She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her, and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complementary vibration in him."
Tender is the Night, F.S. Fitzgerald
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.
(Ch1, P16)
"To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."
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"I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."
Here's one from a short story called The People of Sound and Slag. One of 20-some stories in a Science-fiction anthology I'm reading.
Last line actually:
"Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled it's shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it."
I hated that story, but this line was it's one redeeming quality.
P.G.7.
Not things I'm currently reading, but I just recently have finished.
2001: A Space Odyssey
"After ten thousand years, man had at last found something as exciting as war."
High Fidelity
"Anyway. Here's how not to plan a career: a) split up with girlfriend: b) junk college; c) go to work in record shop; d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven't let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can't is kind of the point of them). I'm stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, for ever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, ort he nearest abattoir. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way."
Winter Dreams
“’I’m nobody’, he answered. ‘My career is largely a matter of futures.’”
'A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking and the steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.'
Dickens, 'Bleak House'
say what you will about Dickens, he can write beautifully when he wants to --
Good night, too late for me!
"And so we beat on, boats against the current..."
The Great Gatsby~Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Quote:
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look to the east at sunset, you can see the night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, a little black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, bushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it is heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Quote:
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
"To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions."
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
and (from the same novel)
(after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo)
"It was Napoleon, still trying to go forward, the giant somnambulist of a shattered dream."
"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free."
Still Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
I can't bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way! It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!
(Part 5, p309)
Buddha -- Osamu Tezuka
"I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, or make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak and erring pal, or make 'em think you're God-Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to give 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try tto improve their minds."
from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
From All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren
Quote:
I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle of the floor. And kept moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you here that thar is gold in then-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."
All Quiet on the Western front Remarque.
yeah, i just finished it
Come not between the dragon and his wrath. - King Lear
I do desire we may be better strangers. - As You Like It
“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.”
'Sometimes, when I felt real mean, and got to wondering why things are so queerly fixed in the world, I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere.'
""Dreadful crimes? But I can assure you that crimes just as dreadful, and probably more horrible, have occurred before our times, and at all times, and not only here in Russia, but everywhere else as well. And in my opinion it is not at all likely that such murders will cease to occur for a very long time to come. The only difference is that in former times there was less publicity, while now everyone talks and writes freely about such things--which fact gives the impression that such crimes have only now sprung into existence. That is where your mistake lies--an extremely natural mistake, I assure you, my dear fellow!" said Prince S."
The Idiot by Dostoevsky
I've said pretty much the same thing so many times when people go on about how terrible it is nowadays.
"- Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. - There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom."
From The Vanishing American Hobo by Jack Kerouac
"Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice--that's what it is--they are all full of malice, malice!"
The Idiot by Dostoevsky
Reading, The Eye of the Leopard, by Henning Mankell. ( the Inspector Wallender author)
Its a a book with almost nothing quotable in it. But here goes;
In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in giant catapults across the world. Time allotted to us is no more than that of our fore-fathers, but we have augmented it with our technology.
Child Ballad #93, Lamkin.
I'd quote the whole thing if I could. The eponymous stonemason Lamkin has build Lord Wearie a castle, but Lord Wearie has refused to pay him for the work. With the Lord away at sea, Lamkin, with the help of the 'fause nourice', has broken into his house and tourtured his baby son in an attempt to get the Lady of the castle to come down from her room. This verse appears after a tension-building exchange between the nurse and the Lady:
'O the firsten step she steppit,
she steppit on a stane;
But the neisten step she steppit,
she met him -- Lamkin.'
See the variants at: http://www.peterrobins.co.uk/ballads/list/titles.html
See the text with accompanying essay at: http://cfmb.icaap.org/content/36.1/BV36.1art10.pdf
EP :D
"We sometimes have strange, impossible dreams, contrary to all the laws of nature. When we awake we remember them and wonder at their strangeness. You remember, perhaps, that you were in full possession of your reason during this succession of fantastic images; even that you acted with extraordinary logic and cunning while surrounded by murderers who hid their intentions and made great demonstrations of friendship, while waiting for an opportunity to cut your throat. You remember how you escaped them by some ingenious stratagem; then you doubted if they were really deceived, or whether they were only pretending not to know your hiding-place; then you thought of another plan and hoodwinked them once again. You remember all this quite clearly, but how is it that your reason calmly accepted all the manifest absurdities and impossibilities that crowded into your dream? One of the murderers suddenly changed into a woman before your very eyes; then the woman was transformed into a hideous, cunning little dwarf; and you believed it, and accepted it all almost as a matter of course--while at the same time your intelligence seemed unusually keen, and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and logic! Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained some real idea, something that belongs to your true life,--something that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. It has left a deep impression upon you, joyful or cruel, but what it means, or what has been predicted to you in it, you can neither understand nor remember."
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Now, we have noticed that judges usually so arrange matters that the day upon which they hold court is also the day on which they are out of temper, in order that they may always have some one upon whom to vent their rage, in the name of the king, law and justice."
I was amazed at how well this 178-year-old quote described one of the judges before whom I practice law:p
I've never heard of this book. Who wrote it and when?Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
'But that perfect happiness is a contemplative activity will appear from the following consideration as well. We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks because it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, every one supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.'
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynne Fees
:lol:
Book One: Italy:
"How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her."
Book Two: India:
"I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water."
Book Three: Bali:
' "Ketut, why is life all crazy like this?" I asked my medicine man...He replied, "Bhuta ia, dewa ia."
"What does that mean?"
"Man is demon. Man is god. Both true." '
Two quotes from Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
"All that was the matter with her was nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness."
"The real troubles in the world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women."
I could apply the second quote to "the misalignment between money and time."