Quotes from Books

“…About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it’s the same damned thing, the questions are all the same only from the other end. And many, many of all the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk about the eternal questions, now, in our time. Isn’t it so?” – Book V; Chapter 3 “The Brothers Get Acquainted”

I've just bought The Brothers Karamazov Gilliat, and am really looking forward to reading it, after all the rave reviews.

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

It's that time of year again, Good old Charlie! :thumbs_up

i wish i could remember one from lord of the rings.

Wessexgirl, I'm happy to learn that you will be reading TBK. I'll try not to spoil it too much for you.

“Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with suffering. Why do they get thrown into the pile, to manure someone’s future harmony with themselves? – The Brother Karmazov, Book V; Chapter 4 “Rebellion”

__________________
The following is from “The Raven” – A biography of Sam Houston
by Marquis James; Copyright 1929

“The brothers paddled up to find the runaway lying under a tree, scanning lines of the “Iliad”. He was invited to return home. Sam relates that he stood “straight as an Indian,” and (with a creditable touch of Cherokee imagery for a beginner) replied that he “preferred measuring deer tracks to tape” and “the wild liberty of the Red Men better than the tyranny of his own brothers” He begged to be excused as “his translation from the Greek” claimed his interest and he desired to read it in peace.” – Book I; Chapter 2: Deer Tracks and Tape”

just off the top of my head.

so it goes. k vonegunt

oh god we know what we are, but not what we can be. d alligieri

por su experiencia sabia que uno no se muere cuando debe sino cuando puede. g g marquez ( sorry for the spanglish)

and therefore he willed that the hearts of men should seek beyond the world, and should find no rest therein, but they should have a virtue , to shape their lives amid the powers and chances of the world. j r r tolkien

always in motion, the future is. yoda


i'll be back with more

i promise

From Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

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Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

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(a paraphrase) Ariel to Prospero in The Tempist: Be of good cheer, sir, our revels are ended."

from Olympio: The Life of
Victor Hugo
by Andre' Maurois
translated by Gerard Hopkins

Chapter 18 ANANKE'

"Notre-Dame is very old; but maybe she will
attend the funeral of that Paris which saw her
birth."
Gerard De Nerval

HUGO finished NOTRE-DAME de PARIS at the beginning of January, 1831. He had written the whole of this long novel in six months, bringing it to conclusion at the very end of the time-limit set by Gosselin. It had been, as a matter of fact, merely a question of the actual writing and composition. The documentary material had been accumulated over a period of three years: histories, chronicles, charters, inventories. Hugo had read widely. He had explored the Paris of Louis XI, and examined what remained of its old houses. In particular, he had made himself familiar with every nook and cranny of the cathedral -- its spiral staircases, its mysterious closets hollowed out of the stones, its inscriptions, both ancient and modern. Everything about the book, he hoped, would be historically correct: the scene-painting, the persons, the language. "But that is what matters least in it. Its sole merit, if it has one, lies in the fact that it is a work of the imagination, whim and fancy." In strict truth, if the erudition is real, the characters seem to be more than real, larger than life. The archdeacon Claude Frollo is a monster; Quasimodo, one of those hideous, bulbous-headed dwarfs with which Hugo's imagination teemed; Esmeralda, a vision of grace rather than a woman.

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.

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hi,

This quote is from Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare
Good Night, Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow." - (Act II, Scene II)

This quote is from Candida by George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Candida, Act I (1898)

MarkC

Here is a famous quote from mark Twain's work
"The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say".
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies. . . . And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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Originally Posted by Snowqueen

[I]I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents...
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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Thanks for sharing Snowqueen. I had read "Grapes of Wrath", "Of Mice and Men", "Travels With Chrley" and "The Wayward Bus" but not "East of Eden". perhaps one day I will come back around to Steinbeck and give that one a go.

Here is another from TBK

"Marfa Ignatievna cooked dinner, and the soup compared with Smerdyakov's cooking, came out "like swill", while the chicken was so dry that teeth could not chew it. In reply to the bitter, though just, reproaches of her master, Marfa Ignatievna objected that the chicken was a very old one to begin with, and that she had never been to cooking school."
The Brother Karmazov, Book V; Chapter 7 “Its Always Interesting”

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Originally Posted by AliceTwists

i wish i could remember one from lord of the rings.

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here's my favorite

"forth rode the king, fear behind him, fate before him."

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

Many things are interesting, fool, but nowhere near true.

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... your life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments.

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Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.

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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?

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Is the thing that's happening so far outside experience that you're forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?
Is reality too powerful for you?
Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life.

"She in her madness wished for a storm, hoping the storm would bring her peace."
- Family Happiness

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Originally Posted by Gilliatt Gurgle

Thanks for sharing Snowqueen. I had read "Grapes of Wrath", "Of Mice and Men", "Travels With Chrley" and "The Wayward Bus" but not "East of Eden". perhaps one day I will come back around to Steinbeck and give that one a go.

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East of Eden is a brilliant novel I'll soon post more quotes. I haven't read Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men but I'm looking forward to read these two as well.

From Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

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The most imporant thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to be dead. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very sill for people to cry and his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Fralfamadorians can look at different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. The can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

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One of my new favorite quotes:

But what is this inscription on mine arm?
Homo fuge! Whither should I fly?
If unto God, He'll throw me down to hell.
My senses are deceived, here's nothing writ.
Oh yes, I see it plain! Even here is writ
Homo fuge! Yet shall not Faustus fly!

This lesson in life spoken by Polonius in Hamlet should i think be taught to every child

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear 't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

I'll quote Leroux today:
"One must get used to everything in life, even to eternity."
"All that belongs to the past...but there is the present, and you are responsible to me for the present..."

From Victor Hugo; "Toilers of the Sea"

"Being respectable implies a multitude of observances, from Sunday well sanctified, to a cravat properly tied. "Don't get yourself pointed at," that is a terrible law. To be pointed at is the diminutive of the anthema. Little towns, hotbeds of gossips, excel in this isolating malignity, a curse viewed through the small end of a a telescope. A man faces grapeshot, he faces a hurricane, but he beats a retreat before Madame Pimbeche."

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships; each of which has its goal and course. Our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did —and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. --- From part 279 of The Gay Science by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The greatest weight -- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This Life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable time more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everthing unutterable small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and inumberable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?" Part 341 from The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche

"Star Friendship" is one of the most beautiful passages in Nietzsche's entire oeuvre. It reminds me of a good friend that I lost a couple of years ago.

"It's a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?"

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I suddenly felt peaceful again, as if I were a lake and the world could only form ripples on my surface while the calm beneath continued in solitude.

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All those years gone so quickly that even describing them does not take long. Big things do not happen to you and so you think time is not passing. You jiggle the years in your pocket, thinking you are a rich man, and suddenly you have spent everything.

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To be angry without power is to be ridiculous.

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"People cry with you one day, two days. Then they say, 'She's always crying. Why does she bring her unlucky face here?'"

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When unhappiness is so great, how can one separate mine and yours?

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"No matter how much love you need, I can love you more."

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Salman Rushdie

From Gösta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöff

"For we were thinking of the wonder-stricken spirit of self-analysis which had already taken possession of our minds; we were thinking of him with the icy eyes and long, knotted fingers - he, who sits in the darkest corner of our souls, and pucks our being to peices as old women pluck scraps of wool and silk. Piece by piece, the long, hard fingers have dissected us till our whole being lies there like a heap of rags - till all our best feelings, our innermost thoughts, all we have said and done is examined, ransacked, disintegrated, and the icy eyes have watched, and the toothless mouth has sneered and whispered, "See, it is but rags, nothing but rags."

'God takes long and punishes hard.'

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"Who would punish if not God?"

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"Well, you can't make a fur hat out of a pig's tail."

Liberty and power, but above all power! Over all trembling mortals and over the whole antheap!

From Crime and Punishment

One of my favorite quotes is a simple one that comes from the brief introduction of Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies:

"I could say much more. But it is wisest often to be most silent on the very points on which one longs most to speak."

Another from TBK:
(I'm actually very near the the end after months of sporadic reading)

"The deceased, your saint here", he (Father Farapont) turned to the crowd, pointing at the coffin with his finger, "denied devils. He gave purgatives against devils. So they bred here like spiders in the corners. and on this day he got himself stunk. In this this we see a great sign from God."
Part III; Book 7, Chapter 1 - "The Odor of Corruption"

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Originally Posted by Geoffrey

"Listen, my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, will someday become Buddha. Now this 'someday' is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carried grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people-eternal life."

Siddhartha
Herman Hesse

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loved that book !! i was abit disappointed by other Hesse stories but this novel was just fantastic.

:yesnod:

"But there are no small events for The Heart : it heightens everything ; it puts in the same balance the fall of a fourteen years-old empire and the fall of a woman's glove, and almost everytime the glove is heavier than the empire"

Balzac "The duchess of Langeais"

I don't know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of things to think about. When it comes to thinking, life is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides.

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'And when a person doesn't read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and clichés.'

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'But pain is much harder on the mind than ignorance.'

I'm re-reading 1984 right now. And this struck a certain chord with me this time through -

"They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail, everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."

Entirely random! :

"Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Full account of de big f-i-r-e!
Here ye are!
Wuxtry!
"Woild, Joinal, Sun, Telegram!
Here ye are, mister!
Git de latest wuxtry!
"Wuxtry!
Wuxtry"

Jimmy Small was only one of a dozen newsboys crying the same thing in City Hall Park, New York. The lads, ragged little chaps, were rushing at all in whom they saw possible customers, thrusting the papers in their very faces, a fierce rivalry taking place whenever two of the boys reached the same man at the same time. But of all who cried none shouted louder than this Jimmy Small, and none was more active in rushing here and there with papers"

From "The Newsboy Partners" by Frank Webster.
Couples and Leon Publishers, New York
Copyright 1909.

Gilliatt

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went great quivering thrusts like golden lances, the gleam became a glare; without a sound, with godlike violence, glow and glare and rolling flames streamed upwards, and with flying hoof-beats the steeds of the sun-god mounted the sky. The lonely watcher sat, the splendor of the god shone on him, he closed his eyes and let the glory kiss his lids. Forgotten feelings, precious pangs of his youth, quenched long since by the stern service that had been his life and now returned so strangely metamorphosed--he recognized them with a puzzled, wondering smile. He mused, he dreamed, his lips slowly shaped a name; still smiling, his face turned seawards and his hands lying folded in his lap, he fell asleep once more as he sat.

"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained -- an urn in daylight.