Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
"Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."
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Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
"Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."
Also my signature is a pretty damn good quote (1984)
"Do you know why you are such a help?" she said. "It's because you have never grown old - because you've never allowed yourself to grow absolutely certain about anything in life." A smile half sad and half perplexed came on her father's heavy face.
"You consider that a strong point?" he asked.
"I do," she replied, "compared to being a bundle of creeds and prejudices."
"Oh, I've got prejudices enough."
"Yes," she said. "And so have I. But we're not even sure of them these days."
~ His Family by Ernest Poole.
'One mustn't make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it turns out that I'm not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it's not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it's not so bad.'
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'And fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.'
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'You and I speak different languages ... but the things we say don't change for all that.'
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Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps! He who has wondered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over the earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it. And without regret he leaves the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, with a light heart he gives himself into the hands of death, knowing that she alone can bring him peace.
“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”
ANNA KARENINA
“Let it be admitted, then, that I was thinking of Natalia Haldin’s life in terms of her mother’s character, a manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy, overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly somber youth given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious antagonisms.”
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"
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Every time I read this I cry, I actually cry...
Petronius: [in his dying letter to Nero] "To Nero, Emperor of Rome, Master of the World, Divine Pontiff. I know that my death will be a disappointment to you, since you wished to render me this service yourself. To be born in your reign is a miscalculation; but to die in it is a joy. I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive - the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero - murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects if you must; but with my last breath I beg you - do not mutilate the arts. Fare well but compose no more music. Brutalize the people but do not bore them, as you have bored to death your friend, the late Gaius Petronius."
...
in the first place, at home, I spent most of my time reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by external sensations. And the only source of external sensation possible for me was reading. Reading was a great help, of course, it exited, delighted and tormented me. But at times it bored me terribly. .....
Notes from underground.
Dostoyevsky
That's very funny. Is the rest of the Satyricon that funny?Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzzy_duck
It's not Satyricon. It's Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz :p
We submerge our truths and have our sunsets on untroubled waters.
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The helpless are the cruelest lot of all: they shift their burdens so.
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Do we dislike happiness? We manufacture such a portion of our own despair . . .
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It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without . . . that the one body you've wrapped your arms around . . . and the only skin you've ever known . . . is your own - and it's dry . . . and not warm.
"Ill fares the land, to hasteneing ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied"
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from Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
"At birth, we emerge from dream soup.
At death, we sink back into dream soup.
In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.
Life is a portage."
"That we were slaves I had known all my life - and nothing could done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold - but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves." - Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people. And how they can't always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition... Then there were the nice people who weren't interesting, and you didn't want to know what they thought of anything... they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones ... who ended up with everything ...
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'It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That's how I knew it was good. I judge all art by its effect on my neck.'
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'I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.'
"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."
"Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it."
Game, my ***. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right — I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.
"Not all those who wander are lost."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
I don't remember which book.
delete this
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Stranger fiends hide here, in human form, than reside in the valleys of hell. But goodness, kindness, and love arise in the heart of the beast as well. (don't remember where I read that)
Here are some words from the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov that I read months ago and still cannot get out of my head. They struck me as so profoundly true, beautiful and sad at the same time in their relevance to my own feelings especially.
"There is a silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing ... But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.
I had to stop reading when I came across this. It is so lovely in it's melancholy that it actually made me cry. It's the only time a book or words have ever made me feel so strongly. The wording from this great master of literature is truly exquisite.
"Every patriarchal society is either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war."
George Carlin - When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
"Outlaws, like lovers, poets and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon."
"Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the nature of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We raise it a little bit when we fail."
- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
"Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't."
"Except when it does."
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. . . one could do nothing right without also doing something wrong, so wrong, in fact, that ... one might be better off to wait and do nothing - except that to do nothing was also to do something...
For even day-dreams need an element of hope to give satisfaction to the dreamer.
"You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell."
"I can sum up in one sentence what my life here has been-physically, so far as the appetites are concerned, paralysis; socially, exile; ethically, theoretically, a feast, a peace of mind unapproached in all previous experience"
from "Zuni - Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"
"You must not touch one of them, nor utter a single word in Spanish or American, nor whistle. But you must behave very gravely, for it is ak-ta-ni [fearful] in the presence of the gods. If you should happen to forget and say a Spanish word, hold out your left hand and then your right, one foot and then the other, and they will strike them very hard with a yucca wand." - "Zuni Selected writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"
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"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about."
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It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven.
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
- Picture of Dorian Gray.
Doubt could be preferable to sure knowledge if the difference between the two was a large sum of money.
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"There are a lot of things that make you what you are ... But the most important thing is your mother's womb."
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"An inside servant sees everything. A maid sees into the bed of the husband and wife, does she not? A cook sees into their stomachs. Servants are always there, watching, watching. They will talk to another servant. Servants know everything."
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We do need somebody else in this life ... we need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth... Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.
Everything in nature is good: trees grow, rivers flow, birds sing, stars shine; but man in his torment twists and turns, rushes around, cuts down forests, overturns the earth, launches out to sea, travels, runs, kills animals, kills himself, perhaps, and weeps, and roars, and thinks about hell, as if God had given him a mind to conceive even more evils than those he endures!
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Oh, to travel, to travel, never stopping, and, in this immense waltz, to see everything appearing and vanishing away ...
"Here now young one, get up! For shame that you should be lying here, still nesting, and the day already grown aged and warm!"
(No matter either, if his own eyes were masty, his bodily consciousness of parasitical activity so acute as to cause his constant prosecution of vengeance on its perpetrators - all the same he would continue) :
"Up, up I say! Run to the river and wash your winkers in cold water; it will brighten your vision and lighten the footfalls of the itch makers, whom you only encourage to travel by lying in bed so long!"
Frank Hamilton Cushing "Zuni - Selected Writings"
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From a Sherlock Holmes story called A Case of Identity
"My dear fellow...life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence...Depend upon it, there is nothing as unnatural as the common place."
'Giraffes do not wind people's hair three times around their throat and strangle them.'
'...I do not have to get inside your brain to know that when I see you rolling at my feet with your hair on fire emitting strange noises, you are clearly not happy.'
from Terry Eagleton, 'How to Read a Poem', p 105, but wildly out of context.
"materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which i myself am included in the picture constituted by me - it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bear witness to my 'material existence'. materialism means that the reality i see is never 'whole' - not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it." (s.zizek, the parallax view, pg17)
"His hatred for his wife glittered in and sparked in every word he spoke to her.The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices."
From Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
"So I tell you that you better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without kindness."
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"You shouldn't be angry for hearing the truth, if you're lucky enough to find somebody to hear it from."
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You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts.
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"There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together."
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God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.
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You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.
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"Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love - or what good is it?"
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
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I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering.
~The Adventures of Augie March-Saul Bellow