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"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."
-Neil Gaiman
"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words." -Edgar Allen Poe
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way--Tolstoy
“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so?”--Hemingway
"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her." Wilde
"Everything that I don't know to say is most important than things I say" - Clarice Lispector
"In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.” Machado de Assis
"Everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly [...] what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person."
-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
"The poem has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you."
- John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons"
"It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything."
F. Pessoa, Book of disquiet.
I really love Emily Dickinson's poem on books...
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
'Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.'
-Joyce
'In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her Eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!'
~ Joyce: Finnegans Wake
"I walked into the bath house, strait into Hell."
~The House of the Dead
"Question: What does a man most like to talk about?"
"Answer: Himself."
~Notes From the Underground
There are a ton more Dostoevsky quotes I love even more, I just can't remember them. O well.
O yeah, can't forget Shakespeare.;)
"And the native hue of resolution, is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
Love that one.
Behind every successful man is a woman. Behind her is his wife.
--Oscar Wilde
Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,
That you would have me seek into myself
For that which is not in me?
--Brutus from Julius Caesar
If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honour in one eye and death i' the other,
And I will look on both indifferently,
--Brutus from Julius Caesar
"On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, "924-3130." Or he would say, "757-1366." We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime."
-Amy Hempel from The Harvest
If you haven't read this story, do it right now!!!!! It may possibly be the best short story ever written (in my humble opinion).
http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/413/
"To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that’s someone else’s; in the first instance you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely being a parrot!" - Dostoevsky
"In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen." - James Joyce
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
"Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing! As long as no one is listening!"
-Frank Miller
"It's all bulls**t, folks. And it's bad for you"
George Carlin
"here's my counteroffer to your counteroffer: Go f**k yourself."
Al Swearengen - Deadwood
A man is as great as his daydreams--or his nightmares! --LEONID ANDREYEV
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. -- HAMLET
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. -- HAMLET
"Better one hour's stour than a year's peace". -Pound
Ray Bradbury on where his ideas come from:
"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."
Albert Camus- The Fall
A single sentence will suffice for modern man; he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted." pp. 6-7
From The Idiot:
How can you tell, Bakhmutov, what significance such a communion of one individual with another will have in the latter's destiny? For here you have a whole lifetime, with an infinity of ramifications which are hidden from us. The best chess player, the very cleverest, can think only a few moves ahead; a French player who could calculate ten moves ahead was written about as a marvel. But how many moves are there here and how much is unknown to us? In planting your seed, in offering your "alms," your good deed in whatever form, you are giving away part of your individuality and receiving part of another's; you are communign one with another already with a certain mutual consideration, andyou will be rewarded by knowledge and by the most unexpected discoveries. You will certainly in the end come to look upon what you do as a science; it will absorb your whole life and perhaps fill it entirely. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds planted by you, which perhaps you have forgotten, will take root and grow; whoever received them from you will pass them on to another. And how will you know what part you will have played in shaping the destiny of mankind?
"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." - The Judge
(Blood Meridian; Cormac McCarthy)
Never mistake activity for achievement.
- John Wooden
SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows. In literature, and particularly in poetry, the elements of success are exceedingly simple, and are admirably set forth in the following lines by the reverend Father Gassalasca Jape, entitled, for some mysterious reason, "John A. Joyce."
The bard who would prosper must carry a book,
Do his thinking in prose and wear
A crimson cravat, a far-away look
And a head of hexameter hair.
Be thin in your thought and your body'll be fat;
If you wear your hair long you needn't your hat.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
~Leonardo Da Vinci
"I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores."
Victor Hugo
"I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge."
"He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great."
- Melville
From the 1966 book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina:
Quote:
The sky changed, the entire translucent dome stunned by the swiftness of the shimmering atomic flash. The light drove their once tiny shadows to a terrifying distance in the desert, making them seem like titans. Then it shrank, the aurora crashing insanely backward, like a film in reverse, toppling, swimming into a single white-hot bulge, a humming lump, a festering core. It hovered inches above the horizon, dancing, waiting almost as if it were taking a stoked breath, then swelled in puffing spasms, poking high into the stratosphere, edging out the pale skyrocket vapor trails at either side, the ball going sickly yellow, the shock wave releasing its roar, the entire spectacle catching fire, blazing chaotically, shaming the paltry sun.
Quote:
Hours later, at the end of a tangled spool of red registration tape, Gnossos was in the office of the dean himself. A roomy, leather-chaired kind of library, filled with mineralogical specimens. Obscure varieties of limestone, quartz, shale from the gorges, chunks of coal from Newcastle seams, spongy layers of igneous Hawaii, silica, granite, semi-precious stones. All the wrack and refuse of a ridiculous career interrupted by colleagues who sensed incompetency. Instead of dropping him into Maeander with a slab of Carrara marble tied to his leg, they made him a dean. Molder of men.
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There were marks on the wall from strips of masking tape, where he'd torn away the landlord's quaintly familiar Degas, Renoir, Soyer, Utrillo and Mary Cassat prints in a narcotized rage. A nail had been driven into the French doors that separated him from the alcoholic Rajamuttus, and on it was hung the rucksack. It emanated a faint odor of month-old rabbits' feet and Oriental goods from the Greco-Turkish supply company in the negro section downtown. Two rubber plants stood by the fireplace, still in the dappled, plastic pots he'd meant to disguise with flat-black spray. Spilled textbooks everywhere, notes scrawled in the margins, faces drawn on the covers. All horizontal surfaces were occupied by at least one open beer can stuffed with cigarettes saturated in some reeking liquid. And dominating the entire white-walled living room, hanging over the mantel by the number-fifteen housewire anchored to the molding, was the tapestry-like Blacknesse painting of the man cutting away his own head.
What do you think of considering comic strips such as Peanuts as literature? Charles Schultz said a lot of profound things in it. I think. Motherof8Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
"Seven stars and seven stones, and one white tree."
J.R.R. Tolkien
"I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe." - Franz Kafka.
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
--Haruki Murakami
"The air was saturated with the finest flower of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I could move through it only with a sort of greed, especially on those first still cold mornings of Easter week when I tasted it more keenly because I had only just arrived in Combray." -Marcel Proust
"It's wot's behind me that I am."
"When is a door not a door, and the answer is, when it's a jug - which is all a joke."
-Krazy Kat
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -F.S. Fitzgerald
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting - Edgar Allan Poe.
The quote I like so much I came here with it as my signature ¬ (Henry David Thoreau)