"Great events have incalculable results" pg 8 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
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"Great events have incalculable results" pg 8 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
"It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one."
from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
"[The soldiers] moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they has evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure."
from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
I know how but I do not know why
1984 by George Orwell
Hi, it's nice and comfortable to be here in this forum :) I'm currently read the eccentric Strindberg's A Madman's Defense and here's a passage from it:
"And while I, completely absorbed in my daily toil, lived unsuspectingly from day to day, a false legend took shape and form, grounded on nothing but the talk of the envious and the rumormongering of the café crowd. And I, idiot that I was, believed everybody except myself. Ah!..."
It's a paranoid and melodramatic piece, but not without it's charm.
"But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her but once in his life!"
~ THe unbearable lightness of being~ Milan Kundera
A Passage To India~ E.M Forster
Quote:
They removed their turbans, and one put a lump of butter on his forehead, and waited for it to slide down his nose into his mouth. Before it could arrive, another stole up behind him, snatched the melting morsel, and swallowed it himself. All laughed exultantly at discovering that the divine sense of humour coincided with their own. "God si love!" There is fun in heaven. God can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs away from beneath His own posteriors, set His own turbans on fire, and steal His own petticoats when He bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment. All spirit as well as all matter must participate in salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle is incomplete.
Dark Muse, I love that book; I like everything I have read by Forster. Is it required reading for you course? I love the movie adaptation, too. In fact, I own it; stars Judy Davis, so it is an older film, but a true classic, directed by the late David Lean. Enjoy your reading, DM.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Here is a quote from Willa Cather's short novel ~ "Alexander's Bridge":
I just love that description of someone's personal study.Quote:
After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without obtrusions of ugliness or change.
Yes it is one of the books required for my Brit. Lit. class. I am throughly enjoying the novel and only have but a few pages left from it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Janine
Good for you DM. It is a wonderful book! Have you read any others by Forster? I went through a stage of reading his books. I love "A Room With a View"...it actually makes me laugh out loud; it is not a long book, either.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
No, I have not yet read any of his other books
I only read "Howard's End" and "A Room with a View"....I loved them both...and also, "Passage to India"...they all were fine reads!Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
"Justice. . . limps along, but it gets there all the same."
In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez.
"Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didn't crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever."
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.
Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.
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And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.
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... hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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... beauty ... flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident.
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"You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good."
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... the good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.