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Yeah, that's a good one (and reminds me I should better go and finish the other half of Norwegian Wood that needs to be completed)Quote:
"'Don't feel sorry for yourself,' he said. 'Only arseholes do that.'"
from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
"Forgetting is not something you do. It happens to you. Only it did not happen to me."
- The Collector by John Fowles.
The quote
This is from 'Mencius'.Quote:
The descendants of Shang
Exceed a hundred thousand in number,
But because God so decreed,
They submit to Chou,
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Quote:
The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God, or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Quote:
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, becasue the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passaion for the truth.
Sometimes when Sirius was out on the hills alone in the winter dawn, examining the condition of the snow and looking for sheep in distress, the desolation of the scene would strike him with a shivering dread of existence. The universal carpet of snow, the mist of drifting flakes, the miserable dark sheep, pawing for food, the frozen breath on his own jaws, combined to make him feel that after all this was what the world was really like.
Olaf Stapledon
A small collection of quotes from the Dune Series -Heratics of Dune-
Quote:
Most dicipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask "why?" Be catious with "how?" Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.
Quote:
Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person
Adapted from The Life of ST ColumbaQuote:
ACCORDING to the promise given above, I shall commence this book with. a brief account of the evidences which the venerable man gave of his power. By virtue of his prayer, and in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, he healed several persons suffering under various diseases; and he alone, by the assistance of God, expelled from this our island, which now has the primacy, innumerable hosts of malignant spirits, whom he saw with his bodily eyes assailing himself, and beginning to bring deadly distempers on his monastic brotherhood. Partly by mortification, and partly by a bold resistance, he subdued, with the help of Christ, the furious rage of wild beasts. The surging waves, also, at times rolling mountains high in a great tempest, became quickly at his prayer quiet and smooth, and his ship, in which he then happened to be, reached the desired haven in a perfect calm.
"The straight lines, the uniform size of the surfaces converted his thoughts into squares, ruled lines through his soul and, by simplification, turned the freedom of it's organic life into a pattern and brought the rich, primaeval forest vegetation of his brain, full of varying impressions, back to nature's first child-like attempts at organization."
From By The Open Sea by August Strindberg
I really liked this passage
From Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto EcoQuote:
If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): "Here I am, the One and they don't know it." If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize, and move on, even though you're God and with a snap of you're fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.
"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity".
"When I began to write I said this was a story of hatred, but I am not convinced. Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love. I looked up just now from writing and caught sight of my own face in a mirror close to my desk, and I thought, does hatred really look like that? For I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright, unobtainable objects within".
From The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. My first Greene, but certainly not my last. Brighton Rock is calling me.... :thumbs_up
"Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless." -Confucius and the Madman
I thought this conversation about blushing was quite amusing
The Way of the World by William CongreveQuote:
MIRA. Are you? Pray then walk by yourselves. Let not us be
accessory to your putting the ladies out of countenance with your
senseless ribaldry, which you roar out aloud as often as they pass
by you, and when you have made a handsome woman blush, then you
think you have been severe.
PET. What, what? Then let 'em either show their innocence by not
understanding what they hear, or else show their discretion by not
hearing what they would not be thought to understand.
MIRA. But hast not thou then sense enough to know that thou
ought'st to be most ashamed thyself when thou hast put another out
of countenance?
PET. Not I, by this hand: I always take blushing either for a sign
of guilt or ill-breeding.
MIRA. I confess you ought to think so. You are in the right, that
you may plead the error of your judgment in defence of your
practice.
Where modesty's ill manners, 'tis but fit
That impudence and malice pass for wit.
"We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice."
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.
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Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.
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... it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy ... it is impossible to rehearse life.
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"... and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old."
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"There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light ... We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."
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The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended ...
That night, after she returned from Tatsumara's shop, Chieko had a dream. SChools of all colors of carp gathered as knelt at the edge of the pond. The carp piled one on top of another, dancing as they stuck their heads out above the surface of the water.
That was all there was to the dream. It was midday. The fish drew closer when Chieko put her hand in the water and made ripples on the surface of the pond....
"I wonder what kind of fragrance, what kind of spirit, emanates from your hand?" Ryusuke said.
The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata
Borges on Falklands War between England and Argentina, quoted in Naomi Klein's The Shock DoctrineQuote:
A fight between two bald men over a comb
"What's interesting about our society is that everyone knows everything, but everyone pretends to know nothing."
From Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich