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She had the sense that Poppy was one of those girls who very quickly become girlfriends who like to fix up their other girlfriends with their friends and have coffee shop fantasies about the whole thing.
--from Keeping it Real by Justina Robson
If other sci-fi/fantasy books were as literate as this one, I'd read a lot more sic-fi/fantasy.
"amar uma apenas é demasiado pouco; amar todas é uma imprudência de caráter superficial; porém, conhecer-se a si próprio e amar um número tão grande quanto possível, encerrar na sua alma todas as energias do amor de modo que cada uma receba o alimento que lhe é próprio, ao mesmo tempo em que a consciência engloba o todo - aí está o prazer, aí está o que é a vida." (s. kierkegaard - diário de um sedutor)
"The reason he was late was that he was enjoying the twentieth century immensely. It was much better than the seventeenth, and a lot better than the fourteenth. One of the nice things about Time, Crowley always said, was that it was always taking him steadily further away from the fourteenth century, the most bloody boring century on God's, excuse his French, Earth. The twentieth century was anything but boring. In fact, a flashing blue light in his rear view mirror had been telling Crowley, for the last fifty seconds, that he was being followed by two men who would like to make it even more interesting for him.
"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"and you just want me to live like the others,get up and move around and go to parties all day?"."thats not living,this is living"
Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?” He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own. (m.proust, swanns way)
im actually reading Within a Budding Grove, but i was going through swanns way and found one of the many highlights with (seriously) "LOL" by it, and
http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/emoticons7/21.gif
Honesty does not fear authority.
Inspector Javert from Les Misérables
"You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody." ~ The Graveyard Book
"To slur a good man's name with baseless slander is one crime--another is rashly to mistake bad men for good. Cast out an honest friend, and you cast our your life, your dearest treasure. Time will teach the truth of this; for time alone can prove the honest man, one day proclaims the sinner." ~ Oedipus by Sophocles.
From The Princess by D.H. Lawrence
Quote:
"My little Princess must never take too much notice of people and the things they say and do," he repeated to her. "People don't know what they are doing and saying. They chatter-chatter, and they hurt one another, and they hurt themselves very often, till they cry. But don't take any notice, my little Princess. Because it is all nothing. Inside everybody there is another creature, a demon which doesn't care at all. You peel away all the things they say and do and feel, as cook peels away the outside of the onions. And in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can't peel away. And this green demon never changes, and it doesn't care at all about all the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person, all the chatter-chatter, and all the husbands and wives and children, and troubles and fusses. You peel everything away from people, and there is a green, upright demon in every man and woman; and this demon is a man's real self, and a woman's real self. It doesn't really care about anybody, it belongs to the demons and the primitive fairies, who never care. But, even so, there are big demons and mean demons, and splendid demonish fairies, and vulgar ones
"At round rock's top, note: it lies asleep do no disturb it, do not hate it, it senses such voids of the soul, remove the child underneath it, feel love by that time, otherwise it wiil stop your blood and you'll be dead - alive!"
We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns.
-Newt Hoenikker from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's CradleQuote:
There is love enough in this world for everbody, if people will just look.
'When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.'
The opening line to Godbye Mr Chips by James Hilton
man, why is proust so wonderful??
Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when such a grief has its birth—as was now happening—at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end. The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte's presence. But she would have said to herself: "Back again! Evidently I can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he'll be." Besides, I was irresistibly drawn towards her in thought, and those alternative orientations, that mad careering between them of the compass-needle within me, persisted after I had reached home, and expressed themselves in the mutually contradictory letters to Gilberte which I began to draft.
(...)
I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later, the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those 'nevermores' so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believe them to be false and translate 'nevermore' by 'this very evening, if you want me,' or believe them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations which make so little difference to our lives when the other person is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the next persons whom we shall presently have become, and who will then be in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, so as to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same speeches that she would make if she loved us. When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.
(...)
I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
(within a budding grove) http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...tch/sm/106.gif
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory in the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.