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I've been hacking my way through Crime and Punishment (finally finishing last week) as well and although the writing and quotes are memorable and the recurring theme is blatant and auspicious, the book gets tedious very quickly... But Pulcheria Alexandrovna line is intriguing: "God knows what concerns and plans you may have; or what ideas you are hatching; so its not for me to keep nudging your elbow.."Quote:
Originally Posted by Laindessiel
I downloaded and read My Man Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse earlier this afternoon. I had read it years ago, but it certainly need re-reading.
Quote:
She was rather like one of those
innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your
system so that, before you know what you're doing, you're starting out
to reform the world by force if necessary and pausing on your way to
tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at you like that,
you will knock his head off.
"Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy
things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very
seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies
in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in
a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they
want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he
says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite
bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh
of animals slain in anger and pie.
Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed
female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet
from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as
if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing
arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.
... and from his pain he knew he was not dead.
- from The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
This is from 'Eragon' by Christopher Paolini.
I'm not quite sure why I like this quote, I just think it's ace :]Quote:
"My mind is the only sanctuary that has not been stolen from me. Men have tried to breach it before, but I've learned to defend it vigorously, for I am only safe with my innermost thoughts."
Then again, I also like the character that said it, Murtagh. Rather mysterious is he :]
x
-Abbe Mouret's TransgressionQuote:
So he left her at the end of the garden, sitting in the sunlight on the ground before a hive, whence the bees buzzed like golden berries round her neck, along her bare arms and in her hair, without thought of stinging her.
'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'T is woman's whole existence;'
'Don Juan' by Lord George Gordon Byron
Yâ Rab belâ-yı ‘aşk ile kıl âşinâ meni
Bir dem belâ-yı ‘aşkdan etme cüdâ meni
Az eyleme ‘inâyetüni ehl-i derdden
Ya‘ni ki çoh belâlara kıl mübtelâ meni[11]
Oh God, let me know the pain of love
Do not for even a moment separate me from it
Do not lessen your aid to the afflicted
But rather, make lovesick me one among them
fuzuli divan
"The black leafless trees gave no protection: they stood around like broken waterpipes, and the rain dripped off his dark hat and ran in streams down his black civil servants overcoat."
"There are men one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesnt share."
The incomparable Graham Greene in "The End of the Affair."
"If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends." -Helen Burns in Jane Eyre
"Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings." - Prince Myshkin, The Idiot
Receive what cheer you may:
The night is long that never finds the day.
- from Macbeth, Act IV, Scene iii
Middlemarch by George EliotQuote:
"He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes
to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed." --FULLER.
It's a quote of a quote...guess that counts. :)
I like this forum idea!
"It seems to me that when any belief leaves our minds, the loss is either voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary when the belief is false and we learn better, involuntary whenever the belief is true"
The Republic, Plato -- Plato's explanation of this comment is the beginning of a chain of logic that rips into the veil of free will and judgment in theistic worldviews. I had come to this conclusion, in different words, as a student in a Christian university. When last month I came across this statement, which forms the cornerstone of my own thought process, which I considered a very modern one inasmuch as it questions free will, I marveled, wondering whether Plato saw the theological implications of this statement or if he only saw its value pertaining to his purpose of training and evaluating Guardians for his Republic.
I'm almost done with Absurdistan by Gary Shtyengart, who is interestingly enough, the great-great grandson of Nikolai Gogol. I'm also reading Sea Change by Robert B. Parker for some fast and easy reading.
"I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. It's a thing you don't want to go wrong over, because one false step and you're sunk. I mean, if you fool about too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it, and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out on you.
"Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can't make out what you're talking about."
P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves
Hi, I'm new here... :) Here's a quote:
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar WildeQuote:
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.
From Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood.
Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting on the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife.
Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretremps; yet the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.
- Ancient Sorceries (the inspiration for Lewton's The Cat People)
Great Expectations
"Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and universe, there is a reason." -Slartibartfast (Life, The Universe and Everything)
"It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiat delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack."
- an eerie description of the guillotine from A Tale of two Cities by Charles Dickens
We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read, which seems only fitting, because it is how the books we are reading were written in the first place.
'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' American Psycho.
Should be the tag-line for this forum!
"...if something real enters the imagination, it can seem almost as eerie as if some fantasy figure had suddenly loomed up in real life."
-Jostein Gaarder, The Ringmaster's Daughter
I love The Trial by Franz Kafka and what's weird is that I can't find any quotes in particular that stand out to me! It's just the whole book. Other than The Trial, I would say the Metamorphosis is another favorite.
"I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Buddha by Karen Armstrong.Quote:
Confusion was the beginning of philosophy
"Go to thy cold bed and warm thee!"
-The taming of the Shrew
Ah, this book is hilarious!!!
*thinks* Well since i have to learn quotes for Frankenstein i won't look at the book to get one...
"Her hair was the brightest living gold"
Mary Shelly - Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) This quote is what Victor sees in his cousin Elizabeth
"It was Yefrem's tongue that had been hit - his quick, ever-ready tongue, which he had never really noticed, but which had been so handy in his life. In fifty years he'd given it a lot of exercise. With it he'd talked his way into pay he'd never earned, sworn blind he'd done things when he hadn't, stood bail for things he didn't believe in, howled at the bosses and yelled insults at the workers. With it he'd piled filth on everything most dear and holy, reveling in his politics. He sang Volga songs. He lied to hundres of women scattered all over the place, that he wasn't married, that he had no children, that he'd be back in a week and they'd start building a house. "God rot your tongue!" one temporary mother-in-law had cursed him, but Yefrem's tongue had never let him down except when he was blind drunk."
Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"... eat well, don't skimp. Look after yourself. Don't live out of the microwave. Use love and care."
-- fromTHE LIGHT OF DAY by Graham Swift
"Things have a life their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "Its simply a matter of waking up their souls." -- One Hundred Years of Solitude.
"So it goes." - Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep ...
-- from The Tempest (Act IV, Scene 1)
by William Shakespeare
'Do you know what a ****ing loser you are?' He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long, think knife, with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the hand up, instantly popping the retina.
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
We cannot predict consequences of great decisions.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches."
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Kreutzer Sonata
You might not want to read this if you intend on reading it...I might spoil it.
"When people say that they do not remember what they do in a fit of fury, they talk nonsense. It is false. I remember everything."
and
"I well remember the horror of that concsiousness and I know vaguely that, having plunged in the dagger, I drew it out again immediately wishing to repair and arrest my action. She had straightened up and cried:
'Nurse, he has killed me!'"
"Dear me, dear me," say I. "These are not the times to be writing books, Don Eligio, even fool books like mine. Of literature I must begin to say what I have said of everything else: 'Curses on Copernicus!'"
"Oh, wait now," exclaims Don Eligio, the blood rushing to his face as he straightens up from his cramped position. (It is hot at noon time, and he has put on a broad-brimmed straw, for a bit of artificial shade.)
"What has Copernicus got to do with it?"
"More than you realize, perhaps ... "
The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello.
I thought that might have been your diary...:lol: please don't detach my retinas, opti:thumbs_up :pQuote:
Originally Posted by optimisticnad
"and you, are you still here, tilting in this stranded ark, blind and seeing in the dark." Phyllis Web-Leaning
I will remember not to watch that movie! or read the book. Oh yuk, almost worse than Lear when the eyes are pushed in, even more graphic here. Yes, as Asa said - don't detach my retina:eek:Quote:
Originally Posted by optimisticnad
Play nice and I won't have to! And you Janine!Quote:
Originally Posted by Asa Adams
Janine - that was nothing! Just a taster. You should read it, but its not for the faint hearted!
Oh and my diaries much much darker than that. :eek: (we have no sinister smileys!)