Quotes from Books

Marriage...a dead state carried over into and existing still among the living like two shadows chained together with the show of a chain.

William Faulkner, Light in August

'But soon we shall die ... and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'

Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: 'Of course I've got one,' he insisted,'--a man can't live without a moral code. Mine is that I'm against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.'

Michener's Fires of Spring hit me like a ton of bricks. It is an extraordinary book that I strongly recommend. Here is a quote for your consideration:


tell yourself the truth ... you'll be miles ahead of those who live on dreams

This is from Phantom of the Opera. The original novel which I am almost done reading for the 6th or 7th time.

"Three weeks later, the Epoque published this advertisement: Erik is dead."
P.G.7.

"Hold on tight, I'll pull you in. Don't let go. Pull with your eyes while I pull with my hands. In a few seconds you'll be aboard and we'll be together."

I love that line.

Currently reading the Merchant of Venice, so:

"To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

Sigh... I'd love to play Shylock on the stage...

I'm reading Don DeLillo and I love how he writes so i've got a bunch. but one is:

"The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in ****face fear."

and

"He imagined the sound waves passing over the land and lapping forward in time, over weeks and months, cross-country, eventually becoming the gentlest sort of rockabye rhythm in a small safe room where a mother nurses a baby and a man stands with his arm over his head, a research fellow, not in fear of shattered plaster and flying glass but only to draw down the shade-- the sky is going dark, and a tangy savor drifts from the kitchen, and there is music in the house."

Underworld by Don DeLillo

Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness.

I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increase enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

- William S. Burroughs, Junky

The Age of Fable:

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
by the known laws of ancient liberty,
When straight a arbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cucoos, asses apes and dogs,
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latonia' s twin progeny,
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.

Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move it.

- William S. Burroughs, Junky

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

From the story, "The Church in Novograd" in the collection called Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel:

Quote:

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"Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixtion. Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican."

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'I'd take all your troubles from you if I could ... and give you mine instead... Mine you wouldn't find so bad. Other people's troubles never are.'

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How do you wake up in the morning if you've never been to sleep?