Man that's a great line!Quote:
Originally Posted by bouquin
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Man that's a great line!Quote:
Originally Posted by bouquin
"In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister."
- Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Beautiful quote.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsuyoiko
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"One afternoon we were drinking beer, and then we changed to Courvoisier brandy. Then Neal, Jack and a few others started playing baseball in the yard. This time Jack played right field, Neal was pitcher...and I covered first base! It was hilarious, none of us were "feeling any pain," and the game did not last long. Then Tyne suggested we eat. We had a ball sitting on that wonderful porch, looking out at beautiful Lake St. Clair. Jack wrote about it all in On The Road but his editor, Malcolm Cowley, cut out most of what he wrote about his Detroit visits and changed the name of Lake St. Clair to Lake Michigan, which is clear across the state from Grosse Pointe."
You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac
by Edie Kerouac-Parker
From Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
"The people will have their light-and every center of habitation goes up in flames! There is the end of the world you used to live in."
"She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her, and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complementary vibration in him."
Tender is the Night, F.S. Fitzgerald
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years.
(Ch1, P16)
"To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."
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"I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."
Here's one from a short story called The People of Sound and Slag. One of 20-some stories in a Science-fiction anthology I'm reading.
Last line actually:
"Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled it's shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it."
I hated that story, but this line was it's one redeeming quality.
P.G.7.
Not things I'm currently reading, but I just recently have finished.
2001: A Space Odyssey
"After ten thousand years, man had at last found something as exciting as war."
High Fidelity
"Anyway. Here's how not to plan a career: a) split up with girlfriend: b) junk college; c) go to work in record shop; d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven't let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can't is kind of the point of them). I'm stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, for ever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, ort he nearest abattoir. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way."
Winter Dreams
“’I’m nobody’, he answered. ‘My career is largely a matter of futures.’”
'A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking and the steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.'
Dickens, 'Bleak House'
say what you will about Dickens, he can write beautifully when he wants to --
Good night, too late for me!
"And so we beat on, boats against the current..."
The Great Gatsby~Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Quote:
Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look to the east at sunset, you can see the night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, a little black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, bushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it is heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Quote:
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
"To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions."
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
and (from the same novel)
(after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo)
"It was Napoleon, still trying to go forward, the giant somnambulist of a shattered dream."
"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free."