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Still Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
I can't bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way! It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!
(Part 5, p309)
Buddha -- Osamu Tezuka
"I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, or make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak and erring pal, or make 'em think you're God-Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to give 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try tto improve their minds."
from All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
From All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren
Quote:
I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle of the floor. And kept moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you here that thar is gold in then-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."
All Quiet on the Western front Remarque.
yeah, i just finished it
Come not between the dragon and his wrath. - King Lear
I do desire we may be better strangers. - As You Like It
“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.”
'Sometimes, when I felt real mean, and got to wondering why things are so queerly fixed in the world, I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere.'
""Dreadful crimes? But I can assure you that crimes just as dreadful, and probably more horrible, have occurred before our times, and at all times, and not only here in Russia, but everywhere else as well. And in my opinion it is not at all likely that such murders will cease to occur for a very long time to come. The only difference is that in former times there was less publicity, while now everyone talks and writes freely about such things--which fact gives the impression that such crimes have only now sprung into existence. That is where your mistake lies--an extremely natural mistake, I assure you, my dear fellow!" said Prince S."
The Idiot by Dostoevsky
I've said pretty much the same thing so many times when people go on about how terrible it is nowadays.
"- Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. - There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom."
From The Vanishing American Hobo by Jack Kerouac
"Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice--that's what it is--they are all full of malice, malice!"
The Idiot by Dostoevsky
Reading, The Eye of the Leopard, by Henning Mankell. ( the Inspector Wallender author)
Its a a book with almost nothing quotable in it. But here goes;
In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in giant catapults across the world. Time allotted to us is no more than that of our fore-fathers, but we have augmented it with our technology.
Child Ballad #93, Lamkin.
I'd quote the whole thing if I could. The eponymous stonemason Lamkin has build Lord Wearie a castle, but Lord Wearie has refused to pay him for the work. With the Lord away at sea, Lamkin, with the help of the 'fause nourice', has broken into his house and tourtured his baby son in an attempt to get the Lady of the castle to come down from her room. This verse appears after a tension-building exchange between the nurse and the Lady:
'O the firsten step she steppit,
she steppit on a stane;
But the neisten step she steppit,
she met him -- Lamkin.'
See the variants at: http://www.peterrobins.co.uk/ballads/list/titles.html
See the text with accompanying essay at: http://cfmb.icaap.org/content/36.1/BV36.1art10.pdf
EP :D
"We sometimes have strange, impossible dreams, contrary to all the laws of nature. When we awake we remember them and wonder at their strangeness. You remember, perhaps, that you were in full possession of your reason during this succession of fantastic images; even that you acted with extraordinary logic and cunning while surrounded by murderers who hid their intentions and made great demonstrations of friendship, while waiting for an opportunity to cut your throat. You remember how you escaped them by some ingenious stratagem; then you doubted if they were really deceived, or whether they were only pretending not to know your hiding-place; then you thought of another plan and hoodwinked them once again. You remember all this quite clearly, but how is it that your reason calmly accepted all the manifest absurdities and impossibilities that crowded into your dream? One of the murderers suddenly changed into a woman before your very eyes; then the woman was transformed into a hideous, cunning little dwarf; and you believed it, and accepted it all almost as a matter of course--while at the same time your intelligence seemed unusually keen, and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and logic! Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained some real idea, something that belongs to your true life,--something that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. It has left a deep impression upon you, joyful or cruel, but what it means, or what has been predicted to you in it, you can neither understand nor remember."
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Now, we have noticed that judges usually so arrange matters that the day upon which they hold court is also the day on which they are out of temper, in order that they may always have some one upon whom to vent their rage, in the name of the king, law and justice."
I was amazed at how well this 178-year-old quote described one of the judges before whom I practice law:p