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"We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have more money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him."
"I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws"
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Agony and the Ecstasy ~ Irving Stone
Quote:
His first lesson had been that the power and the durablity lay in the stone, not in the arms or tools. The stone was master; not the mason. If ever a mason came to think he was master, the stone would oppose and twart him. And if a mason beat his stone and an ignorant contadino might beat his beasts, the rich warm glowing breathing material became dull, colorless, ugly; died under his hand. To kicks and curses, to hurry and dislike, it closed a hard stone veil around its soft inner nature. It could be smashed by violence but never forced to fullfill. To sympathy, it yielded: grew even more luminous and sparkling, acheived fluid forms and symmetry.
"Something stronger than herself forced her to him"
- Madame Bovary
From Passing by Nella Larsen
Quote:
She didn't like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudly as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all soft, as like April, as possible.
From the Watchmen graphice novel:
"The world will look up and shout 'save us!', and I'll look down and whisper, "No."
-Rorscach
P.G.7.
"I reached down to feel my knee, but it wasn't there. I reached further and found my knee in my shin." A Farewell to Arms
I think you mean "the story takes place in the 14th century"? Because The Name of the Rose was published in 1980...Quote:
Originally Posted by K.K.
I hate intro posts so I figured that this would be a good place to start on the forum :)
"...I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for a millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves."
--Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
"If he is not the word of God, God never spoke."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Hunter S. Thompson
He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No one asks your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.
--The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
"I was always embarassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot ... and we had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, ...and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything."
from A Farewell to Arms