East of Eden, by John SteinbeckQuote:
There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
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East of Eden, by John SteinbeckQuote:
There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
"He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, move and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect- the sun gold on its slope. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever-
Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring-(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)- for ever desiring - (the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)- for ever desiring truth. Red is the doom; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry 'Iron for sale'- and truth?
Monday or Tuesday- Virginia Woolf
"If ... being sick ...man's remedially instinct, his fighting instinct wears out... one great remedy: .... Russian fatalism .... exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow." - Nietzsche, Ecco Homo
This jumped out at me at the beginning of Tess of the D'ubervilles. I thought it was such a well written sentence.
...The interior in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl's senses with an unspeakable dreariness. ...
Context:
Rosalind: ...I say i will not have you.
Orlando: Then ... I die.
Quote:
Rosalind: Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
- As You Like It
"They were like birds beating there wings against her window and calling to her every morning, 'Nou t'aimons Marie'."
The Idiot by Dostoyevsky
Tears where in my eyes by then.
"The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched."
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
A wonderful book about three of the major players in the French Revolution, Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins.
what crap people believed freedom to be.
On a night like this you could understand why people robed banks.
Rich man, Poor man - Irwin Shaw
What is/are your favourite, from any book you've read.
Quotes that have spoken what you couldn't quite put together in your head, quotes that have changed you, etc
"They're all the same, women like her. It's not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven't changed, we're just young. It's the silly new middle-aged people who've got to be young who've changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can't be with us. We don't want them to be with us. We don't want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can't respect them"
^ From The Collector
"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep.And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and that loss is too empty to share"
House of Leaves
Oh, I don't know about ever, or that have changed me, but I'll throw in this one, as I thought about it (again) the other day:
Work is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Oscar Wilde (of course).
Particularly APT, as that foul thing is upon me soon once again.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
- Shakespeare
That has got to be my all time favourite. Absolutely perfect.
From Fifth Business by Robertson Favies
Quote:
How happy they might have been if they had recognized and gloried in their talent, confronting the world as gifted egoists, comparable to painters, musicians, or sculptors! But that was not their style. They insisted on degrading their talent to the level of mere acquired knowledge and industry. They wanted to be thought of as wise in the ways of the world and astute in politics; they wanted to demonstrate in themselves what the ordinary fellow might be if he would learn to think straight and be content to reap only where he had sown. The and their wives (women who looked like parrots or bulldogs, most of them) were so humorless, and except when they were drunk, so cross that I thought the ordinary fellow as lucky not to be like them.
I am quite sure if this book had some other title it could have been not called as the book of adventure, or the book for youth, yet one could ask, how many adult really understand the contest of this book and the social history where this book is connected.
There is the philosophical and ideological message of the master Larsen which – not doubt, is titled wrong making the book looking like some imaginative word apart –which it wasn’t, it was real word telling story about average men at their average work at that average contest during the era which have lasted for centuries until the when the new era with the new morder ro-on ro-off stated
These quotations here could have sound just the same if it has been taken twenty year ago,
Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas. I talked with Johansen last night – the first superfluous words with which he has favored me since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was eighteen, now thirty- eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once. He had met a townsman couple of year before, in some sailor boarding -house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.” She must be a pretty old woman now, he said staring meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison who was steering a point off the course.
“When did you last write to her”?
He performed his mental arithmetic aloud, “Eighty – one; on – eighty –two, eh? no –eighty three? yes eighty three. Ten year ago, from some little port in Madagascar. I was trading.
You See,” he went on , as though addressing his neglected mothers across half the girth of the earth.” each year I was going to home. So what the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something happened, and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money; and the I will pay my passage home,
"Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'some one,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must need pity the Opera ghost..." ~ Gaston Leroux in the Phantom of the Opera