Quotes from Books

"It's a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?"

--------------------------------------------------------

I suddenly felt peaceful again, as if I were a lake and the world could only form ripples on my surface while the calm beneath continued in solitude.

--------------------------------------------------------

All those years gone so quickly that even describing them does not take long. Big things do not happen to you and so you think time is not passing. You jiggle the years in your pocket, thinking you are a rich man, and suddenly you have spent everything.

--------------------------------------------------------

To be angry without power is to be ridiculous.

--------------------------------------------------------

"People cry with you one day, two days. Then they say, 'She's always crying. Why does she bring her unlucky face here?'"

--------------------------------------------------------

When unhappiness is so great, how can one separate mine and yours?

--------------------------------------------------------

"No matter how much love you need, I can love you more."

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Salman Rushdie

From Gösta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöff

"For we were thinking of the wonder-stricken spirit of self-analysis which had already taken possession of our minds; we were thinking of him with the icy eyes and long, knotted fingers - he, who sits in the darkest corner of our souls, and pucks our being to peices as old women pluck scraps of wool and silk. Piece by piece, the long, hard fingers have dissected us till our whole being lies there like a heap of rags - till all our best feelings, our innermost thoughts, all we have said and done is examined, ransacked, disintegrated, and the icy eyes have watched, and the toothless mouth has sneered and whispered, "See, it is but rags, nothing but rags."

'God takes long and punishes hard.'

--------------------------------------------------------

"Who would punish if not God?"

--------------------------------------------------------

"Well, you can't make a fur hat out of a pig's tail."

Liberty and power, but above all power! Over all trembling mortals and over the whole antheap!

From Crime and Punishment

One of my favorite quotes is a simple one that comes from the brief introduction of Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies:

"I could say much more. But it is wisest often to be most silent on the very points on which one longs most to speak."

Another from TBK:
(I'm actually very near the the end after months of sporadic reading)

"The deceased, your saint here", he (Father Farapont) turned to the crowd, pointing at the coffin with his finger, "denied devils. He gave purgatives against devils. So they bred here like spiders in the corners. and on this day he got himself stunk. In this this we see a great sign from God."
Part III; Book 7, Chapter 1 - "The Odor of Corruption"

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Geoffrey

"Listen, my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, will someday become Buddha. Now this 'someday' is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carried grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people-eternal life."

Siddhartha
Herman Hesse

---

loved that book !! i was abit disappointed by other Hesse stories but this novel was just fantastic.

:yesnod:

"But there are no small events for The Heart : it heightens everything ; it puts in the same balance the fall of a fourteen years-old empire and the fall of a woman's glove, and almost everytime the glove is heavier than the empire"

Balzac "The duchess of Langeais"

I don't know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of things to think about. When it comes to thinking, life is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides.

--------------------------------------------------------

'And when a person doesn't read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and clichés.'

--------------------------------------------------------

'But pain is much harder on the mind than ignorance.'

I'm re-reading 1984 right now. And this struck a certain chord with me this time through -

"They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail, everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."

Entirely random! :

"Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Full account of de big f-i-r-e!
Here ye are!
Wuxtry!
"Woild, Joinal, Sun, Telegram!
Here ye are, mister!
Git de latest wuxtry!
"Wuxtry!
Wuxtry"

Jimmy Small was only one of a dozen newsboys crying the same thing in City Hall Park, New York. The lads, ragged little chaps, were rushing at all in whom they saw possible customers, thrusting the papers in their very faces, a fierce rivalry taking place whenever two of the boys reached the same man at the same time. But of all who cried none shouted louder than this Jimmy Small, and none was more active in rushing here and there with papers"

From "The Newsboy Partners" by Frank Webster.
Couples and Leon Publishers, New York
Copyright 1909.

Gilliatt

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went great quivering thrusts like golden lances, the gleam became a glare; without a sound, with godlike violence, glow and glare and rolling flames streamed upwards, and with flying hoof-beats the steeds of the sun-god mounted the sky. The lonely watcher sat, the splendor of the god shone on him, he closed his eyes and let the glory kiss his lids. Forgotten feelings, precious pangs of his youth, quenched long since by the stern service that had been his life and now returned so strangely metamorphosed--he recognized them with a puzzled, wondering smile. He mused, he dreamed, his lips slowly shaped a name; still smiling, his face turned seawards and his hands lying folded in his lap, he fell asleep once more as he sat.

"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained -- an urn in daylight.