THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET - Salman Rushdie
Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
--------------------------------------------------------
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
--------------------------------------------------------
No shortage of explanations for life's mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find.
--------------------------------------------------------
"The true miracle of reason ... is reason's victory over the miraculous."
--------------------------------------------------------
We leave home not only to make room for ourselves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don't want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in our turn. Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.
--------------------------------------------------------
When the impossible becomes a necessity, it can sometimes be achieved.
--------------------------------------------------------
"Find your enemy. When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for."
--------------------------------------------------------
If the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend.
--------------------------------------------------------
The problem is not technical. You're worried about wings? Look on your shoulders. There they are. The problem, pal, is not wings but balls.
--------------------------------------------------------
What's the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where's the nearest edge? Jump off it.
--------------------------------------------------------
A man's worth reveals itself in the hour of his greatest adversity. What is our value when the chips are down? Do we merely flatter to deceive, or are we the real thing, the stuff of alchemists' dreams? These, too, are questions to which most of us, mercifully, are never required to supply answers.
--------------------------------------------------------
The world is irreconcilable, it doesn't add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can't make judgements or choices. We can't live.
--------------------------------------------------------
In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles... Beatitude is the prisoner's surrender to his chains.
--------------------------------------------------------
Down with a world where the guarantee that we won't die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom!
----------------------------------------------------------
A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host's best rug.
AMERICAN PSYCHO - Bret Easton Ellis
"So listen ... what do you really want to do with your life? ... Just briefly, you know, summarize... And don't tell me you enjoy working with children, okay?"
ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT - Jeanette Winterson
Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved... The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind... It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.
--------------------------------------------------------
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
--------------------------------------------------------
Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches . . . .
--------------------------------------------------------
'Everyone has a demon ... but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it.'
--------------------------------------------------------
Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
--------------------------------------------------------
'Things get in the way ... that's what's sad about life.'
--------------------------------------------------------
People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much... Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, they treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
--------------------------------------------------------
There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.
Howards End - E.M. Forster
"Miss Schlegel, the real things' money and all the rest is a dream."
"You're still wrong. You've forgotten Death."
Leonard could not understand.
"If we lived for ever what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say 'I am I.'"
44 Scotland Street (Alexander McCall Smith)
"Our reaction to the beautiful occurs in the face of every single one of our intellectual pretensions. We may be very well aware that the call of beauty is a siren-call, but that doesn't stop it from arresting us, seizing us, rendering us helpless. A soul-beguiling face will make anybody stop in their tracks, in spite of themselves."
--------------------------------------------------------
"Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust."
--------------------------------------------------------
"There's nothing - and I mean nothing - that doesn't look less serious if confessed, or shared... Tell the truth, and you'll see how the world carries on. Just try it."
--------------------------------------------------------
"You have to have time to create art. If you are busy surviving, then art doesn't probably get much of a look in."
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
---SPOILER---The conclusion:
"Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He'd had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn't put him in the cells; they hadn't sent his squad to the settlement; he'd swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he'd built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he'd smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he'd earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he'd bought that tobacco....
A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.
Three thousand six hundred and fifty three days.
The three extra days were for leap years"
The Razor's Edge (W. Somerset Maugham)
"Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy."
--------------------------------------------------------
"One has to take the world as it comes. If we're here, it's surely to make the most of life."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... and even if the dream doesn't come true it's rather thrilling to have dreamt it."
--------------------------------------------------------
"You know, often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."
--------------------------------------------------------
"In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable ..."
--------------------------------------------------------
"You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth."
--------------------------------------------------------
"We're not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don't believe in."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son."
--------------------------------------------------------
"... if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled ..."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
"I think you might do something better with the time . . . than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
--------------------------------------------------------
"Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"
--------------------------------------------------------
"You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it'll encourage me, you see."
