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Not my fave author but one a enjoy alot:
'That moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the contraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.' - Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'urbervilles
I love this quote because I personally feel mentally free and relaxed when the light is fading but its not quite dark. :) (Through the day its too busy and my head can't concentrate very well)
"I believe you are right," he replied, "and yet I have always set her down as a lively girl."
"I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes," said Elinor, "in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid man they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."
"But I thought it was rignt, Elinor," said Marianne, "to be guided wholly by the opinion of other people. I servient to those of our neighbours. This has always been your doctorine, I am sure."
"No, Marianne, never. My doctorine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding. All I have ever attempted to influence has been the behaviour. You must not confound my meaning. I am guilty, I confess, of having often wished you to treat our acquaintance in general with greater attention; but when have I advised you to adopt their sentiments or conform to their judgment in serious matters?"
"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
Jane Austen
'According to my humble opinion, everything that is not life, is literature... Music has tried to fight that ever since it has existed, it goes up and down, it wants to free itself from the word, out of jealousy I think, but in the end it always prostrates itself anyway.' (José Saramago, The Siege of Lisbon, 1989, the corrector to the writer about literature)
It is an unbelievable arrogant thing to say about your own art, but it is so deeply thought...
'Women all think that they are oracles and sybils and get it finally wrong as the biggest simpleton on whom they look down with quiet and patient mockery.' (José Saramago, same book)
These two about women I found the best:
'Whosoever wants to make a lasting impression on a woman, pose as a rebus and never give the solution.' (Marcellus Emants (Dutch naturalist author), Monaco, Mastazza, 1878)
'A woman kneels for manly superiority, and mysteriousness is a handy tool to either gain it, or give the impression to be it.' (Marcellus Emants, Monaco, Mastazza, 1878)
With Byronic heroes, we think twice... I am a woman, but still I like the two last ones... I guess we shouldn't be so prone to mystery and puzzledness...
I enjoyed reading all your favorite quotes and here is mine. It is a shame I do not have the book in French. I can read a little bit of French.
The toilers of the sea by Victor Hugo(1802 ~ 1885)
"Penetrate into the remote fastnesses where the mountains offer the greatest solitude and the forests the greatest silence; Choose, let us say, Andernach and its surroundings; visit the obscure and impassive Laacher See, so unknown that it is almost mysterious. No tranquility can be found more august than this; universal life is here in all its religious serenity; no disturbances; everywhere the profound order of nature's great disorder; walk with a softened heart in this wilderness; it is as voluptuous as autumn; wander about at random; leave behind you the ruined abbey, lose yourself in the moving peace of the ravines, amid the song of birds and rustle of leaves; drink fresh spring water in your cupped hand; walk, meditate, forget."
"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."
-Neil Gaiman
"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words." -Edgar Allen Poe
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way--Tolstoy
“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so?”--Hemingway
"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her." Wilde
"Everything that I don't know to say is most important than things I say" - Clarice Lispector
"In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it.” Machado de Assis
"Everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly [...] what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person."
-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
"The poem has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you."
- John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons"
"It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything."
F. Pessoa, Book of disquiet.
I really love Emily Dickinson's poem on books...
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
'Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.'
-Joyce
'In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her Eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!'
~ Joyce: Finnegans Wake