Quotes from Books

Here are some words from the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov that I read months ago and still cannot get out of my head. They struck me as so profoundly true, beautiful and sad at the same time in their relevance to my own feelings especially.

"There is a silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing ... But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

I had to stop reading when I came across this. It is so lovely in it's melancholy that it actually made me cry. It's the only time a book or words have ever made me feel so strongly. The wording from this great master of literature is truly exquisite.

"Every patriarchal society is either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war."

George Carlin - When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

"Outlaws, like lovers, poets and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon."

"Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the nature of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We raise it a little bit when we fail."

- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

"Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't."
"Except when it does."

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. . . one could do nothing right without also doing something wrong, so wrong, in fact, that ... one might be better off to wait and do nothing - except that to do nothing was also to do something...

For even day-dreams need an element of hope to give satisfaction to the dreamer.

"You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell."

"I can sum up in one sentence what my life here has been-physically, so far as the appetites are concerned, paralysis; socially, exile; ethically, theoretically, a feast, a peace of mind unapproached in all previous experience"

from "Zuni - Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"

"You must not touch one of them, nor utter a single word in Spanish or American, nor whistle. But you must behave very gravely, for it is ak-ta-ni [fearful] in the presence of the gods. If you should happen to forget and say a Spanish word, hold out your left hand and then your right, one foot and then the other, and they will strike them very hard with a yucca wand." - "Zuni Selected writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"



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"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about."

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It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
- Picture of Dorian Gray.

Doubt could be preferable to sure knowledge if the difference between the two was a large sum of money.

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"There are a lot of things that make you what you are ... But the most important thing is your mother's womb."

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"An inside servant sees everything. A maid sees into the bed of the husband and wife, does she not? A cook sees into their stomachs. Servants are always there, watching, watching. They will talk to another servant. Servants know everything."

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We do need somebody else in this life ... we need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth... Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.

Everything in nature is good: trees grow, rivers flow, birds sing, stars shine; but man in his torment twists and turns, rushes around, cuts down forests, overturns the earth, launches out to sea, travels, runs, kills animals, kills himself, perhaps, and weeps, and roars, and thinks about hell, as if God had given him a mind to conceive even more evils than those he endures!

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Oh, to travel, to travel, never stopping, and, in this immense waltz, to see everything appearing and vanishing away ...

"Here now young one, get up! For shame that you should be lying here, still nesting, and the day already grown aged and warm!"

(No matter either, if his own eyes were masty, his bodily consciousness of parasitical activity so acute as to cause his constant prosecution of vengeance on its perpetrators - all the same he would continue) :

"Up, up I say! Run to the river and wash your winkers in cold water; it will brighten your vision and lighten the footfalls of the itch makers, whom you only encourage to travel by lying in bed so long!"
Frank Hamilton Cushing "Zuni - Selected Writings"

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From a Sherlock Holmes story called A Case of Identity

"My dear fellow...life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence...Depend upon it, there is nothing as unnatural as the common place."