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'Giraffes do not wind people's hair three times around their throat and strangle them.'
'...I do not have to get inside your brain to know that when I see you rolling at my feet with your hair on fire emitting strange noises, you are clearly not happy.'
from Terry Eagleton, 'How to Read a Poem', p 105, but wildly out of context.
"materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which i myself am included in the picture constituted by me - it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bear witness to my 'material existence'. materialism means that the reality i see is never 'whole' - not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it." (s.zizek, the parallax view, pg17)
"His hatred for his wife glittered in and sparked in every word he spoke to her.The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices."
From Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
"So I tell you that you better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without kindness."
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"You shouldn't be angry for hearing the truth, if you're lucky enough to find somebody to hear it from."
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You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts.
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"There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together."
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God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.
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You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.
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"Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love - or what good is it?"
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
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I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering.
~The Adventures of Augie March-Saul Bellow
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
He went on talking, his eyes fixed on a framed text hanging on the dirty white wall, 'Vengeance is Mine'.
'You take too long, Lord,' he told it. 'I hurry you up a bit.'
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'Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.'
"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
OMG that is awsome! I laughed out loud when I saw that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mariamosis
"I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate."
— John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little
"Precisely so, precisely so," he cried, and his green left eye, which was focused on Berlioz, sparkled. "That's the very place for him! As I told him that time at breakfast, 'As you please, professor, but you've contrived something totally absurd! True, it may be clever, but it's totally incomprehensible. People will laugh at you.'"
Berlioz's eyes popped. "At breakfast... with Kant? What kind of nonsense is this?" he thought.
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
~Mobdy Dick, Herman Melville
"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously: for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."
The Moon and Sixpence- W. Somerset Maughaum
The limits of human life are determind, one may not live beyond them.
War and Peace
He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.