"Blades don't need reloading."
Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide
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"Blades don't need reloading."
Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide
"We must not always talk in the market place of what happens to us in the forest."
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"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there?"
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"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"
He saw financiers whose immense wealth was based on robbery but who were welcome everywhere, in the noblest houses, and also men so respected that ordinary people raised their hats to them as they passed but whose scandalous speculation in state-controlled enterprises was perfectly familiar to all those who knew the shady things that take place behind the scenes.
Bel Ami - Guy de Maupassant
From 1984 by George Orwell.
Quote:
Unquestionably Syme would be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason to do so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say he was unorthodox. He believed in the principle of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which an ordinary party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to forsee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.
"On a fine Morning." Thomas Hardt
Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's pretty obvious that Evelyn Waugh was bitterly affected by having his world swept away by the Second World War and the deadening effect of its aftermath. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the short story Love Among the Ruins: an allegory on a dystopian future engendered by post-war socialism in Britain. Notwithstanding the satirical intent, there is more than a little truth in this passage about the trial of a pyromaniac called Miles Plastic.
At last the Bench summed up. He reminded the jury that it was a first principle of the New Law that no man could be held responsible for the consequences of his own acts. The jury must dismiss from their minds the consideration that much valuable property and many valuable lives had been lost and the cause of Personal Recreation gravely retarded. They had merely to decide whether in fact the prisoner had arranged inflammable material at various judiciously selected points in the Institution and had ignited them. If he had done so, and the evidence plainly indicated that he had, he contravened the Standing Orders of the Institution and was thereby liable to the appropriate penalties.
Thus directed, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty coupled with a recommendation of mercy towards the various bereaved persons who from time to time in the course of the hearing had been committed for contempt. The Bench reprimanded the jury for presumption and impertinence in the matter of the prisoners held in contempt, and sentenced Miles to residence during the State's pleasure at Mountjoy Castle( the ancestral seat of a maimed V.C. of the Second World War, who had been sent to a Home for the Handicapped when the place was converted in to a gaol)
"Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain."
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
Once I quarrelled with our late mamma: she stromed and would not listen to me....At last I said to her, "Of course you cannot understand me: we belong to different generations," I said. She was dreadfully offended but I thought to myself, ''It can't be helped. It is a bitter pill but she must swallow it."You see, now our time has come, and our seccessors say to us, You are not our generation: sawllow your pill."
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
"I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka's The Castle
Holy smokes. That's beautiful...Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregory Samsa
“History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.” - Roberto Bolańo, 2666
Though this might hardly be considered funny to many, I really busted a gut reading this.
'..a "horribly soft" male voice "whispering" a whole string of "nasty things" to her, wicked things, and the worst of it was that the fellow had said he lived in the same building and why, if she was so keen on intimacies, did she look for them so far away, he was willing and able to offer her every conceivable variety of intimacy...' - Heinrich Böll/The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum