Quotes from Books

[Hyacinth Girl]

"Ever since then I have understood that strength, intelligence, stupidity, beauty, cowardice and weakness are situations and roles which sooner or later hapen to everyone." Claudio Magris, Danube

[TEND]

"My Mother is a fish." As I Lay Dieing - Faulkner
That's an entire chapter...what is that? I loved it though , just started reading yesterday and after that chapter I figured I'd reaed enough for one day.

[Scheherazade]

"My Mother is a fish." As I Lay Dieing - Faulkner
That's an entire chapter...what is that? I loved it though , just started reading yesterday and after that chapter I figured I'd reaed enough for one day.

I love that quote. I don't think there are many other quotes capable of saying so much with so few words.

[TEND]

Thank you very much. I was also considering quoting something from the last bit of Darl's chapter previous to it, all about being and not being very interesting. I'm absolutely loving this book, as I've had trouble getting into Faulkner previously, this one really hits home, partly due to characters I can identify with and the unique style it's also a much shorter novel than the others I own. Very good way to start off my Faulkner reading (Although I have read some short stories from my big book ).

[Basil]

"....he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never."

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

[lavendar1]

"Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that -- I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up," she added, smiling playfully.

--Dorothea Brooke, Middlemarch (George Eliot)

[Asa Adams]

Bag of bones

the more debased and devious we become, the more we cloud the launguage with erudition.

Timothy Findley

[Gallantry]

"Why do I always begin to feel sad at such moments; explain that mystery; you learned person? I've been thinking all my life that I should be goodness knows how pleased to see you and recalling everything, and here I somehow don't feel pleased at all, although I do love you..."
- Lizaveta Nikolaevna from The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Mary Sue]

"Perhaps a man builds for his future in more ways than one, builds not only toward the body which will be his tomorrow or next year, but toward actions and the subsequent irrevocable courses of resultant action which his weak senses and intellect cannot foresee but which ten or twenty or thirty years from now he will take, will have to take in order to survive the act."-William Faulkner

[dreamweaver_tri]

"The choice we have is not whether to be gay or straight. For the majority of gay people, we are who God made us to be. The real choice is between denial and embracing who we are. The real choice is between living life in the shadows or walking proudly in the light. The real choice is between a slow death or an honest life."
-"Letters from the closet"

[Behemoth]

"I take this lock of hair as a solemn offering to Dis, and now I free you from your body." With these words she raised her hand and cut the hair, and as she cut, all warmth went out of Dido's body and her life passed into the winds.
Virgil, "The Aeneid"

[byquist]

This novel, "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, has too much gab and banter, yet some is good.

Here's a nice quote: "I wanted to be near the children, watch them sleep. Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. ... If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially."

Two others:

"Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such as it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don't mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust."

"Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearable lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it's obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter."

It's not all this decent; a lot of redundancy and treading water. Something going on though. It's very casual. I don't like casual that much; seems too easy-going. But I'll give it a plug. It does move fast.

Good beach reading if you get to the beach.

[Ahmed-Adel]

Well, I have just finished Sons and Lovers some days ago. Thus, I think I can write a quote from that excellent novel!

"I do like her... I do like to talk to her – I never said I didn't. But I don't love her."
Paul, Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence

[miss tenderness]

" ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy,and persue with eagerness the phantoms of hope;who expect that age will perform the promises of youth ,and the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow..."
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas.

[superunknown]

"Stately plump Buck Mulligan..."

Best beginning ever.