"The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerge all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is the flood."
-Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Pantheon Books, 182)
"The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerge all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is the flood."
-Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Pantheon Books, 182)
"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicillian when death is on the line.'"
-The Princess Bride, William Godman/S.Morgenstern (Del Ray, 156)
Naked except for a cigarette, you let your mind drift and forget your disbelief. Feel the chill down your back and the flutter of wings through dandelion fields, and forget the pull of gravity in a night without stars.
I lack eloquence and commitment to my arguments. They are half baked, and I will begin passionately, and then abandon them.
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Part II, Chapter 5, Section 5)
com-pas-sion (n.) [ME. & OFr. <LL. (Ec.) compassio, sympathy < compassus, pp. of compati, to feel pity < L. com-, together + pali, to suffer] sorrow for the sufferings or trouble of another or others, accompanied by an urge to help; deep sympathy; pity
Dostoevsky Forum!
Gunter Grass from "Peeling the Onion" Chapter 5, "Guests at Table" ..."Not a single one of the ten thousand starved to death, of course, but the want of food gave us an ascetic appearance. Even those not so inclined underwent a spiritual transformation. My new spiritual look must have suited me: my enlarged eyes saw more than was before them, choirs rejoicing beyond the senses. And since hunger brought home the maxim 'Man does not live by bread alone' not only as camp cynicism but also as consolatory bromide, many of us felt an increased desire for spiritual food"
I actually just finished this book a few days ago, but there were two things that I thought were very much worth quoting. (I underline a lot in my books..)
They are both from Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal"
"The proud husband told the reporter ' My wife and I have a saying that you can tell the health of a marriage by the number of teeth marks on your tongue.' I wonder, when I'm around such people, What are they being punished for? Thirty-four years. One stands in awe of the masochistic rigor required."
and
"The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. Your grandparents go long before your parents, and your parents go long before you."
the first one cracks me up.
"What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait."- Cheif, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
"And I am treating my poor heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted. Tell no one of this; there are people who would it take it amiss."
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Von Goethe
OH MY!!!! That is one of my favorite books, I must have read it a dozen times. I am having that put on my gravestone.Originally Posted by Bii
just my name and "So it goes" in the middle. Great quote!
"What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait."- Cheif, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.
- from the short story Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield
The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the children laugh.
Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:
"Damned Italians! coming over here!"
As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being -- that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:
"Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!"
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
From Eveline ~ The Dubliners, James Joyce
That is a beautiful line, Dori!
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ~ Thomas Gray
In the middle of January, schoolwork turned its attention to letter-writing. After learning the basics, each student was to write two letters, one to a friend and one to somebody in another class.
Liesel's letter from Rudy went like this:
Dear Saumensch,
Are you still as useless at football as you were the last time we played? I hope so. That means I can run past you again just like Jesse Owens at the Olympics …
When Sister Maria found it, she asked him a question, very amiably.
Sister Maria's Offer: 'Do you feel like visiting the corridor, Mr. Steiner?'
Needless to say, Rudy answered in the negative, and the paper was torn up and he started again.
From "Youth," by Joseph Conrad:
"Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within . . ."
Joseph Conrad is the only author that can make me emotional from sheer mastery of language. I can't read this story without bursting into tears.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the Eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
-- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", T. S. Eliot
" 'Yes,' I said, as though carrying on a discussion, 'and amongst other things you dreamed foolishly of a certain butterfly. . .' "
-- Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
It was a bit disconcerting this side of Felicity, like having a pet shark that thinks itself a goldfish."
A Great and Terrible Beauty
If it's worth complaining about, it's completely worth doing yourself!
Last night I bought like five books one of them was A Portrait of Dorian Gray. It seems like a good book but that is only from ten pages read so I don't know yet.
The Book Of Shadows James Rese
What finer tribute might a man know than to be mistrusted by the stupid for being clever, envied by the inept for making good, loathed by the dull for his wit, by the boors for his breeding an by the ugly for his successes?
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
"the Joyous Cosmology," by philosopher, thinker and writer, Alan Watts
The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems to be, the more I am moved to marvel at the ingenuity with which divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this cosmic joie de vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so reassuring—nothing around here but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I were to step up and say, "Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be.* When people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the unconscious—"You know....You know!"
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