Quotes from Books

[Pyrrho]

"[The soldiers] moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they has evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure."

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Finished that one just about two weeks ago. But I found it much too emotional... Had its good parts though.

[Scheherazade]

Finished that one just about two weeks ago. But I found it much too emotional... Had its good parts though.

I have written a review of the book here:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=34988

If you like, you can add yours as well

[Pyrrho]

I am not yet confident enough to post a review. But I have to agree largely with yours. While the parts about the war were quite good, the bit about Elizabeth is very cliché. When he writes about her affair and feminism I had the impression that I read all of it before...and not necessary in the great books.

Sorry. I meant 'necessarily'. Writing in English is pretty difficult.

[Dark Muse]

The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bown

Chapter 4

Most mornings, Lilian waited for Portia in the old cemetery off Paddington Street: they liked to take this short cut on the way to lessons. The cemetery, overlooked by windows, has been out of touch with death for some time: it is at once a retreat and a thoroughfare not yet too well known. One or two weeping willows and tombs like stone pavilions give it a prettily solemn character, but the gravestones are all ranged round the walls like chairs before a dance, and half way acorss the lawn a circular shelter looks like a bandstand. Paths run from gate to gate, and shrubs inside the paling seclude the place from the street-it is not sad, just cosily melancholic. Lilian enjoyed the melancholy; Portia felt that what was here was her secret every time she turned in at the gate.

[bouquin]

" ... that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed."

[Tiny Dancer]

my favourite quotes are from a book called Twilight (it is so sad)

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."




AND

Darkness is so predictable, don't you think?" He smiled wistfully.

"I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars."

[Dark Muse]

Madame Bovary~ Gustave Flaubert

"I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all those others with thier mummeries and thier juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Surpreme Being; in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed use here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to chruch to kiss silver plates and fatten out of my pocket a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one I know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even comtemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and Beranger! I am for the profression of faith of the Sayvoyard Vicar, and the immoratal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden withy a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves and completly opposed moreover, to all physcial laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in torpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them"

[Page Sniffer]

From In the Monitor's Turret , journal entry by Samuel Dana Greene, 1862:
"...We left New York harbor in tow of the tug-boat Seth Low at 11A.M., of Thursday, the 6th of March. On the following day a moderate breeze was encountered, and it was at once evident that the Monitor was unfit as a sea-going craft. Nothing but the subsidence of the wind prevented her from being shipwrecked before she reached Hampton Roads. The berth-deck hatch leaked in spite of all we could do, and the water came down under the turret like a waterfall. It would strike the pilot-house and go over the turret in beautiful curves, and it came through the eye-holes in the pilot-house with such force as to knock the helmsman completely round from the wheel. The waves also broke over the blower-pipes, and the water came down through them in such quantities that the belts of the engines slipped, and the engines consequently stopped for lack of artificial draught, without which, in such a confined place, the fires could not get air for combustion..." pg 265, American Sea Writing, Library of America.

The Monitor still had to go on against these odds and do battle with the Confederate Navy operating from Norfolk, Virginia in the Hampton Roads, Chesapeke Bay area during our War Between the States aka, Civil War. Can you imagine what was in the minds of the crew of the Monitor during this near death attempt of just trying to stay afloat on the way to battle?

[byquist]

Practice Nonchalance. Never seem to be working too hard . . . Even when something demands a lot of sweat, make it look effortless . . ."

from The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Wish I'd come across this kind of book a long time ago; would have saved a lot of time and mistakes. Recommend it.

[CognitiveArtist]

Stendhal The Red and the Black first paragraph from the chapter 'Entry into Society'

(square brackets are translator's, round brackets are Stendhal's)

Julien stood dumbfounded in the middle of the courtyard.
'Do try to look as if you had your wits about you,' said Father Pirard; 'you have these horrible ideas, and then you act just like a child! What's happened to Horace's nil mirari [:nil admirari 'do not marvel at anything']? (Never show any enthusiam.) Just think that this tribe of lackeys, on seeing you established here, will try to make fun of you; they will see in you an equal who has been unjustly put above them. Beneath outward appearences of good nature, kind advice, and a desire to guide you, they will try to get you to put your foot in it in a big way.'
'I defy them to,' said Julien, biting his lip, and he resumed all his wariness.

[white camellia]

Punishment, according to our conception, should bear some proportion to the offence. Why then eternal punishment for the temporary offences of so frail a creature as man?

Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
David Hume

[Dark Muse]

The Initiate Brother, Sean Russle

Pg. 175

Chapeter Eight

Walls: they were everywhere and everywhere they went unoticed-not that they weren't resepcted, that was not the case-they were simply not considered for what they were; the Signficant Pattern.

But it had always been so. Even a thousand years before, the Lord Botahara had spoken of walls: "Between themselves and the weak the strong build walls, fearing that the weak will learn of thier own strength. So it is that the poor are shut out into the wide world with all of its uncertainity but also with all of its purity and beauty. Whose palace garden compares to the perfection of the mountain meadows? So thinking to shut out the poor and the weak, the strong suceed only in walling themselves in. Such is the nature of illusion."

[BREWNING]

I'm reading The Merry-Go-Round by Joshua Bruening...

You can find it at amazon / barnesandnoble . com

It's worth checking out!

[bouquin]

"Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness ..."

--------------------------------------------------

What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell... It is important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.

[behindblueeyes]

"It was a way of giving herself permission to be entirely heedless in her escapades. And then she made the most of it, repeatedly."
-Emma, Mme. Bovary