Quotes from Books

[Miarose]

I'm reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi for just about the hundredth time... I can't get over how good of a book it is, even as I get older. (I'm reading an online version this time though, I got it in ebook form off this cool site.)
Some of my favourite quotes from Life of Pi:

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation"

"I discovered at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. It's not something evident, in my experience. Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others--and I am one of those-- never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. It maybe nothing more than life-hungry stupidity"

and my absolute favourite:

"The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity–it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud."

[Aiculík]

"Eyes mark the shape of the city.
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entitty created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to teh ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding."

Openin paragraph of Murakami's After Dark. When I read it in the bookstore I knew I'll love it and bought it immediately. And so far, book meets my high expectations.

[patrickbeverley]

"This book sums up my lifelong effort to discover and test what is involved and required for successful child-rearing—that is, the raising of a child who may not necessarily become a success in the eyes of the world, but who on reflection would be well pleased with the way he was raised, and who would decide that, by and large, he is satisfied with himself, despite the shortcomings to which all of us are prey."
Bruno Bettelheim, A Good Enough Parent

[EastofEden]

John Steinbeck's East of Eden....its hard to convey just how powerful these words are when they have been removed from the central story

"The ways of sin are curious...I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up." (p. 166)

"The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time and so did the brothels." (p. 215)

"I believe that when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side, you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other - cold, lonely, greatness. There you make your choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?....Isn't it strange? A father wanting to condemn his son to greatness! What selfishness that must be." (p. 263)

and of course, the most triumphant moment of the whole book,

"Don't you see? The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you call sin ignorance. The King James translations makes a promise in "Thou shalt", meaning that men will most surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word timshel - "Thou mayest" - that gives a choice. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if it is true that thou mayest - it is also true that thou mayest not." (p. 301)

[Hypercrit Htd]

Mr. Steinbeck no historian. The first church not arrive same time as whorehouse. People had temple, religion many century before it. Historical fact show it were Greeks who invented whorehouse, exploited foreign women. That your democracy-that your failure-that the decline of your civilization.

[Hypercrit Htd]

after that Greek introduced whore,porn to western world.

[aeroport]

There were hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a connexion more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them in life.

'The Altar of the Dead' - Henry James

[patrickbeverley]

Mr. Steinbeck no historian. The first church not arrive same time as whorehouse.

I think the "Far West" part is important. Anyway, of course Steinbeck wasn't a historian. He was a writer, and the central point of that sentence is not the exact historical accuracy, but the comparison of the religious and the sexual experience that Steinbeck makes.

That your democracy-that your failure-that the decline of your civilization.

Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

[JBI]

I think the "Far West" part is important. Anyway, of course Steinbeck wasn't a historian. He was a writer, and the central point of that sentence is not the exact historical accuracy, but the comparison of the religious and the sexual experience that Steinbeck makes.


Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

Prostitution is a sign of democracy. In authoritative regimes it is possible to actually disallow prostitution, to the point where women (or men more modernly) will not practice it, for fear of the punishment, despite its capital necessity. But in democracy, the attempt to liberalize everyone involves allowing people control over their own bodies, and in that sense, the right to make a living wherever they want as long as nobody (usually including themselves) is harmed.

Even Pope John Paul II realized that it should not be legislation that stops prostitution, but the fact that society doesn't need to create women in the state where they do prostitute themselves (this is of course, sexually biased, assuming women do not have the strength to not be prostitutes, and that all prostitutes hate their job).

Prostitution is older than the church, and even was made legal during the dark ages by the church (even going as far as having state and church run brothels), on the prompting of the writings of St. Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo, the famous autobiographer). In truth, the catholic church holds that soliciting a prostitute is better than masturbating, and therefore, to not damn male souls to hell, prostitutes were seen as integral to society.

As for democracy playing in with it, really prostitution has nothing to do with democracy, if people are given control over their bodies, than prostitution only has to do with economics, and the welfare of the prostitutes in question.

[bouquin]

If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.

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I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which ... is home at the moment.

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"... Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky."

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... if the Lord can't inspire you to leave off sinning any other way, then, it's His business to scare the dickens out of you.

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God works, as is very well known, in mysterious ways. There is just nothing you can name that He won't do, now and then. Oh, He will send down so much rain that all his little people are drinking from one another's sewers and dying ... Then he will organize a drought to scorch ... so whoever did not die of fever will double over from hunger.

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To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story ...

[Hypercrit Htd]

I think the "Far West" part is important. Anyway, of course Steinbeck wasn't a historian. He was a writer, and the central point of that sentence is not the exact historical accuracy, but the comparison of the religious and the sexual experience that Steinbeck makes.


Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

Prostitution BEGAN with democracy- Greece c.sixth century B.C.E. History show every indication that the western world experience nothing like it before that time.That probably due to class competition-upper class men having slave. Foreign women , children were enslave in brothel for that purpose.

You the bloody fool-study history before you make accusations!

[Hypercrit Htd]

Prostitution is a sign of democracy. In authoritative regimes it is possible to actually disallow prostitution, to the point where women (or men more modernly) will not practice it, for fear of the punishment, despite its capital necessity. But in democracy, the attempt to liberalize everyone involves allowing people control over their own bodies, and in that sense, the right to make a living wherever they want as long as nobody (usually including themselves) is harmed.

Even Pope John Paul II realized that it should not be legislation that stops prostitution, but the fact that society doesn't need to create women in the state where they do prostitute themselves (this is of course, sexually biased, assuming women do not have the strength to not be prostitutes, and that all prostitutes hate their job).

Prostitution is older than the church, and even was made legal during the dark ages by the church (even going as far as having state and church run brothels), on the prompting of the writings of St. Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo, the famous autobiographer). In truth, the catholic church holds that soliciting a prostitute is better than masturbating, and therefore, to not damn male souls to hell, prostitutes were seen as integral to society.

As for democracy playing in with it, really prostitution has nothing to do with democracy, if people are given control over their bodies, than prostitution only has to do with economics, and the welfare of the prostitutes in question.

Organize prostitution BEGAN with democracy so it have more to do with it than might be suppose. The Greek saw it as way for poor men to have slave. It never question because no one question slavery. There were no prostitute in Rome until Greek introduced the practice. Prostitution not about simple economics-it about economic slavery.

[coolestnerdever]

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

I love Jane Austen.

[Argus]

From The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler:

"In a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at Battersby in after years the diary which he kept on the first of these occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by generation after generation of prigs and impostors."

Butler is hilarious and I wish I had read those lines before I studied art history.

[thelastmelon]

I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm very much enjoying the dialogues between the man and the boy:

"They're going to kill those people, arent they?
Yes.
Why do they have to do that?
I dont know.
Are they going to eat them?
I dont know.
They're going to eat them, arent they?
Yes.
And we couldn't help them because then they'd eat us too.
Yes.
And that's why we couldn't help them.
Yes.
Okay."