Quotes from Books

[Virgil]

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."

I can't wait to start Melon. I'll probably start this weekend. Thanks for the inspiration.

[Logos]

....

But he said none of these things. He was an Afghan, with an Afghan's dignity. He was not used to explaining himself. Or perhaps he saw little purpose in presenting his point of view to these foreigners. For reasons of his own, the singer had stated simply the practice of his own culture. He stood there under darkening trees, .... and what he said was "Afghans do not sing in the garden."
--from Ann Jones' Kabul In Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan (2006)

[Scheherazade]

....

But he said none of these things. He was an Afghan, with an Afghan's dignity. He was not used to explaining himself. Or perhaps he saw little purpose in presenting his point of view to these foreigners. For reasons of his own, the singer had stated simply the practice of his own culture. He stood there under darkening trees, .... and what he said was "Afghans do not sing in the garden."
--from Ann Jones' Kabul In Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan (2006)

This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for so long... Along with couple of other books based on Afghanistan.

[Logos]

Oh well! put it on the top of your pile! because it's an amazing non-fiction work about, ermmmm, current politricks Very informative and enlightening, but profoundly sad about the state of education programs in Afghanistan

[Dori]

"What an idiot!"
from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Madame la Fere]

"I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself."
The Count of Monte Cristo
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."
Also from The Count of Monte Cristo

[Logos]

"It was the men that made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads."

--p. 202, "Lying Under the Apple Tree", from Munro's The View From Castle Rock

[Scheherazade]

"It was the men that made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads."

--p. 202, "Lying Under the Apple Tree", from Munro's The View From Castle Rock

__________________

[quasimodo1]

"The story we tell of these circumstances (largely at the prompting of Rilke's own letters) goes something like this: Afer more than a decade of free, uninterrpted productivity, Rilke was gradually drawn by his work on "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" into a realm of conflict and self-doubt--to such a degree that after that prose work's publication in 1910 he found himself directionless and existentially exhausted, a beginner unable to begin, feeling more and more estranged from the "task" of poetry and yet looking to it increasingly for some difinitive, life-answering statement." from the introduction by Edward Snow, Uncollected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke

[Tersely]

I asked her what was wrong. "It's Jeannot." Her voice was toneless. "His mother says he can't play with me anymore."
"Oh?" Neutrally. "What does she say?"
"She says I'm a bad influence." She flickered a dark glance at me. "Because we don't go to church. Because you opened on Sunday."
You opened on Sunday.

-Chocolat

[Idios_Daemon]

"I believe in Him who is conscious of Himself in me only."
--The Possessed, by F. Dostoyevsky.

[byquist]

How's this for genius?:

"This matter of distribution is important, because two of the rules for a valid syllogism involve distribution of terms and because many of the fallacies in deductive reasoning are the result of an inference being drawn from undistrbuted terms."

Ed Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student -- great for beach reading, sure.

[Dark Muse]

Catch-22 Joseph Heller

"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. "There's nothing mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about-a country bumpkin, a clumsy bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Surpreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phelgm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control thier bowl movmeents? Why in the world did He ever create pain?

What a colossal immortal blunderer! When you consider the oppertunity and power He had to really do a job, and than look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead. His sheer incompotence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never met a payroll. Why no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!"

[bouquin]

"And what we fear we often rage against."

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"Nobody, nobody in their right mind would go back to them hard, hard times. People was only kind because life was so dirty you couldn't afford to have any enemies. It was all swim or all sink. A situation that makes people very sweet."

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Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure.

[FranzKafka]

"Three things a man needed: faith, practice, and luck."-Bukowski