Quotes from Books

[MarkC]

Here is a famous quote from mark Twain's work
"The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say".
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

[Snowqueen]

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies. . . . And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

[I]I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents...
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Thanks for sharing Snowqueen. I had read "Grapes of Wrath", "Of Mice and Men", "Travels With Chrley" and "The Wayward Bus" but not "East of Eden". perhaps one day I will come back around to Steinbeck and give that one a go.

Here is another from TBK

"Marfa Ignatievna cooked dinner, and the soup compared with Smerdyakov's cooking, came out "like swill", while the chicken was so dry that teeth could not chew it. In reply to the bitter, though just, reproaches of her master, Marfa Ignatievna objected that the chicken was a very old one to begin with, and that she had never been to cooking school."
The Brother Karmazov, Book V; Chapter 7 “Its Always Interesting”

[marcolfo]

i wish i could remember one from lord of the rings.

here's my favorite

"forth rode the king, fear behind him, fate before him."

[quasimodo1]

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

[bouquin]

Many things are interesting, fool, but nowhere near true.

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... your life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments.

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Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.

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Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?

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Is the thing that's happening so far outside experience that you're forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?
Is reality too powerful for you?
Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life.

[Pensive]

"She in her madness wished for a storm, hoping the storm would bring her peace."
- Family Happiness

[Snowqueen]

Thanks for sharing Snowqueen. I had read "Grapes of Wrath", "Of Mice and Men", "Travels With Chrley" and "The Wayward Bus" but not "East of Eden". perhaps one day I will come back around to Steinbeck and give that one a go.

East of Eden is a brilliant novel I'll soon post more quotes. I haven't read Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men but I'm looking forward to read these two as well.

[Dark Muse]

From Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The most imporant thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to be dead. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very sill for people to cry and his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Fralfamadorians can look at different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. The can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

[Jeremydav]

One of my new favorite quotes:

But what is this inscription on mine arm?
Homo fuge! Whither should I fly?
If unto God, He'll throw me down to hell.
My senses are deceived, here's nothing writ.
Oh yes, I see it plain! Even here is writ
Homo fuge! Yet shall not Faustus fly!

[Albion.]

This lesson in life spoken by Polonius in Hamlet should i think be taught to every child

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear 't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

[lillottezobel]

I'll quote Leroux today:
"One must get used to everything in life, even to eternity."
"All that belongs to the past...but there is the present, and you are responsible to me for the present..."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

From Victor Hugo; "Toilers of the Sea"

"Being respectable implies a multitude of observances, from Sunday well sanctified, to a cravat properly tied. "Don't get yourself pointed at," that is a terrible law. To be pointed at is the diminutive of the anthema. Little towns, hotbeds of gossips, excel in this isolating malignity, a curse viewed through the small end of a a telescope. A man faces grapeshot, he faces a hurricane, but he beats a retreat before Madame Pimbeche."

[Nietzsche]

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships; each of which has its goal and course. Our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did —and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. --- From part 279 of The Gay Science by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The greatest weight -- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This Life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable time more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everthing unutterable small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and inumberable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?" Part 341 from The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche

[Desolation]

"Star Friendship" is one of the most beautiful passages in Nietzsche's entire oeuvre. It reminds me of a good friend that I lost a couple of years ago.