Quotes from Books

[RaoulDuke]

A few of my favourites:

It is no honest and blunt tu-whit-tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to here their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins in the scenery of their transgressions.

- Henry David Thoreau, listening to owls outside his cabin in Walden woods and letting his imagination wander.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of victory over the forces of Old an Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

- Hunter S. Thompson on the collapse of the 60's hippy movement.

He says my daughter and all the love he has wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all of the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

- Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

[coolnice]

will someday become Buddha. Now this 'someday' is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on the way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection.

[Manalive]

Herman Melville- Moby Dick

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

William Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury

"I seed de beginning, en now I sees de ending."

Absalom, Absalom

"You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."

Shakespeare- Hamlet

The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

G.K. Chesterton- Orthodoxy

"That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point- and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching on a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionist choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, but let the atheist choose themselves a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

[Dark Muse]

The Picture of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
of the spectacle enthralls us.

[Cygnus X-2112]

I started reading Paradise Lost today and this one line said by Satan really struck me as a pretty awesome quote.

The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

[bouquin]

'The past has all the time in the world. It's only the future which is running out.'

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

Nobody ever died of feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

[jessicapall]

and the best quote ever
"no hell is colder then the house where my soul is clogged"
from David L. Swift in Canon (2001).
a damned good novel.

[Elentarri]

Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."

'All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.'

“I do not love the bright sword for it's sharpness, nor the arrow for it's swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend” - Faramir

“Courage is found in unlikely places.”

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"...a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought - devil knows what foreign nations. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully - and I take liberty to call myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word as far as I know."
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"

[Scheherazade]

"...a thinker, though to be sure, this name nowadays seems to be the monopoly of hawkers of revolutionary wares, the slaves of some French or German thought - devil knows what foreign nations. But I am not an intellectual mongrel. I think like a Russian. I think faithfully - and I take liberty to call myself a thinker. It is not a forbidden word as far as I know."
Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"

I really enjoyed reading that book; more so than Heart of Darkness.

[The Comedian]

The grafting of fruit trees has always interested me. Here's a couple of lines on this topic from one of the many great books by John McPhee.

In Florida, most orange trees have lemon roots. In California, nearly all lemon trees are grown on orange roots.

From Oranges by John McPhee

[Kafka's Crow]

'Politics,' the author resumes, 'are a stone attached to the neck of liter-
ture, which, in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of
imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert. The
noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not in harmony with the
sound of any of the instruments.

Stendhal The Red and the Black

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Stendhal The Red and the Black

Thanks for the ammunition!
My wife and her family are notorious for wedging politics into any conversation killing the moment.
I cant't wait to use that one.

[Lost_Souls]

I'll throw in a few quick bursts of prose from E. M. Forster's Howard's End:

'You and I have built up something real, because it is purely spiritual. There's no veil of mystery over us. Unreality and mystery begin as soon as one touches the body. The popular view is, as usual, exactly the wrong one. Our bothers are over tangible things--money, husbands, house-hunting. But Heaven will work of itself' (Ch. 23)

---

'Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.
[...]
She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.' (Ch. 22)

This book is so surprisingly beautiful and touching that I couldn't believe Forster wasn't a woman. He is a man isn't he?

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

"Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The one's that don't make it are those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies"

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Gilliatt