# Reading > General Literature >  Quotes from Books

## Scheherazade

Here is a thread to share the sections you like in the book you are reading at the moment.

I have been reading _The Name of the Rose_, which I find a little hard because it is full of religious references (Christianity), some of which I don't understand (practical) and some of which I don't care about (historical). However, it is a good book to make one consider and reconsider blind obedience to religion -or any teaching for that matter. 

Here are some quotes I really like: 


> If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.


 


> For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.

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## Schokokeks

This is a very nice idea for a thread, thanx for opening!  :Nod:  
I'd like to share my favourite passages from _Paradise Lost_ by John Milton.

Godfather about man's fall from paradise:



> whose fault?
> Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me
> All he could have; I made him just and right,
> Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.


 (III, l.96-100)

Raphael to Adam:



> that thou art happy, owe to God;
> That thou continuest such, owe to thyself


 (V, l.520f)

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## Pensive

A Walk To Remember




> I breathe deeply, taking in the fresh spring air. Though Beaufort has changed and I have changed, the air itself has not. Its still the air of my childhood, the air of my seventeenth year, and when I finally exhale, Im fifty-seven once more. But this is okay. I smile slightly, looking toward the sky, knowing theres one thing I still havent told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen.


EDIT: I am reading nothing now a days but this is the book I have read recently so I hope that you did not mind me quoting it.

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## genoveva

"Mercedes was silent. In her fourty years, she knew two things with certainty: From the minute we are born there is danger. In the end, it is up to the women to shield and protect." p.7 Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez

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## RobinHood3000

"Darwin settled in the country, fathered ten children, corresponded wtih Lyell and a hundred other scientists and wrote books--among them a journal of the voyage of the _Beagle_, a treatise on volcanos and another on the geology of South America, and a masterful study of barnacles that consumed seven years of work and left him fuming that 'I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before.' "

--_Coming of Age in the Milky Way_, Timothy Ferris

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## rachel

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura 
ché la via diritta era smarrita. 

In the middle of our life's walk 
I found myself in a dark wood 
for the straight road was lost] 


I am overwhelmed by Dante, his brain must have been continually smoking.

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## Scheherazade

Another quote from _The Name of the Rose_:


> What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man or Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

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## chmpman

From _Hamlet_ 

Ghost:
I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

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## subterranean

" Would you like to be grown up?"

"Yes, I would... But I don't really want to grow up. Old people can be so disagreeable... I'd rather stay the way I am, and sometimes I'd like to be able to fly... Then I'd laugh at everybody."

* Rosshalde - Hermann Hesse*

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## bhekti

" I sing of arms and of the man"
Daved West's Translation of Virgil's Aeneid

What a wonderful sentence!

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## Virgil

For Mother's Day on Sunday. From Joyce's _Portrait of the Artist_:




> That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two five-shilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:
> -- Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!
> 
> -- Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

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## Broken

> Whats the point of knowing good if you dont keep trying to become a good person?"


 - The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard

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## Truth Untold

The Ghost Road

'Too fussy to live, Prior thought. There you are, nowhere near France and an epitaph already.'

' "Sleeping all right?"
"Not last night. Bloody tent leaks."
"Generally?"
"I sleep alright"
Mather sat back in his chair. "How did you get in?"
"Throught he flap."
Mather's forefinger shot up. "Watch it, laddie. How did you get into the army?"'

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## Eagleheart

Right now poems of a prominent Bulgarian poet along with Some works of W.Blake...I will try to translate some lines of him/I do not mean Blake/:
.....
The struggle is mercilessly cruel
The struggle,as they say, is epich
I have fallen. Someone else will replace me ...
and that is it
What does here a single person mean?
....
A shooting,and after it-worms
This is so simple and logical. 
But in the storm we will be together again with you-
my people
because we loved you 
2 o'clock 23.07.1942
.....
He wrote it in his cell three hours before being shot

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## Idril

This is from _The Master and Margarita_ by Mikhail Bulgakov and I just think it's one of the funniest lines I've ever read,




> "The main problem is Pontius Pilate. But the underwear doesn't help."

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## Scheherazade

> This is from _The Master and Margarita_ by Mikhail Bulgakov and I just think it's one of the funniest lines I've ever read,


I love _Master and Margarita_ and there are couple of discussion threads around the Forum if you would like to have a look at them once you've finished reading.  :Smile: 

Some more quotes from _The Name of the Rose_:


> Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected inquiry. When we consdeir a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...


 


> There are words that give power, otehrs that make us all the more derelict, and to this latter category belong the vulgar words of the simple, to whom the Lord has not granted the boon of self-expression in the universal tongue of knowledge and power.





> Be on guard, my son... The beauty of the body stops at the skin. If men could see what is beneath the skin,..., they would shudder at the sight of a woman. All that grace consists of mucus and blood, humours and bile. If you think of what is hidden in the nostrols, in the throat, and in the belly, you will find only filth. If it revolts you to touch mucus or dung with your fingertip, how could we desire to embrace the sack that contains that dung?





> After so many years even teh fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?





> Est ubi glorai nunc Babyloiae? Where are the snows of yesteryear? The earth is dancing the dance of Macabre; at times it seems to be that the Danube is crowded with ships loaded with fools going towards a dark place.


This last quote reminded me of Yossarian's question in _Catch-22_: "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" 

I would like to inform everyone that I have finally finished reading _The Name of the Rose_ so no more quotes!  :Biggrin:

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## Idril

> I love _Master and Margarita_ and there are couple of discussion threads around the Forum if you would like to have a look at them once you've finished reading.


I will, thank you for mentioning them. I'm cruising through the book, I just can't put it down so I should be done very soon.




> Some more quotes from _The Name of the Rose_:...


If you liked _The Name of the Rose_, you should try _Q_ by Luther Blissett. It's actually written by a collaboration of 4 anonymous Italian authors using the name Luther Blissett but that's not really important, what's important is that it's a fascinating book, it takes place during the Reformation but it focuses on the Anabaptists and Catholics, not the Lutherans although they certainly do pop up from time to time. It's not a particularly easy read, much like _Name of the Rose_ but the historical context is riveting and it's interesting to look at the Reformation from a slightly different angle and to learn that those Anabaptists were a violent bunch.  :Eek:

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## SurrealDialogue

I'm currently re-reading "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges. Here is a quote:




> ...I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world.

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## Earnshaw

"My greatest thought in living is Heathcliff.
If all else perished, and _he_ remained.
I should still continue to be. . . .
Nelly, I _am_ Heathcliff!
He's always, always in my mind:
not as a pleasure . . . but as my own being."

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## Truth Untold

Now I'm reading an Anita Blake novel, Book 9 Obsidian Butterfly let's see, quotes quotes quotes...

'I was covered in blood, but it wasn't mine, so it was okay.'

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## Shannanigan

lol, Truth. God I love Anita Blake :P

I'm reading "True Notebooks" by Mark Salzman (he's writing about teaching a writing class in Juvenile Hall). The inmate boys are discussing how they're going to make themselves look good for the inmate girls who will be at an open mic event. Quote:

"Listen up! I figured out a way to crease our pants using the hot plate."
"Jackson, you gotta get some Scotch tape from the pantry. That way we can make cuffs."

and that's pant leg and sleeve cuffs...not the other kind  :Wink:

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## beer good

"For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it's wrong."
- Umberto Eco quoting HL Mencken in "Foucault's Pendulum"

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## grace86

From Anna Karenin:

1) "He walked down, for a long while averting his eyes from her, as though she were the sun, but seeing her, as one sees the sun, without looking."

2) "Well, such women do exist...and they are terrible. Woman, don't you know, is the sort of subject that study it as much as you will it is always quite new."

3) "The child's presence called up both in Vronsky and in Anna a feeling akin to that of a sailor who can see by the compass that the direction in which he is swiftly sailing is wide of the proper course, but is powerless to stop. Every moment takes him farther and farther astray, and to admit to himself that he is off his course is the same as admitting final disaster. This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass which showed them the degree to which they had departed from what they knew but did not want to know."

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## Redshift

> Harrison Ford in harris tweed


Well not really, but I thought I'd give everyone a laugh.

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## Asa Adams

this is from Orwell's "1984" on the rebellion of the proles and when and if that could ever happen.

"Untill they have become conscious they will never rebel, and untill after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

-Winston Smith

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## Arethusa

Ian McKellen, an openly gay actor who plays Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code, tried to make light of the controversy:

"I'm very happy to believe that Jesus was married," he said. "I know the Catholic Church has problems with gay people and I thought this would be absolute proof that Jesus was not gay." 

That kinda cracked me up. As did the following.

Read this today in Horace's Satires. Horace's slave, Davus, comparing his master's behavior to his own at Saturnalia when all slaves are free to speak without fear of reprecussion and servant becomes master for the day:

Wretch, you who order me around serve another, 

Like a wooden puppet jerked by alien strings.

So who is free? The wise man: in command of himself,

Unafraid of poverty, chains, or death, bravely 

Defying his passions, despising honours, complete

In himself, smoothed and rounded, so that nothing

External can cling to his polished surface, whom

Fortune by attacking ever wounds herself. Can you

Claim any of this for your own? The woman demands

A fortune, bullies you, slams the door in your face,

Drowns you in cold water, then calls you back! Take your

Neck from the vile yoke. Im free, free, say it! You cant:

A despot, and no slight one, oppresses your spirit,

Pricking sharp spurs in your tired flanks, yanking when you shy.

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## ShoutGrace

From Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis", his letter to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas. It was this relationship that eventually landed Wilde in prison, which is where he wrote the work.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should forever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me . . ."

I have no doubt that in this letter which I have to write of your life and of mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned to joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read this letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison where the day no less than the night is set apart for tears."

"Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right. Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery for me to set down. To you the Unseen Powers have been very good. They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic shapes of Life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone you have been allowed to look at in a mirror, merely. You yourself have walked freely among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away."

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## cuppajoe_9

From _Catch-22_: "If they wanted to fly combat missions they were insane and they didn't have to fly them, but if they didn't want to fly combat missions they were sane and they had to fly them."

From _The Grapes of Wrath_: My signature.

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## Cormeister37

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
-The Great Gatsby

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## Idril

From _The Gulag Archipelago_ by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:




> ...there's a folk saying about the search which covers the subject: _They are looking for something which was never put there_.

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## NNoah3

> Here is a thread to share the sections you like in the book you are reading at the moment.


Can we post quotes about books that we read already?

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## superunknown

> Lennie said, "Tell about that place, George."
> "I jus' tol' you, jus' las' night."
> "Go on - tell again, George."
> "Well, it's ten acres," said George. "Got a little win'mill. Got a little shack on it, an' a chicken run. Got a kitchen orchard, cherries, apples, peaches, 'cots, nuts, got a few berries. They's a place for alfalfa and plenty water to flood it. They's a pig pen-"
> "An' rabbits, George."
> "No place for rabbits now, but I could easily build a few hutches and you could feed alfalfa to the rabbits."
> "Damn right, I could," said Lennie. "You God damn right I could."
> George's hands stopped working with the cards. His voice was growing warmer. "An' we could have a few pigs. I could build a smoke house like the one gran'pa had, an' when we kill a pig we can smoke the bacon and the hams, and make sausage an' all like that. An' when the salmon run up river we could catch a hundred of 'em an' salt 'em down or smoke 'em. We could save them for breakfast. They ain't nothing so nice as smoked salmon. When the fruit come in we could can it - and tomatoes, they're easy to can. Ever' Sunday we'd kill a chicken or a rabbit. Maybe we'd have a cow or a goat, and the cream is so God damn thick you got to cut it with a knife and take it out with a spoon."
> Lennie watched him with wide eyes, and old Candy watched him too. Lennie said softly, "We could live offa the fatta the lan'."


- John Steinbeck, "Of Mice and Men"

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## Rachy

The Green Mile:

"Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day."

"When I die and stand before God awaiting judgement and he asks me why I let one of his miracles die, what am I going to say? It was my job?"

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## Psycheinaboat

"But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death."

J.P. Donleavy
_The Ginger Man_

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## Psycheinaboat

I enjoyed Tom's school days with Mr. Stelling a great deal...

"Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he never called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he had got on some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus, that he was advanced enough to call it a "bore" and "beastly stuff." At present, in relation to this demand that he should learn Latin declensions and conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimaginativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash-tree in order to cure lameness in cattle."

George Eliot 
_The Mill on the Floss_

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## Hyacinth Girl

"I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybbe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit - the human sperit - the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent - I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it." - Preacher Casy
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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## cuppajoe_9

You're reading _Grapes of Wrath_ too? I'm reading that for english right now.

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## Hyacinth Girl

So how are you finding it? I have to admit, I am not a fan of Steinbeck at ALL, but a friend of mine wanted to know what I thought of the ending, so I am reading to oblige. I am about halfway through now, and it's not as bad as I feared it would be - body count is only up to 2 people, a dog and a jackrabbit! =-) Casy is actually my favorite character so far - I like his train of thought.

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## Lambert

Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse 5_ 

_"The American was astonised. He stood up shakily, spitting blood. He'd had two teeth knocked out. He had meant no harm by what he'd said, evidently, had no idea that the guard would hear and understand.
'Why me?' he asked the guard.
The guard shoved him back into the ranks. 'Vy you? Vy anybody?' he said."_

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## Shannanigan

Laurell K. Hamilton's Incubus Dreams:

"At 3:00 that afternoon, I was at work, right on time. Neither sex, vampires, shapeshifters, nor metaphysical meltdowns will deter this animator from her appointed rounds. At least not today."

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## poetru_fanatic

"It's not the destination, but the journey when walking the witches road."

The Outer Temple of Witchcraft by Christopher Penczak

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## Taime

'' I awoke trembling and sweating, the sheets soaking wet beneath me as my mind recalled the visions from the nightmare that had ripped me from my sleep. The recollections were sadly all too vivid as I had been fighting them all night, a battle I was destined to lose."

'Redemption' by Wayne Sharrocks

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## cuppajoe_9

> So how are you finding it? I have to admit, I am not a fan of Steinbeck at ALL, but a friend of mine wanted to know what I thought of the ending, so I am reading to oblige. I am about halfway through now, and it's not as bad as I feared it would be - body count is only up to 2 people, a dog and a jackrabbit! =-) Casy is actually my favorite character so far - I like his train of thought.


Just finished it on Tuesday. I am absolutely in love.

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## Erna

Some passages out of _Extremely loud and incredibly close_ by *Jonathan Safran Foer* that made me laugh, think or otherwise impressed me.




> "I changed the Sahara!" "Which means?" he said. "What? Tell me." "Well, I'm not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking about moving that one grainof sand one millimeter." "Yeah?" "If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?" "But you did do it, so...?" I stood in the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!" "That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.





> But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say. It became difficult to navigate from Something to Something without accidentally walk through Nothing, and when Something - a key, a pen, a pocketwatch - was accidentally left in a Nothing Place, it never could be retrieved, that was an unspoken rule, like nearly all our rules have been.

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## literaturerocks

Dante's Inferno



> One must fear only those things that have the power to harm; not other things, for they are not fearful.


 i love that quote..for some reason it just struck me as brilliant..but then again.. Dante was brilliant

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## Hyacinth Girl

"Ever since then I have understood that strength, intelligence, stupidity, beauty, cowardice and weakness are situations and roles which sooner or later hapen to everyone." Claudio Magris, Danube

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## TEND

"My Mother is a fish." As I Lay Dieing - Faulkner
That's an entire chapter...what is that? I loved it though  :Biggrin:  , just started reading yesterday and after that chapter I figured I'd reaed enough for one day.

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## Scheherazade

> "My Mother is a fish." As I Lay Dieing - Faulkner
> That's an entire chapter...what is that? I loved it though  , just started reading yesterday and after that chapter I figured I'd reaed enough for one day.


I love that quote. I don't think there are many other quotes capable of saying so much with so few words.

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## TEND

Thank you very much. I was also considering quoting something from the last bit of Darl's chapter previous to it, all about being and not being very interesting. I'm absolutely loving this book, as I've had trouble getting into Faulkner previously, this one really hits home, partly due to characters I can identify with and the unique style it's also a much shorter novel than the others I own. Very good way to start off my Faulkner reading (Although I have read some short stories from my big book  :Biggrin:  ).

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## Basil

"....he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never."

Thomas Wolfe, _Look Homeward, Angel_

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## lavendar1

"Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that -- I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up," she added, smiling playfully.

--Dorothea Brooke, _Middlemarch_ (George Eliot)

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## Asa Adams

*Bag of bones*

the more debased and devious we become, the more we cloud the launguage with erudition.

Timothy Findley

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## Gallantry

"Why do I always begin to feel sad at such moments; explain that mystery; you learned person? I've been thinking all my life that I should be goodness knows how pleased to see you and recalling everything, and here I somehow don't feel pleased at all, although I do love you..." 
- Lizaveta Nikolaevna from The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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## Mary Sue

"Perhaps a man builds for his future in more ways than one, builds not only toward the body which will be his tomorrow or next year, but toward actions and the subsequent irrevocable courses of resultant action which his weak senses and intellect cannot foresee but which ten or twenty or thirty years from now he will take, will have to take in order to survive the act."-William Faulkner

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## dreamweaver_tri

"The choice we have is not whether to be gay or straight. For the majority of gay people, we are who God made us to be. The real choice is between denial and embracing who we are. The real choice is between living life in the shadows or walking proudly in the light. The real choice is between a slow death or an honest life."
-"Letters from the closet"

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## Behemoth

_"I take this lock of hair as a solemn offering to Dis, and now I free you from your body." With these words she raised her hand and cut the hair, and as she cut, all warmth went out of Dido's body and her life passed into the winds._
Virgil, "The Aeneid"

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## byquist

This novel, "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, has too much gab and banter, yet some is good.

Here's a nice quote: "I wanted to be near the children, watch them sleep. Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. ... If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially."

Two others:

"Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such as it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don't mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation. It is a form of self-renewal and a gesture of custodial trust."

"Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearable lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it's obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter."

It's not all this decent; a lot of redundancy and treading water. Something going on though. It's very casual. I don't like casual that much; seems too easy-going. But I'll give it a plug. It does move fast. 

Good beach reading if you get to the beach.

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## Ahmed-Adel

Well, I have just finished _Sons and Lovers_ some days ago. Thus, I think I can write a quote from that excellent novel!



> "*I do like her... I do like to talk to her  I never said I didn't. But I don't love her.*"
> Paul, _Sons and Lovers_ - D. H. Lawrence

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## miss tenderness

" ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy,and persue with eagerness the phantoms of hope;who expect that age will perform the promises of youth ,and the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow..."
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas.

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## superunknown

"Stately plump Buck Mulligan..."

Best beginning ever.

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## Woland

Lear 1.2

"...Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"

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## HarryPercy

I am now of all humours that haved showed themselves humours since the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

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## melancolia

"Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one"
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

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## white camellia

But, in accordance with the primitive arrangement of things, the most trifling causes produce the greatest events, and the grandest undertakings end in the most insignificant results.

I am not fond of reflections when they remain mere reflections.

_Old-Fashioned Farmers_
Nikolai Gogol

(Although it's a short story, I read it as a book and loved it!)

btw, very interesting avatar from you, melancolia!  :Biggrin:

----------


## Ahmed-Adel

> *Success in life may come to anyone at any level in any walk of life, but whatever the degree or the profession, one's success is shaped by the help of a multitude of other people -- a team effort. Recognizing this fact, the haves should help the have-nots.*
> Dr Ahmed Zewail, _Voyage through Time - Walks of Life to the Nobel Prize_.


This book is really excellent. It makes you feel you are living with Dr Zewail. He is a charming and lovely character; I love him!

----------


## melancolia

Why, thank you white camellia!  :Biggrin: 

_To become the spectator of ones own life, is to escape the suffering of life._ 
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

----------


## aeroport

"And your idea is worth, _this time_, quite as much as any of mine..." 
Fanny Assingham (great name) from _The Golden Bowl_  speaking to her husband

(my italics)

----------


## ShoutGrace

_"The briefest of images can sometimes blossom into the most complex thoughts, particularly when we think about them in the context of the whole poem. The second pun, on 'standing', compares Donne 'standing' to watch his mistress undress with a soldier 'standing' waiting for a battle to begin; but the pun additionally relies on us to link 'standing' with the poet's erect penis."_  :Rolleyes:  



Analysing Texts - John Donne - The Complete English Poems

----------


## carina_gino20

Mr. Sleary in Dickens's Hard Times. "People mutht be amuthed. They can't alwayth be a learning; nor can they alwayth be a working. they an't made for it."

----------


## white camellia

One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. 

_The Heart of Darkness_
Joseph Conrad




> Why, thank you white camellia!


It made me laugh.

----------


## Trackster

"Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am you master;-obey!"

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

It is such a strong image I feel. This is the first time the monstar really puts Victor in his place. There is so much to reflect on in the quote. The whole book is amazing. 

-Me

----------


## Skipping Record

"If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics." -Paul Auster, Moon Palace.

----------


## Geoffrey

"Listen, my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, 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. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carried grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people-eternal life."

Siddhartha 
Herman Hesse

----------


## ShoutGrace

“A credulous father, and a brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
My practises ride easy! I see the business.
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit:
All with me's meet that I can fashion fit.”


- - - King Lear, Act 1 Scene 2.

----------


## Viridis

The bishop, who was sitting near him, touched his hand gently and said: "You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. I tell you, who are a traveller, that you are more at home here than I; whatever is here is yours. What need have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me, I knew it."
The man opened his eyes in astonishment:
"Really? You knew my name?"
"Yes," answered the bishop, "your name is my brother."

- Victor Hugo, _Les Miserables_

----------


## Scheherazade

Although I have already finished reading this book, I couldn't help posting this section, which I love:


> It was there that the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasinal basis. So that the fable of the Virginia ham was nonsense, the same as that of the miraculous pills and the Yuletide toilets, and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist.


_One Hundred Years of Solitude_ by Marquez

----------


## kmwmn

"In the abstract but not in the concrete," Said Ursula. "When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted - oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only _not_ tempted not to." The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement. Women in Love - D. H. Lawrence On the idea of getting married or not.

----------


## Maida

"With the approach of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies. Golden in the purest sense of the word, with not the least intrusion of another hue. Theirs is a gold that comes into this world as gold and exists in this world as gold. Poised between all heaven and earth, they stand steeped in gold."

Hard-boild Wonderland and the End of the World Haruki Murakami

----------


## Erna

"Ik heb ontdekt dat het niet de zwaartekracht is die alles op de aarde houdt, maar de kleuren, zij hij langzaam maar heel stellig en dwingend. Als de hemel groen was en de aarde blauw, zouden zelfs de stenen naar boven vallen. De bomen zouden ontworteld worden."
From _Kort Amerikaans_ by Jan Wolkers

Translation:
"I found that it's not gravity that keeps things down to earth, but the colours, he said slowly but positive and binding. If the sky would have been green and the earth blue, stones would fall upwards. The trees would get out of the ground."

----------


## orra

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta .
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted lines. But in my arms she was always Lolita"
From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

----------


## subterranean

I'm currently reading _ Fast Food Nation_ by Eric Schlosser. There's a movie coming soon based on this book, I think.




> Outside of school, the typical American child spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping

----------


## F.Emerald

Porno - Irvine Welsh:

more drinks come over and I see their three faces with the blotches on them getting bigger and redder as the alcohol rapidly fires through the system, flashing them like beacons, as the hormones shoot all over the place. Aye, its like a Vegas sign which says: C*CK PLEASE.

----------


## Neovia

> Robin Hobb - Ship of Magic:
> "Let me take you back o the cabin," the ever-present whore said from behind his shoulder. He had just been about to tell her to do that. Now, of course, he could not. He'd have to wait until she believed it was his own idea, or until he could think of a good reason why he had to go there. Damn her!


I love Kennit <3

----------


## Pensive

> How often have we been urged to cultivate a good heart! Yet we are forbidden to follow its dictates where a man is in question


From Translation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

----------


## Sylph

These lines are from *Endymion* by *John Keats*.....which I like most..






> To Sorrow 
> I bade good-morrow, 
> And thought to leave her far away behind; 
> But cheerly, cheerly, 
> She loves me dearly; 
> She is so constant to me, and so kind: 
> I would deceive her 
> And so leave her, 
> But ah! she is so constant and so kind. 
> ...

----------


## umeyo

"Things may not be easy, but they have to be done."

----------


## orra

I have already finished this play The White Devil by John Webster but there were some lines I did really like(Act I, scene1)
" Great men sell sheep, thus to be cut in pieces, 
When first they have shorn them bare and sold their fleeces"

----------


## Helga

I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the writer is remembering them- and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.

a letter John Fowles sent a friend, published in Fowles biography

----------


## Eulalia

From Walter Scott´s Rob Roy:




> ...And the unit of that life for which he had pleaded so strongly, was for ever withdrawn from the sum of human existence.

----------


## Ubiquitous Prat

I am reading _Cousin Bette by Honere de Balzac_ and _For whom the bells toll by Ernest Hemmingway_ Balzac is one of the greats.

----------


## Mark F.

"But it's the truth even if it didn't happen."

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

----------


## Janine

Wonderful idea this thread!

"It seemed almost as if, at home, I might lift my hand to the ceiling of the valley, and touch my own beloved sky, whose familiar clouds came again and again to visit me, whose stars were constant to me, born when I was born, _whose sun had been all my father to me_. But now the skies were strange over my head, and Orion walked past me unnoticing, he who night after night had stood over the woods to spend with me a wonderful hour."

D.H.Lawrence The White Peacock (his first published novel)
Poem may refer to the authors own feeling, working in London


"... his black hair was moist and twisted into confused half-curls. Firmly planted, he swung with a beautiful rhythm from the waist ...; his shirt, faded almost white, was torn just above the belt, and showed the muscles of his back playing like lights upon the white sand of a brook." 

D.H.Lawrence The White Peacock

----------


## Virgil

Nice quotes, Janine. I'm pooped. See you around tomorrow

----------


## jarradalexander

'yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, i have had my vision.'

----------


## Virgil

> 'yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, i have had my vision.'


I see jarra that you are reading Virgina Woolf's To The Lighthouse. That is a great line from a great novel.

----------


## brainstrain

I just finished A Tale of Two Cities. one of my all time favorite books (besides Inkheart, the third harry potter, and Peter and the Starcatchers). I am sure most of you have heard this, but it is worth repeating:

"It is a far, far better thing that i do, than i have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that i go to than i have ever known"

-Sydney Carton

also, one i like simply because of the elemental reference:

"Tell the wind and fire where to stop; not me!"

-Madame Defarge

I love this book. my older sister loved this book. my oldest sister is in africa so i don't know about her, but still. The last three paragraphs brought tears to my eyes

----------


## brainstrain

Also, from a book I read for English II earlier this year (A Separate Peace, also a book that I loved):

"All of them...at infinite cost to themselves constructed these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy"

"It wasn't until much later that i recognized sarcasm as the protest of those who are weak"

"It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were instead made by something ignorant in the human heart
~Gene
A Seperate Peace

----------


## Tasartir

Yep, I'm a newbie! Hi everyone! Well, I'm rereading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer for the third time now! I enjoy this book so much, it's so personal, Miller is amazing; it feels like you've stepped into the mind of this author while you're reading. Here's the quote:

"Suddenly it all died down. It was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he had on a cutaway suit. He arrested himself. A great mistake, in my humble opinion. Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT. Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest before going to bed."

----------


## DragonScale101

From the book I'm reading right now, The Little Country, by Charles de Lint- I searched back a while to find this particular quote.

Could it be true? If the Widow DID have a Small, hidden away in that old house of hers..
Wouldn't that be something?
And if it WAS true, did she herself have the nerve to sneak in and have a look at him?
Not likely.
She didn't have the nerve.
Nor would there really be a Small.
But what if there was?

----------


## Horatio

"THE CAB I HAD was a real old one that smelled like someone'd just tossed his cookies in it."

----------


## LPRox015

My favorite quote from Come Into The Garden Maud by Lord Alfred Tennyson is: 

"Half the night I waste in sighs,
Half in dreams I sorrow after 
The delight of early skies; 
In a wakeful doze I sorrow 
For the hand, the lips, the eyes, 
For the meeting of the morrow 
The delight of happy laughter, 
The delight of low replies."

----------


## slipperyyoke

This is just one of many that I love from _Walden_..

"The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."

----------


## grace86

From Crime and Punishment - I just loved this part:

*"Do you like street music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, startled and wondering.

"I love to hear singing to a street organ," said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject--"I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings--they must be damp--when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there's no wind--you know what I mean?--and the street lamps shine right through it...."

"I don't know...Excuse me..." muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikov's strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.*

That part just to me sums up Raskolnikov at this point of the novel, and it is morbidly funny as well.

----------


## ghideon

I am half way through Paradise Lost by Milton. He is an extraordinary writer and comes closer to Shakespare then most, which is saying a lot and not saying much since nobody comes too close to The Bard of Bards.

Satan is about to enter Eden and reek his vengance. But, as he looks down on his destination he ponders on his destiny and expresses profound distress for the first time in the poem.


"...Now conscience wakes despair
That slumbered , wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be"

"O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down."

----------


## jon1jt

> From Crime and Punishment - I just loved this part:
> 
> *"Do you like street music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, startled and wondering.
> 
> "I love to hear singing to a street organ," said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject--"I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings--they must be damp--when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there's no wind--you know what I mean?--and the street lamps shine right through it...."
> 
> "I don't know...Excuse me..." muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikov's strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.*
> 
> That part just to me sums up Raskolnikov at this point of the novel, and it is morbidly funny as well.


that's a great quote grace, wow, it doesn't get any better than that---it reminds me how much dostoyevsky was as much a poet as he was a prose writer. thanks!

----------


## genoveva

From Opal Whiteley's diary:

_"By the wood-shed is a brook. It goes singing on. Its joysong does sing in my heart... Between the ranch house and the house we live in is the singing creek where the willows grow. We have conversations. And there I do dabble my toes beside the willows. I feel the feels of gladness they do feel."_

----------


## Woland

The Merchant of Venice


PORTIA
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

----------


## grace86

> that's a great quote grace, wow, it doesn't get any better than that---it reminds me how much dostoyevsky was as much a poet as he was a prose writer. thanks!


Glad you liked it.  :Tongue:

----------


## euterpe

"Without lust we cannot fly." 
_Sappho's Leap_ by Erica Jong

----------


## Yelena

"Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush cracking wrack and shells. You are walking though it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short spaceof time though very short times of space..." - I love how J. Joyce played with words.

----------


## Scheherazade

> Summer of 1918--Never was life in the line more bitter and more full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when he blanched faces lie in the dirt, and the hands clutch at the one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment! 
> 
> Summer of 1918--Breath of hope that sweeps over the scorched fields, raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonizing terror of death, insensate question: Why? Why do they not make an end? And why do these rumours of an end fly about?


from _All Quiet on the Western Front_ by Remarque

----------


## Logos

*last time*
.......Last time you see someone and you don't know it will be the last time. And all that you know now, if you'd known then. But you didn't know, and now it's too late.

*rupture*
.......Something ruptured and began bleeding in my chest when I bent over my mother, when I saw my mother in that way. It will happen to you, in a way special to you. You will not anticipate it, you cannot prepare for it, and you cannot escape it. The bleeding will not cease for a long time.
-Joyce Carol Oates, _Missing Mom_
.
.

----------


## dramasnot6

Post any quote from the book you are currently reading! Also, say why you like it in terms of your personal appreciation and it's context in the book.
I'll start. 
"The really great men must have great sadness on earth"-Raskolnikov
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky 
This quote is said by the protagonist, who is remorseful from murdering a person without getting caught, in a debate about criminals with the fiance of his sister whom he does not like. I like it because it is not only powerful from that particular character, but poses the question "Do the means justify the end?" It also makes us question the actions of so many leaders we consider great, could one truly improve society through otherwise criminal actions? Even if most consider particular killing for the best, would that exonerate someone from their guilty conscience?

----------


## missjane

I read a Chinese version, so I translate it into English. Hope that you can understant what i mean.
"We can walk to the Heaven, but we can never get to it. 'Walk to' means there is somewhere we can go, while 'get to' give us an aimless world.'
I cannot reinterpretate it with beautiful words and correct meaning. i can use a metaphor to make it clear. when one is standing in the bank of a river, and the other side of the river is an ideal aim. so you can sail to it. but once you get it . there would be no "other side".  :Smile:  So hard to explain it.

----------


## Gallantry

from "The Varieties of Religious Experiences" by William James.

"Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most 'good' is not always most 'true', when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. The difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober is the classic instance in corroboration. If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience."

----------


## Riddleman

(sorry, misspelled the title :Wink: 

"The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place"
(Kavalier & Clay, p. 339)

Kavalier and Clay is a very poetic book about war, love and comic books. Sometimes I even think that the poetry is a bit over the top, I prefer it when it's about the two lead characters. Anyway, this quote does reflect the sens of doom that you feel throughout the book. It's light and funny, but you just know something's gonna go horribly, horribly wrong.....

----------


## bouquin

from _The Birthmark,_ a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

"... our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make."

----------


## Laindessiel

> From Crime and Punishment - I just loved this part:
> 
> "Do you like street music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, startled and wondering.
> 
> "I love to hear singing to a street organ," said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject--"I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings--they must be damp--when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there's no wind--you know what I mean?--and the street lamps shine right through it...."
> 
> "I don't know...Excuse me..." muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikov's strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.
> 
> That part just to me sums up Raskolnikov at this point of the novel, and it is morbidly funny as well.


Hehe, very nice, Grace.. I'd like to quote from the same book, which I'm curretly in the midway of...

*Facts are not everything; it is important to know how to interpret them. - Zosimoff

Crime is a protest against a badly-organized social state of things.- Razoumikhin

Moral license of authority to kill is even more terrible than official legal authority to the same effect. - Porphyrius Petrovitch

Suffering is part and parcel of extrensive intelligence and a fleeting heart. - Raskolnikoff

Reason is the only slave of passion, and I have only injured myself. - Arcadius Svidrigailov*

----------


## andave_ya

"Here lies an anachronism in the vague expectation of eternity."
Lord Peter Wimsey's epitaph he wrote for himself in _The Wimsey family_

Rather morbid, perhaps, but one that has stayed in my memory.

----------


## bouquin

from _The Diary of a Nobody_ by George and Weedon Grossmith:

If everybody had a nice, _un_interfering mother-in-law, such as I have, what a deal of happiness there would be in the world.

----------


## Adolescent09

> Hehe, very nice, Grace.. I'd like to quote from the same book, which I'm curretly in the midway of...
> 
> *Facts are not everything; it is important to know how to interpret them. - Zosimoff
> 
> Crime is a protest against a badly-organized social state of things.- Razoumikhin
> 
> Moral license of authority to kill is even more terrible than official legal authority to the same effect. - Porphyrius Petrovitch
> 
> Suffering is part and parcel of extrensive intelligence and a fleeting heart. - Raskolnikoff
> ...


I've been hacking my way through Crime and Punishment (finally finishing last week) as well and although the writing and quotes are memorable and the recurring theme is blatant and auspicious, the book gets tedious very quickly... But Pulcheria Alexandrovna line is intriguing: "God knows what concerns and plans you may have; or what ideas you are hatching; so its not for me to keep nudging your elbow.."

----------


## kathycf

I downloaded and read My Man Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse earlier this afternoon. I had read it years ago, but it certainly need re-reading. 



> She was rather like one of those
> innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your
> system so that, before you know what you're doing, you're starting out
> to reform the world by force if necessary and pausing on your way to
> tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at you like that,
> you will knock his head off.
> 
> 
> "Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy
> ...

----------


## bouquin

... and from his pain he knew he was not dead.

- from _The Old Man and the Sea_
by Ernest Hemingway

----------


## LauraJayne

This is from 'Eragon' by Christopher Paolini.




> "My mind is the only sanctuary that has not been stolen from me. Men have tried to breach it before, but I've learned to defend it vigorously, for I am only safe with my innermost thoughts."


I'm not quite sure why I like this quote, I just think it's ace :]
Then again, I also like the character that said it, Murtagh. Rather mysterious is he :]

x

----------


## Cien

> So he left her at the end of the garden, sitting in the sunlight on the ground before a hive, whence the bees buzzed like golden berries round her neck, along her bare arms and in her hair, without thought of stinging her.


-Abbe Mouret's Transgression

----------


## white camellia

'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'T is woman's whole existence;'

'Don Juan' by Lord George Gordon Byron

----------


## kemal

Yâ Rab belâ-yı aşk ile kıl âşinâ meni 
Bir dem belâ-yı aşkdan etme cüdâ meni 
Az eyleme inâyetüni ehl-i derdden 
Yani ki çoh belâlara kıl mübtelâ meni[11] 
Oh God, let me know the pain of love 
Do not for even a moment separate me from it 
Do not lessen your aid to the afflicted 
But rather, make lovesick me one among them 

fuzuli divan

----------


## Anthony Furze

"The black leafless trees gave no protection: they stood around like broken waterpipes, and the rain dripped off his dark hat and ran in streams down his black civil servants overcoat."

"There are men one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesnt share."

The incomparable Graham Greene in "The End of the Affair."

----------


## carina_gino20

"If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends." -Helen Burns in Jane Eyre

"Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings." - Prince Myshkin, The Idiot

----------


## bouquin

Receive what cheer you may:
The night is long that never finds the day.

- from _Macbeth_, Act IV, Scene iii

----------


## ngtotd_dtrt

> "He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes
> to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed." --FULLER.


_Middlemarch_ by George Eliot

It's a quote of a quote...guess that counts.  :Smile:

----------


## jab

I like this forum idea!

"It seems to me that when any belief leaves our minds, the loss is either voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary when the belief is false and we learn better, involuntary whenever the belief is true"

_The Republic_, Plato -- Plato's explanation of this comment is the beginning of a chain of logic that rips into the veil of free will and judgment in theistic worldviews. I had come to this conclusion, in different words, as a student in a Christian university. When last month I came across this statement, which forms the cornerstone of my own thought process, which I considered a very modern one inasmuch as it questions free will, I marveled, wondering whether Plato saw the theological implications of this statement or if he only saw its value pertaining to his purpose of training and evaluating Guardians for his Republic.

----------


## SFG75

I'm almost done with _Absurdistan_ by Gary Shtyengart, who is interestingly enough, the great-great grandson of Nikolai Gogol. I'm also reading _Sea Change_ by Robert B. Parker for some fast and easy reading.

----------


## Banville

"I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. It's a thing you don't want to go wrong over, because one false step and you're sunk. I mean, if you fool about too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it, and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out on you.
"Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can't make out what you're talking about."

P.G. Wodehouse, _Right Ho, Jeeves_

----------


## ejarg7

Hi, I'm new here...  :Smile:  Here's a quote:




> But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! 
> It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.


_The Picture of Dorian Gray_ by Oscar Wilde

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## Stieg

From _Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories_ by Algernon Blackwood.

Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting on the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife.

Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretremps; yet the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind.

- _Ancient Sorceries_ (the inspiration for Lewton's *The Cat People*)

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## Jakattak

Great Expectations

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## malwethien

"Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and universe, there is a reason." -Slartibartfast (Life, The Universe and Everything)

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## carina_gino20

"It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiat delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack."

- an eerie description of the guillotine from A Tale of two Cities by Charles Dickens

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## ezsbookpal

We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read, which seems only fitting, because it is how the books we are reading were written in the first place.

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## optimisticnad

'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' American Psycho. 

Should be the tag-line for this forum!

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## Lioness_Heart

"...if something real enters the imagination, it can seem almost as eerie as if some fantasy figure had suddenly loomed up in real life."

-Jostein Gaarder, _The Ringmaster's Daughter_

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## Sully1966

I love The Trial by Franz Kafka and what's weird is that I can't find any quotes in particular that stand out to me! It's just the whole book. Other than The Trial, I would say the Metamorphosis is another favorite.

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## jon1jt

"I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt." 
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

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## subterranean

> Confusion was the beginning of philosophy


_Buddha_ by Karen Armstrong.

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## brainstrain

"Go to thy cold bed and warm thee!"
-The taming of the Shrew

Ah, this book is hilarious!!!

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## Katie-Lou

*thinks* Well since i have to learn quotes for Frankenstein i won't look at the book to get one...

"Her hair was the brightest living gold"
Mary Shelly - Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) This quote is what Victor sees in his cousin Elizabeth

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## Adudaewen

"It was Yefrem's tongue that had been hit - his quick, ever-ready tongue, which he had never really noticed, but which had been so handy in his life. In fifty years he'd given it a lot of exercise. With it he'd talked his way into pay he'd never earned, sworn blind he'd done things when he hadn't, stood bail for things he didn't believe in, howled at the bosses and yelled insults at the workers. With it he'd piled filth on everything most dear and holy, reveling in his politics. He sang Volga songs. He lied to hundres of women scattered all over the place, that he wasn't married, that he had no children, that he'd be back in a week and they'd start building a house. "God rot your tongue!" one temporary mother-in-law had cursed him, but Yefrem's tongue had never let him down except when he was blind drunk."

Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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## bouquin

"... eat well, don't skimp. Look after yourself. Don't live out of the microwave. Use love and care."
-- from_THE LIGHT OF DAY_ by Graham Swift

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## Madhuri

"Things have a life their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "Its simply a matter of waking up their souls." -- One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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## Bii

"So it goes." - Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

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## bouquin

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep ...

-- from _The Tempest_ (Act IV, Scene 1)
by William Shakespeare

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## optimisticnad

'Do you know what a ****ing loser you are?' He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long, think knife, with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the hand up, instantly popping the retina. 

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

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## bazarov

We cannot predict consequences of great decisions. 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo

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## Ricochet

"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches."
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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## grace86

The Kreutzer Sonata 

You might not want to read this if you intend on reading it...I might spoil it.


"When people say that they do not remember what they do in a fit of fury, they talk nonsense. It is false. I remember everything."

and

"I well remember the horror of that concsiousness and I know vaguely that, having plunged in the dagger, I drew it out again immediately wishing to repair and arrest my action. She had straightened up and cried:

'Nurse, he has killed me!'"

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## Aiculík

"Dear me, dear me," say I. "These are not the times to be writing books, Don Eligio, even fool books like mine. Of literature I must begin to say what I have said of everything else: 'Curses on Copernicus!'"
"Oh, wait now," exclaims Don Eligio, the blood rushing to his face as he straightens up from his cramped position. (It is hot at noon time, and he has put on a broad-brimmed straw, for a bit of artificial shade.)
"What has Copernicus got to do with it?" 
"More than you realize, perhaps ... "

_The Late Mattia Pascal_  by Luigi Pirandello.

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## Asa Adams

> 'Do you know what a ****ing loser you are?' He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long, think knife, with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the hand up, instantly popping the retina. 
> 
> American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis


I thought that might have been your diary... :FRlol:  please don't detach my retinas, opti :Thumbs Up:   :Tongue:  

"and you, are you still here, tilting in this stranded ark, blind and seeing in the dark." Phyllis Web-_Leaning_

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## Janine

> 'Do you know what a ****ing loser you are?' He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long, think knife, with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the hand up, instantly popping the retina. 
> 
> American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis


I will remember not to watch that movie! or read the book. Oh yuk, almost worse than Lear when the eyes are pushed in, even more graphic here. Yes, as Asa said - don't detach my retina :Eek:

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## optimisticnad

> I thought that might have been your diary... please don't detach my retinas, opti  
> 
> "and you, are you still here, tilting in this stranded ark, blind and seeing in the dark." Phyllis Web-_Leaning_


Play nice and I won't have to! And you Janine!

Janine - that was nothing! Just a taster. You should read it, but its not for the faint hearted!

Oh and my diaries much much darker than that.  :Eek:  (we have no sinister smileys!)

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## bazarov

Why would world care for me when I don't care for him?

Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame

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## Asa Adams

> Why would world care for me when I don't care for him?
> 
> Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame


The most powerful line of this masterpiece.

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## bazarov

> The most powerful line of this masterpiece.


So you have notice it too? Very nice, Asa aka Orwell! :FRlol:  
That's only one of many many great quotes I've found in Hunchback. I agree, it really is a masterpiece! 
But I don't get it; why do they have to kill everybody??? This realism sometimes makes me really sad. :Bawling:

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## Pensive

_Even mothers who love you better than anyone ever will, don't always understand_*- The Railway Children*

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## amanda_isabel

to the most beautiful woman i know,
now that i'm alone again, nopthing is as it once was.
the sky is grayer, the ocean is more forbidding.
will you make it right?
the only way is to see me again.

i miss you.'

message in a bottle, by nicholas sparks

just finished it actually.

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## bouquin

... you are cursed when you realize true things, because then you can't act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore. (from _Vernon God Little_ by DBC Pierre, winner of The Man Booker Prize 2003).

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## bazarov

World is really strangely managed; something happy becomes unhappy if you're looking at it too long.
Gogol - Dead Souls

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## ngtotd_dtrt

some of my favorites from Middlemarch (Eliot)... the first in the list made me lol

===
Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become
like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry--the mother
too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy--

===

Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness."

===

"I mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done
something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it."

===

That evening he seemed to be talking widely for the sake of resisting any personal bearing.

===

1st Gent. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.
2d Gent. Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright The coming pest with border fortresses, 
Or catch your carp with subtle argument. All force is twain in one: cause is not cause
Unless effect be there; and action's self Must needs contain a passive. So command
Exists but with obedience." 

===

In marriage, the certainty, "She will never love me much," is easier to bear than the fear, "I shall love her no more." 

===

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## kathycf

I just downloaded The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge by Conan Doyle. I haven't read any Sherlock Holmes in ages, and this is one I haven't read before.  :Smile:  




> "I suppose, Watson, we must look upon you as a man of letters,"
> said he. "How do you define the word 'grotesque'?"
> 
> "Strange--remarkable," I suggested.
> 
> He shook his head at my definition.
> 
> "There is surely something more than that," said he; "some
> underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible. If you
> ...

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## cows

In the name of irony!

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know"

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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## kathycf

> In the name of irony!
> 
> "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know"
> 
> -Ralph Waldo Emerson


Great quote, although this is the quote the book you are reading thread. Which of Emerson's works are you currently reading?  :Smile:

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## cows

Yes, my appologies, it fit too well. 

I wrapped up Emerson's _Self-Relience_ yesterday. Here's a quote:

"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature."

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## malwethien

Well since I just finished reading Jane Eyre...I thought it only fitting that I read Wide Sargasso Sea next........I'm quite excited to begin!!  :Biggrin:

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## malwethien

oopss...sorry...i posted on the wrong thread!!!

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## malwethien

“I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.” - "Edward Rochester" (Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys)

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## JaneB

"twist the neck of the swan" as the Mexican poet said, is to write from my heart and not have anyone notice my tears 

Memories of My Melancholy Whores- Gabriel G. Marquez

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## bouquin

You _orchestrate_ happiness ... you work at it. You don't catch it as it hurls towards you like a football.
---- _She's Come Undone_ by Wally Lamb

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## zarathustra2007

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. "
Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

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## Guida

"It was day time because the daylight was coming into the room" 
my translation, from Uma casa na Escuridão by José Luís Peixoto

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## Scheherazade

> "How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."


_Slaughterhouse - 5_ by Vonnegut

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## Madhuri

[QUOTE=zarathustra2007;367090]"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. "
Friedrich Nietzsche

helotsoftware.co.uk/friedrich-nietzsche.htm

I like it  :Nod:

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## mazz

"The universe," he continued, "this universe that we know, began in almost absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex for about fifteen billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex than it is now. It is moving toward ....something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. We might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet, to that ultimate complexity. And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to is what I choose to call God. If you don't like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving towards it. 
........(para phrasing)
It was my turn to laugh.
"Okay,okay. And you want to say--let me guess--that everything that helps this along is good , right? And anything that goes in the other direction--your spin on it is that it's evil, na?"
Shantaram by Gregory Roberts.

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## smile

"Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

Animal Farm, finished the book- but it's recent as I am currently studying it. Fantastic little book- a definite must read, literary classic.

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## Stieg

_Falling Angel_:

_Seated there in a custom-made blue pin-stripe suit with a blood-red rosebud in his lapel was a man who might have been anywhere between forty-five and sixty. His hair was black and full, combed straight back on a high forehead, yet his square-cut goatee and pointed moustache were white as ermine. He was tanned and elegant; his eyes a distant, ethereal blue. A tiny, inverted golden star gleamed on his maroon silk necktie. "I'm Harry Angel," I said, as the maitre d' pulled out my chair. "A lawyer named Winesap said there was something you wanted to speak to me about."

"I like a man who's prompt," he said. "Drink?"

I ordered a double Manhattan, straight up; Cyphre tapped his glass with a manicured finger and said he'd have one more of the same. It was easy to imagine those pampered hands gripping a whip. Nero must have had such hands. And Jack the Ripper. It was the hand of emperors and assassins. Languid, yet lethal, the cruel, tapered fingers perfect instruments of evil._

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## Anne Boleyn

*" until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent"*

in the book the sentence was not positive at all, it was just one of the countless wicked words mrs Reed adressed to Jane, but being quite a short-tempered person, keeping this sentence in my mind is a great help!  :Smile:

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## whyhello

He went on till he came to the first milestone, which stood in the bank, half-way up a steep hill. He rested his basket on the top of the stone, placed his elbows on it, and gave way to a convulsive twitch, which was worse than a sob, because it was so hard and so dry. 
"If I had only got her with me--- if I only had!" he said. "Hard work would be nothing to me then! But that was not to be. I ---Cain---go alone as I deserve---an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!"

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## Countess

> Another quote from _The Name of the Rose_:



Please tell me who wrote the book! I'm a big romantic/lover!

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## bazarov

> Please tell me who wrote the book! I'm a big romantic/lover!


Umberto Eco.

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## Stieg

*From Slaughterhouse-Five*

_Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he said.

Derby asked him who all was on the list and Lazzaro said, "Just make ****ing sure you don't get on it. Just don't cross me, that's all." There was a silence, and then he added, "And don't cross my friends."

"You have friends?" Derby wanted to know.

"In the war?" said Lazzaro. "Yeah - I had a friend in the war. He's dead." So it goes.

"That's too bad." 

Lazzaro's eyes were twinkling again. "Yeah. He was my buddy on the boxcar. His name was Roland Weary. He died in my arms." Now he pointed to Billy with his one mobile hand. "He died on the account of this silly ****sucker here. So I promised him I'd have this silly ****sucker shot after the war."

Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to say. "Just forget about it, kid," he said. "Enjoy life while you can. Nothing's gonna happen maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell rings, have somebody else answer the door."_ 

*Alittle more:*

_Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed after the war, and rackets he was going to work, and women he was to make **** him, whether they wanted to or not. If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes._


*Furthermore from Slaughterhouse-Five, an account of English and American POWs:*

_Somewhere in there was a lecture on personal hygiene by the head Englishman, and then a free election. At least half the Americans went on snoozing through it all. The Englishman got up on the stage, and he rapped on the arm of the throne with a swagger stick, called, "Lads, lads, lads - can I have your attention, please?" And so on.

***

What the Englishman said about survival was this: "If you stop taking pride in your appearance, you will very soon die." He said that he had seen several men die in the following way: "They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is much to be said for it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go." So it goes._

*I have around 60 pages left, the book has been a hit and miss personally for me but does have keen high moments of anti-war sentiments and morality. And poignant pieces of the human soul too.*

_From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people's home he had put her in only a month before. She had caught pneumonia, and wasn't expected to live. She did live, though, for years after that.

Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.

"How . . . ?" she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn't have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her.

But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. "How what, Mother?" he prompted.

She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence:

"How did I get so old?"_

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## weepingforloman

This is a little something from C.S. Lewis's Perelandra. It's a good book if you haven't read it. Sort of a creepy imagining of a demon.

For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out-its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. ON the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness? (p. 123)

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## weepingforloman

Friedrich Nietzsche is a creepy guy. He advocated a couple of weird ideas: notably that all of humanity was progressing, or should be progressing toward the Ubermensch (over-man, or super man for the German illiterate), a man who "overcomes" (I don't know if it's intentional, but Nietzsche's continual use of "overcoming" echoes eerily of Revelation), and the idea that all values and morals are temporary, and that new morals must be created in each age. He also believed in "the will to rule," a sort of idea corrupted by the Nazis, but already a little too close to their ideas for comfort.

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## NotWoodhouse

"To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's a rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come." -Hamlet 

I'm not actually reading Hamlet at the moment but is my favorite quote.

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## RaatKiRanii

"Why do you despise yourself?"she asked, hardly knowing that she spoke, as though she were continuing without a break the earlier conversation.

He put down his book and observed her reflectively. He seemed to gather his thoughts from a remote distance. 

"Because I loved you."

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## snowangel

I just finished it too! 
I don't have my book in front of me but I loved the part where Townsend told Kitty that women often think men are more in love with them than they really are.

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## Stieg

From _The Stars My Destination_

_It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fifth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution ... that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the Solar System was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.

It is against this seething background of the twenty-fifth century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins._

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## grace86

A key phrase from Don Quixote:

"I know who I am," replied Don Quixote, "and I know, too, that I am quite capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and all the Nine Worthies as well, for my exploits are far greater than all the deeds they have done, all together and each by himself."

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## Quark

I started reading Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. My favorite part has been Hans Castorp's ascent. Mann relates the seperation Castorp feels from his old life during the climb. 

He says, "Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly".

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## Haven

*It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones*. 

THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT 

Five hours: New York jet lag and she wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. 

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

She knows, now absolutelythat Damiens theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in one some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her hereSouls cant move that quickly, and are left behind. That must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types Fetish:Footage:Forum, which Damien, determined to avoid contamination, will never bookmark. 

The front page opens, familiar as a friend's living room. A frame-grab from #48 serves as backdrop, dim and almost monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the sequences that generate comparisons with Tarkovsky. The cult of the footage is rife with subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut, Peckinpah . . . The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn. 

She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though; no new footage has surfaced. Nothing since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter. 

She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home from an Amtrak vacation, California, but when she opens his post she sees that he's only saying hello, literally. 

She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP. 

Hi Parkaboy. nt 

When she returns to the forum page, her post is there. 

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones. 

The Cube sighs softly and makes subliminal sounds with its drive, like a vintage sports car downshifting on a distant freeway. She tries a sip of tea substitute, but it's still too hot. A gray and indeterminate light is starting to suffuse the room in which she sits, revealing such Damieniana as has survived the recent remake.

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## Moira

"But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

Brave New World - A. Huxley

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## Haven

> "But I dont want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
> 
> Brave New World - A. Huxley


Well apart from Huxley [who was my major solace at boarding school along with Jean Paul Satre] try Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, you'll get all of the above and be begging for more. Know what I mean? Can't blame you for not reading my post by Wm. Gibson. Had to be done. Bit on the long side. Pls read this next little bit it is so true of how we now live: 

*It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.* 
Jet Lag: *her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her hereSouls cant move that quickly, and are left behind. That must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.*. If this catches you, have a read of my previous [just skim, know lengthy] thread, I think it sums up much of what we do. And the next generation will read it as Jane Ayre... :Smile:

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## Moira

> Well apart from Huxley [who was my major solace at boarding school along with Jean Paul Satre] try Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, you'll get all of the above and be begging for more. Know what I mean? Can't blame you for not reading my post by Wm. Gibson. Had to be done. Bit on the long side. Pls read this next little bit it is so true of how we now live: 
> 
> *It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.* 
> Jet Lag: *her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her hereSouls cant move that quickly, and are left behind. That must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.*. If this catches you, have a read of my previous [just skim, know lengthy] thread, I think it sums up much of what we do. And the next generation will read it as Jane Ayre...




Thank you Haven.
I googled a little bit and yes it does sound interesting.
 :Thumbs Up:

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## Orpheus

"It is better to be hurt by the truth than comforted by a lie" The Kite Runner

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## tudwell

> ...I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.


_The Wild Palms_ by William Faulkner.

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## Gracewings

He bowed gravely, jabbed his forefinger three times at the books and winked. But as he left the room he said gently, "I've allowed you to fire me, Mr Hale. Now you do one thing for me. Read the essay again and discover the true love your son holds for the missionaries. Only a mind steeped in true love can write irony. The others write satire." 

~from Hawaii The essay referred to was written by a descendant of the Hawaiian missionaries who tried to "reconstruct the _actual_ conditions under which [his] forebears struggled against the sea" in their long journey from Boston around Cape Horn and to Hawaii.

----------


## symphony

Thats right I'm finally reading The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I really liked the engaging tone of Hawking in this book, and the wit with which he made this book a quality-read.




> ...The concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. ...

----------


## CaptureLife

"Words! Mere words!
How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could
not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things,
and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.
Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?"

-The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I finally got around to reading

----------


## grace86

Some quotations I like from Don Quixote:

"For I would have you know, Sancho, that a mouth without molars is like a mill without a stone, and a tooth is more precious than a diamond."

Said by Don Quixote: "That is why I say that the sage I mentioned has put it into your thoughts and into your mouth to call me now The Knight of the Sad Countenance, a name which I intend to use from this day on; and to make it fit me better, I intend to have a very sad countenance painted on my shield when I have an opportunity....."

Said by Sancho: "'There's no need to waste time and money on painting a face,' said Sancho. 'Your worship has only to uncover your own and shot it to anyone who looks at you, and they'll call you The Knight of the Sad Countenance all right, without any picture or shield, and that's the truth.'"

----------


## Ahmed-Adel

*DUKE*
...
For women are as roses, whose fair flower
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
*VIOLA*
And so they are. Alas that they are so:
To die, when they to perfection grow.
Act II, Scene iv, Lines 36 - 39 => _Twelfth Night_  Shakespeare.

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## Scheherazade

"Your memory is a monster; _you_ forget - _it_ doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"

From _A Prayer for Owen Meany_ by John Irving

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## The Catcher

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.

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## grace86

Catcher...stick with Heart of Darkness. It is a tough read but nice to get through.

From The Ivory Child by Haggard

"We spoke but little during all this time. It was as though the silence of the wilderness had got hold of us and sealed our lips. Or perhaps each of us was occupied with his own thoughts. At any rate I know that for my part I seemed to live in a kind of dreamland, thinking of the past, reflecting much upon the innumberable problems of this passing show called life, but not paying much heed to the future. What did the future matter to me, who did not know whether I should have a share of it even for another month, or week, or day, surrounded as I was by the shadow of death? No, I troubled little as to any earthly future, although I admit that in this oasis of calm I reflected upon that state where past, present and future will all be one; also that those reflections, which were in their essence a kind of unshaped prayer, brought much calm to my spirit."

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## The Catcher

> Catcher...stick with Heart of Darkness. It is a tough read but nice to get through.


i just finished it today, but you are so right. its one of the most beautifully written...anything i have ever read. It was exhausting but worth it.  :Smile:

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## grace86

> i just finished it today, but you are so right. its one of the most beautifully written...anything i have ever read. It was exhausting but worth it.


See  :Smile:  I told ya! I think the fact that one has to have a certain amount of patience is what makes it so great to have read.

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## hockeychick8792

Hatsue ~ It is just like before when we lived up north!

Prisoner ~ No. Then there were no bars to separate us and no guard watching my every move.

(how romantic, the prisoner wrongly accused still cares for his wife and children)
(Snow Falling on Cedars)

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## Ahmed-Adel

_ All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything._
Jaques, _As You Like It_, Act II, Scene vii, Lines 139 – 166 –– Shakespeare

----------


## Stieg

From _Cat's Cradle_:

_While Miss Faust and I waited for an elevator to take us to the first floor, Miss Faust said she hoped the elevator that came would not be number five. Before I could ask her why this was a reasonable wish, number five arrived.

Its operator was a small and ancient Negro whose name was Lyman Enders Knowles. Knowles was insane, I'm almost sure - offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, "Yes, yes!" whenever he felt that he'd made a point.

"Hello, fellow anthropoids and lily pads and paddlewheels," he said to Miss Faust and me. "Yes, yes!"

"First floor, please," said Miss Faust coldly.

All Knowles had to do to close the door and get us to the first floor was to press a button, but he wasn't going to do that yet. He wasn't going to do it, maybe, for years.

"Man told me," He said, "that these here elevators was Mayan architecture. I never knew that till today. And I says to him, 'What's that make me - mayonnaise?' Yes, yes! And while he was thinking that over, I hit him with a question that straightened him up and made him think twice as hard! Yes, yes!"

"Could we please go down, Mr. Knowles?" begged Miss Faust.

"I said to him," said Knowles, " 'This here's a research laboratory. Re-search means look again, don't it? Means they're looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they're trying to find again? Who lost what? Yes, yes!"

"That's very interesting," sighed Miss Faust. "Now, could we go down?"

"Only way we can go is down," barked Knowles. "This here's the top. You ask me to go up and wouldn't be a thing I could do for you. Yes, yes!"

"So let's go down," said Miss Faust.

"Very soon now. This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?"

"Yes," I said. "Did you know him?"

"Intimately," he said. "You know what I said when he died?" 

"No."

"I said, 'Dr. Hoenikker - he ain't dead.'"

"Oh?" 

"Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!"

He punched a button, and down we went.

"Did you know the Hoenikker children?" I asked him.

"Babies full of rabies," he said. "Yes, yes!"_

----------


## The Catcher

> See  I told ya! I think the fact that one has to have a certain amount of patience is what makes it so great to have read.


amen to that. and considering i dont have a lot of patience this was definately an accomplishment for me lol...woo heart of darkness!  :Smile:

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## abner28

I am currently reading "iTV" by David Rose. It takes place in a television and the reader is flipping through the different channels as the main character is revealed. 2 favorite quotes (so far). 1 is when David, the main character, is reminded of his 1st love coming out of the shower:

"he was watching television and Zoe came out of the shower...David once wrote that civilization was a louse's fart in comparison to Zoe coming out of the shower...she had that sweet smelling shampoo...it was honey and mango...she was standing there wrapped in her big white towel her hair still wet...David told her terrorists could be raping his mother and he wouldn't give a rat's *** because of the way she looked..."

The second one is a joke: "The bible, the Roman Empire and the Oedipus Complex are walking into a bar. -Excuse me, says the Roman Empire, do you know how many commandments there are? - I have no idea, says the Oedipus Complex, but why don't you ask the bible?"

That's it for now, I highly recommend this book. It is the most original work I have read in ages.

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## Stieg

Another one of those moments where Vonnegut shines through his play of words and sense of irony. 

_Cat's Cradle:_


_"One time," said Castle, "when I was about fifteen, there was a mutiny near here on a Greek ship bound from Hong Kong to Havana with a load of wicker furniture. The mutineers got control of the ship, didn't know how to run her, and smashed her up on the rocks near "Papa" Monzano's castle. Everybody drowned but the rats. The rats and the wicker furniture came ashore."

That seemed to be the end of the story, but I couldn't be sure. "So?"

"So some people got free furniture, and some people got bubonic plague. At Father's hospital, we had fourteen hundred deaths inside ten days. Have you ever seen anyone die of bubonic plague?"

"That unhappiness has not been mine."

"The lymph glands in the groin and the armpits swell to the size of grapefruit."

"I can well believe it."

"After death, the body turns black-coals to Newcastle in the case of San Lorenzo. When the plague was having everything its own way, the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle looked like Auschwitz or Buchenwald. We had stacks of dead so deep and wide that a bulldozer actually stalled trying to shove them toward a common grave. Father worked without sleep for days, worked not only without sleep but without saving many lives, either." 

Castle's grisley tale was interrupted by the ringing of my telephone.

"My God," said Castle, "I didn't even know the telephones were connected yet."

I picked up the phone. "Hello?"_

----------


## Bebbin

*Currently reading*: _Demian_
*Author:* Herman Hesse

"Genuine communion," said Demian, "is a beautiful thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere is nothing of the kind. The real spirit will come from the knowledge that separate individuals have of on another and for a time it will transform the world. The community spirit at present is only a manifestation of the herd instinct. Men fly into each other's arms because they are afraid of each other--the owners are for themselves, the workers for themselves, the scholars for themselves! And why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! They all sense that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws--neither their religion nor their mortality is in any way suited to the needs of the present."

----------


## Pensive

Being partially off-topic (As this is the book which I just finished yesterday and am not reading now). But couldn't resist quoting it. 




> "What is she, after all?" he said to himself. "Here is the sea-coast morning, big and permanent and beautiful; there is she fretting, always unsatisfied, and temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she mean to me, after all? She represents something, like a bubble of foam represents the sea. But what is she? It's not her I care for." - Paul about Clara

----------


## Julian Koller

"Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on"

Samuel Beckett, _The Unnamable_

----------


## ngtotd_dtrt

-----------

"When I've made up my mind that I can't afford to buy a tempting dog, I take no notice of him, because if he took a strong fancy to me and looked lovingly at me, the struggle between arithmetic and inclination might become unpleasantly severe. I pique myself on my wisdom there, Arthur, and as an old fellow to whom wisdom had become cheap, I bestow it upon you."
============================================

But one of the lessons a woman most rarely learns is never to talk to an angry or a drunken man. 
============================================

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
============================================

"Why, yes, a man can't very well steal a bank-note unless the bank-note
lies within convenient reach; but he won't make us think him an honest
man because he begins to howl at the bank-note for falling in his way."

"But surely you don't think a man who struggles against a temptation
into which he falls at last as bad as the man who never struggles at all?"

"No, certainly; I pity him in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis. Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before--consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.
=============================================

"Ah, to be sure," said Mrs. Poyser, emphatically, "you make but a poor
trap to catch luck if you go and bait it wi' wickedness. 
=============================================

"Ah," said Mrs. Poyser, "an' it's poor work allays settin' the dead
above the livin'. We shall all on us be dead some time, I reckon--it 'ud
be better if folks 'ud make much on us beforehand, i'stid o' beginnin'
when we're gone. It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop."
=============================================

"the smell o' bread's sweet t' everybody but the baker. 
=============================================

" if we stay, it's for our own worldly interest, and it looks as if we'd put up with anything for the sake o' that. I know that's what they'll feel, and I can't help feeling a little of it myself. When folks have got an honourable independent spirit, they don't like to do anything that might make 'em seem base-minded."
=============================================

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it-- Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, & passing from pain into sympathy
=============================================

"Said? Nay, she'll say nothin'. It's on'y the men as have to wait till
folks say things afore they find 'em out."
=============================================

"I'm not one o' those as can see the cat i' the dairy an' wonder what she's come after."
=============================================

"Ah!" said Bartle sneeringly, "the women are quick enough-they're quick enough. They know the rights of a story before they hear it, and can tell a man what his thoughts are before he knows 'em himself."

"Like enough," said Mrs. Poyser, "for the men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun 'em, an' they can only catch 'em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man's getting's tongue ready an' when he outs wi' his speech at last, there's little broth to be made on't. It's your dead chicks take the longest hatchin'. Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made'em to match the men."
==============================================

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## Stieg

From _Nam-A-Rama_:

_When Gearheardt was seated next to him, a cold Lone Star in hand, the President put one arm around his shoulder and with his other arm made a sweeping motion past all of the dark-suited men arguing heatedly around the table.

"Know what these boys are figuring out, son?"

"I don't believe so, Mr President."

"Call me Larry Bob, son. Saves a lot of time when you're talking to me. All that President this and President that. Slows down a good confab. Just call me Larry Bob and I'll tell you when to stop." He squeezed Gearheardt's shoulder and withdrew his arm.

"These sons-a-*****es are figuring up how much it's gonna cost to run this damn Veetnam war deal. Some of the smartest boys in the U.S., right here at this table." He looked at him as if expecting a comment.

"I guess they're trying to calculate the budget for the war, Larry Bob. Is that right?"

"Yep, pretty close. These boys are trying to figure how much they can make off it. See that gray-haired feller with the yellow tie? Builds airports. Want to put military airfields in every Veetnam city that has more'n about two thousand people. Feller next to him is a concrete guy. Over there"-he pointed his long finger-"feller builds ships and is lobbying for us to give some battleships to Veetnam so we can have ourselves a sea battle like we ain't seen since the Big One. I think that little skinny feller is a tire man, but I ain't sure. And, oh yeah, you'll love this one, that fat tub-o'-lard is in the medical supply business. Lookit that possum-eatin' grin on his face. Already made himself a deal with the Rooskies so he can supply both sides."

"Is that legal, Larry Bob?" Gearheardt asked. 

"It is if I say so," the President replied.

"You suppose I could have another Lone Star, Larry Bob?"

"I reckon you can. Don't get too familiar with that 'Larry Bob' ****. You're still just a damn Marine." The President signaled by raising his hand, and one of his aides ran over with a beer. He began to whisper in the President's ear. Something about Congress and naked women in the Oval Office. The President excused himself and left the room, carrying one shoe.

Gearheardt sipped his beer and inspected his surroundings. There was no other furniture in the room except for the conference table surrounded by leather swivel chairs and simpler chairs, evidently for aides, behind them. The ceiling was low, there were no windows. Bright lighting hung over the conference table, leaving the edges of the room in near darkness. Each of the four walls had a door. Gearheardt guessed the room was about twenty-five feet square. He had expected to be in a "war room" with maps, electronic gizmos, telephones, televisions, and transparent boards with greased penciled aircraft filling every available space. This room was important without looking important, Gearheardt decided.

He tried to concentrate on the conversations going on at the table. They were of little interest to him, but he knew that he was in the presence of America's greatest businessmen. When he tuned in they were speaking in a language that he did not recognize.

"...short-term returns, my ***. I've got shareholders, you know. You build up faster than I can ramp up, and I'll have to charge the Army double or triple margins." The man, who sounded angry, actually smiled. He was the "tire" guy, Gearheardt remembered the President saying.

"Well, somebody needs to remind old Slickhair that the Street doesn't like surprises near year end. We need to manage the action on a quarterly basis, with the military placing their estimates when it allows my planning boys to get the best spin. Couldn't we allocate the Army on a quarterly basis? If they run out of ammunition near the end of the month, that's their problem. If they see there's going to be a surplus, surely a few big battles can be scheduled without a lot of hoopla. Just to burn up the excess. I would think a quota for each soldier, say 500 bullets a month he needs to shoot, wouldn't be unreasonable."

A skinny young guy that Gearheardt hadn't noticed before popped up near the end of the table. He was wearing heavy black-rim glasses and a gray suit. He waved a tablet of paper wildly.

"TEN YEARS," he yelled.

There was a great deal of consternation around the table.

"Ten years?" asked the medical supply king.

"Hell, I'll be living on a golf course in Florida in less than year," the concrete man mused to no one in particular.

"You gentlemen asked me to calculate how long the war had to last in order to get over the fifteen percent hurdle rate. It works out, on the average industry investment that you gave me, to a seventeen percent internal rate of return, again on average, if the war lasts ten years and the average soldier shoots three times his weight in bullets, the enemy shoots down an average of three helicopters and two fighters a day, and the soldiers generally ruin any equipment in their possession in, again on the average, ninety days."

The room was quiet while the businessmen doodled on pads that had been placed in front of them and conferred with aides, who now leaned in with earnest brows. The mumbling was subdued..._ 

More later(?)

----------


## Argyroneta

If only it could be one thing or the other: let him fall into a real fever or let his aching joints ease up.

from One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solhenitsyn

----------


## Scharphedin2

The last sentence on the page of text prefacing the beginning of Michael Ondaatje's new novel _Divisadero_ ~ "For I have taken myself away from who I was with them, and what I used to be. When my name was Anna."

I was reading on the train this morning, and felt very guilty, when I had to cut at page 37, but I could not very well miss my stop... So far, the book has all of the atmosphere of time and place, and poetic narrative cadence, of Ondaatje's previous novels. Taking the passage quoted above into consideration, the book so far appears to relate most closely to _The English Patient_.

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## Bartholomew

"She has claws all over her, you don't know how to get at her."
-P&#232;re Ubu, about M&#232;re Ubu

----------


## potus13

"Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?"

"The man without a purpose."

--Quite possibly my favorite quotation of Ayn Rand, taken from "Atlas Shrugged."

----------


## Stieg

The first three pages of _I, Zombie_:


_I remember how the bottom of the lake looked as I was drowning. The thought of being buried in the mud frightened me more than the sensation of suffocating. My throat was jammed shut so that no water could go down but I wasn't thinking about air. I could feel my heart slow where at first it had thundered and leaped against my ribs as if it were trying to escape what was happening to it. It couldn't and neither could I. After a while I relaxed and drifted with the cold current while silence came to put me to sleep.


Funny how that nightmare was with me when I woke up in the cargo bound for Land's End. I apologized to Fry for being on top of the pile, not that I could help the way they stacked us in the crate, but she was in a snit and wouldn't respond to me. 


Thoughts of death and life were in my mind, disturbing me, so I concentrated on the creaking and swaying cargo. My head felt strange, as if one piece of my brain were in a kind of trance while the other, smaller portion bellowed in terror and tried to attract attention. I didn't know which piece was me. Maybe both, maybe neither. 


The packs were implanted in our brains on Earth so that all the driver had to do was think what he wanted us to do. Quidler got us moving as soon as the ship landed in the cradle. The compound was short of workers and had been waiting for the four of us for .... I don't know, a long time, I guess.


Frye began squirming beneath me so I told her to take it easy and wait a minute until I rolled over and opened the lid. Inside of me the little piece of brain was doing a lot of yelling, as if it were scared and not sure of what was happening.


I shoved the lid too hard and broke the hinges. Frye came out behind me and I stuck out my hand and said "Hi." I knew the difference between someone it was okay to talk to and someone it wasn't. Frye, LeMay, and Zottinger were big dumb bunnies without much personality and not enough looks to make me feel self-conscious, so I felt right at ease with them, even when they ignored my greeting and didn't say anything back to me.


Land's End was a world of ice and snow, oases, aliens, factories, people who made me nervous and Peterkin.


"Move it, dum-dums!" said Quidler in a tone that said he was bored out of his mind. He gave me a particularly unfriendly stare as I walked down the ramp from the ship and I knew right away I wasn't going to get along with him. He was one of those insecure people who took an instant dislike to me because I was so big. About five-ten, he was contemptuous of tall women, especially tall and muscular women. Back on Earth at the institution for hopeless cases, an acquaintance told me men liked muscles on women so I took up body building. I found out later she was no friend. Men didn't like muscled women, big women, or freak women. They liked cute little icebergs like Bates.


We were taken to the ground in an elevator, then for a couple of hours we stood on a motorized sled that slid over miles of gray ice until finally we arrived at the compound.


No sooner did we march into our quarters, which was a room fifteen by fifteen, than Zottinger climbed on a chair, slung his belt up over a ceiling beam, buckled it around his neck and did a jig in midair.


Frye selected one of the lower bunks while LeMay chose the other lower, at about the time I was sitting down on it. I threw her out so she climbed onto the bed above me. There were just bare springs and naked matresses. Lying down, I looked up at the rusty metal and knew I could never endure such a view for very long. "Get out," I said. "I've changed my mind. I want that bunk you're on."


LeMay's head appeared over the side and she gave me a steady stare with her coaly eyes. 


"No lip," I said. "I want us to be friends but I'll never take lip from anybody ever again. I have to have the top bunk."


We traded places and by and by the place settled down. The only noise was the creaking of Zott's belt as he hung swaying from the rafter.


"They want to freeze me to death," I said. "Are you cold?" LeMay didn't answer so I kicked the wall until she did. No, she wasn't cold.


Quidler and Peterkin came down the hall, looked in and saw Zott, came in cursing and got him down from the rafter.


"When the stiffs go nuts then the whole place is nuts," said Quidler. "How do you account for this?"


"How should I know? This whole business is unnatural so why should any particular part of it seem weird?"


Quidler cut Zott's belt with a knife and allowed the body to drop to the floor. "Maybe he isn't really dead."


"You're always saying that! He's dead!"


"Sure, now that he's hanged himself. He's probably been up there for hours. I wonder why his pack didn't shut down?"


"I suppose the belt wasn't that tight around his neck and he was getting some air."


Hauling Frye onto the floor, Quidler laid Zott on her bunk.


"Why did you do that?" said Peterkin. "Do you think maybe he feels bad and should be made a little comfortable?"


"I'm messed up, okay? I admit it. I can't bear the thought that one of these days they're going to send us a live one."_

...

----------


## Dickens59

From _A History of the End of the World_ by Jonathan Kirsch. A book about the Book of Revelation. The first two sentences.

"I know the ending," goes the slogan on a license-plate frame that can be spotted here and there on the streets and highways of America. "God wins."

----------


## Dori

From "_Les Miserables_":

"What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and sepcially upon their desitinies, as what they do." (Page 11)

"Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfiguresthe wretched." (Page 122)

"No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child." (Page 329)

Those are a few. When I read more, I'll post them.

----------


## Stieg

"It's bulletproof, like my wife, and impregnable. _Not_ like my wife."

- _Demon Theory_

----------


## defeated

this is one of my favorite quotes from the estepary wolve by herman hesse

"at nights I dream of him sometimes, And deep down I feel disturbed, upset on his cause, by the mere existance of such a human being, even when I grew to have true affection for him"

----------


## Night Closet

Virtue itslef turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometime's by action dignified.

Frair Laurence , Romeo And Juliet, Act II,scene iii ,W.Shakespeare

----------


## bouquin

*... you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.*
from Ken Kesey's _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_

----------


## Gracewings

~from Tears of the Giraffe

_The maid glanced at her employer. "Oh, you have heard of me," she said. "I am glad that he speaks of me. I would not like to think that nobody speaks of me."

"No," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is better to be spoken of than not to be spoken of. Except sometimes, that is."_  :Tongue:

----------


## Pensive

From _A Wizard of Earthsea_ by Ursula K Le Guin:

"Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience." - Ogion

"Ged, have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?" - Ogion

----------


## detritus

"I know not yet what I shall sing;
I only know the song is there."

from The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader: _Recollections of Leo Tolstoy_, Maxim Gorky.

----------


## earthboar

Taken from chapter 4 of The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Architect Guy Francon is reading a review on his recent work in the August edition of _New Frontier_. His new understudy Peter Keating is watching him as he reads:




> Francon was smiling over the article, reading it again. Keating had never seen him so pleased; no drawing in the office, no work accomplished had ever made him as happy as these words from another man on a printed page to be read by other eyes.

----------


## bookfaerie

From Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

"What no man may know, nor woman tell."

----------


## caffeinecups

"Every one of us is losing something precious to us... Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive."

Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore

----------


## rich14285

Yeats and the Divine
Although Yeats is often characterised as a mystical or even spiritual writer he is little concerned with God or with spiritual experience of the divine. It would be wrong to say that he is an atheist, since he certainly believes in the divine ‘uncreated spirit’, however, he does not see himself as concerned with the divine. He puts God onto one side of his System, the primary, and distances Him from creation to such an extent that He is no longer relevant, at least to those of antithetical disposition. When God appears in the poetry, He is often addressed through a character such as Crazy Jane or Ribh, or in a mythifying phrase, such as the ‘Primum Mobile that fashioned us’ in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ or ‘the Great Questioner’ in ‘At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death’. Considering the mystical Christian philosopher Friedrich von H&#252;gel, Yeats admits much similarity of character, since he too accepts ‘the miracles of the saints’, but he cannot embrace the religion in which they lived and died:

I—though heart might find relief 
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief 
What seems most welcome in the tomb—play a predestined part. 
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. 
‘Vacillation’ VIII (VP 503)

Note: the above is part of a discussion of the book "A Vision" by Wm B Yeats.

----------


## aeroport

> "Every one of us is losing something precious to us... Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive."
> 
> Haruki Murakami
> Kafka on the Shore


Whoa! You're reading it too?

"I know. You've never killed anyone, and don't want to. But listen to me - there are tmes in life when those kinds of excuses don't cut it anymore." 

Haruki Murakami - _Kafka on the Shore_

----------


## bazarov

Not seeing people permits one to attribute to them all possible perfections.

A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.

Hugo Victor - Les Miserables

----------


## Tabula_Rasa

"Who is John Galt?"


(from Atlas Shrugged... by Ayn Rand... I'm on page 40... and this is what making me go on with it.. right now...)

----------


## caffeinecups

> Whoa! You're reading it too?


Yep, actually finished. It's a good read. I wanna try his other works.


"... Once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

Kafka on the Shore, still.  :Biggrin:

----------


## NikolaiI

"Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middle-class person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps. A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me. That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world's pain. I increased the world's guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation. The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace..."

_Wandering, Notes and Sketches,_
by Herman Hesse

----------


## vheissu

...He dug in a box and produced a board and a wooden box of men. Morris had never seen the chess-set befor but Honey stroked them as if greeting old friends. He set out the pieces tenderly.
'First the castles, one at each corner, like the legs of a cow. Then the knights - I love the knights; such proud horseheads, such flaring nostrils and, besides, they move obliwuely. Now the reverend gentlemen, next to the caballeros. And the Queen, the travelling lady; she's my favourite piece, she can go anywhere on the board - zip, zip. And a femme fatale, she is, whose kiss is death. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, here is the King. Vulnerable your King - in the last resort he has to hop off one by one, stage by stage, like Luis XIV escaping from Versailles. Morris shall be black and I white. There are our infantry, our pawns, all ready to go over the top. 
Let's begin'

From Shadow Dance - Angela Carter

----------


## Idril

"Nothing in life is so beautiful as the night before what is yet to be, the night and it's dew."

From _Independent People_ by Halldór Laxness. 

Man, I love this book!  :Thumbs Up:

----------


## genoveva

"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"
~Vladimir Nabokov, p. 34 _Lolita_

----------


## Tuesday

_"The Fascist guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and the unexploded shells were often reconditioned and fired back. There was said to be one old shell with a nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never exploding." 

(Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell)_


Seriously...this is like the prototype for Catch-22  :Biggrin:

----------


## Idril

"I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought."

_Malone Dies_ by Samuel Beckett

----------


## Bakiryu

> "*Nothing ever begins.
> There's no first moment; no single word or place in which this or any other story springs.
> The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
> thus, the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic becomes laughable, great lovers stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
> Nothing is fixed. in and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden among them is a filigree that will with time become a world"*



~I just found this whole paragraph so beautiful I copied it all. It's the first page of Weaveworld by Clive Barker.

----------


## Demian

"...For me a projection involves the two perceptions of sound and sight. I draw upon picture and sonic images in my memory circuits. Since I have read and summarized every book in print during my time, seen and summarized and cross-filed lectures, conversations between individuals, and been separately programmed to evaluate all formal human philosophies ... Dr. Pierce's request evokes a process of options, each of which I produce for myself in the form of images on a screen. It's as if I'm actually looking at a different future each time. And, since I have no bias, no preconception, the decision as to which is the most likely to happen is something I observe in a mechanically detached way."

-from Computerworld by A.E. Van Vogt

----------


## quasimodo1

..............."I will have such difficulty in becoming English again: here I am Arab in habits, and slip in talking from English to French and Arab unnoticing, yesterday I was 3 hours with an Orleannais, talking French, and he thought at the end I was a compatriot. You may be happy, now all my rough work is finished successfully, and my thesis is I THINK ASSURED. 'Irade' invaluable' ." (Last expression footnote...Lawrence carried {irades} or letters of protection from the Sultan obtained for him by Lord Curzon, then Chancellor of Oxford University.) quote from [Letters of T.E.Lawrence...Archaeology chapter] p77

----------


## quasimodo1

The Letters of T.E. Lawrence -To His Brother, Will Lawrence-June 8, 1911 

(from Carchemish)..................."I left my special subject (the Crusades) till the last two weeks 

of the last term. It was mosotly done while the examination was actually in progress in 

three all-night sittings: special subjects, if you know all but the facts are a matter of 

simple cram. I should certainly not recommend doing it (except to know your ground, if it is 

territorial) before the last term: or the term before the last, leaving the last for revision. 

If it is a matter like the Crusades two or three weeks are more than enough. Other subjects 

have more to read: but always read something that throws a side-light on the set 

authorities. ...You are going to too many lectures." [Archaeology]

----------


## Planet

I have just finished Do With Me What You Will by Joyce Carol Oates. it made me think on very different levels.
Here is a quote:



> Will we always be alone? Always live alone?
> Alone in our heads? - absolutely not.
> But there were so many years before I met you... I lived alone... I was always alone...
> I was alone too, honey, but look: now we relive it all, together. That's my theory about marriage... a long conversation where you relive your life, remembering things, maybe inventing a few things.
> Are we married, then?
> In our heads, why not?... you don't really live alone, because after you fall in love you retell it all, it's like a book two people create together, a novel... There's the need to talk, like making love. First you do one and then you do the other.

----------


## aeroport

From Melville's _White-Jacket_

I did not fancy this station at all; for it is well known on
shipboard that, in time of action, the quarter-deck is one of the
most dangerous posts of a man-of-war. The reason is, that the
officers of the highest rank are there stationed; and the enemy
have an ungentlemanly way of target-shooting at their buttons. If
we should chance to engage a ship, then, who could tell but some
bungling small-arm marks-man in the enemy's tops might put a
bullet through _me_ instead of the Commodore? If they hit _him_,
no doubt he would not feel it much, for he was used to that sort
of thing, and, indeed, had a bullet in him already. Whereas, _I_
was altogether unaccustomed to having blue pills playing round my
head in such an indiscriminate way. Besides, ours was a flag-
ship; and every one knows what a peculiarly dangerous predicament
the quarter-deck of Nelson's flag-ship was in at the battle of
Trafalgar; how the lofty tops of the enemy were full of soldiers,
peppering away at the English Admiral and his officers. Many a
poor sailor, at the guns of that quarter-deck, must have received
a bullet intended for some wearer of an epaulet.

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 65: To V.W. Richards, Dec. 10, 1913.........written at Carchemish "Dear Richard, It's quaint, isn't it, to begin again a correspondence which has lapsed for about a twelve-month? but, you know, I'm about as sick of myself and my affairs as one can well be, and it would be a consolation, if not exactly a comfort, to hear something of the sort from you. The fault was in ever coming out to this place, I think, because really ever since knowing it I have felt that (at least for the near future) to talk of settling down to live in a small way anywhere else was beating the air: and so gradually I slipped down, until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archaeologist. I fought very hard, at Oxford and after going down, to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down, now." from the letters of T.E. Lawrence (Archaeology chapter) ...author also known as Lawrence of Arabia (page 160)

----------


## karo

"We live in a time when no none wants to remember. We pretend we are where it starts. Look at the way we live - we build houses on cliffs, on fault lines, in the path of things, and when something happens, we don't learn history, we build it again, right on the same spot, bigger and better......Fallout accumulates. What we've got now is a blend of fact and fiction that we're agreeing to call reality."

----------


## quasimodo1

Letters of T.E.Lawrence, #114, To Mr. LLoyd George, Thursday, Sept. 19, 1919 Chapter: Dog Fight in Downing Street "Dear Mr. Lloyd George, I must confess to you that in my heart I always believed that in the end you would let the Arabs down: -so that now I find it quite difficult to know how to thank you. It concerns me personally, because I assured them during the campaigns that our promises held their face value, and backed them with my word, for what it was worth. Now in your agreement over Syria you have kept all our promises to them, and given them more than perhaps they ever deserved, and my relief at getting out of the affair with clean hands is very great." T.E. Lawrence p. 287

----------


## quasimodo1

February 16, 1920....letter 120, To Colonel S. F. Newcombe (chapter.........Dog Fight in Downing Street) Dear S.F., I owe you five letters! At first it wasn't worth while for you were reported to me in one week as at Aleppo, Azraak, Bagdad & Cairo: and then it became a habit. However the arrival of a smaller (I hope not cheaper) edition* is an occasion for a bookworm like myself. The "editio princeps" always has a special value: but in some cases (Shakespeare folios e.g.) new matter is embodied in the reprints, which give them a market reputation little, if any, less than original. At the same time collectors, and especially collectors of sentiment, always prefer the genuine article. However Mrs. Newcombe will regard the graft as the first. These things, as Solomon quoted from Adam's table-talk, depend on the point of view. Please give her my heartiest congratulations. *footnote, Colonel Newcombe's son, Stewart Lawrence Newcombe, had just been born. .....from The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett, with a forward by Captain B.H. Liddell Hart. copyright 1938

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 131, Mesopotamia, by Ex-Lieut-Colonel. T.E.Lawrence (Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford) (Mr. Lawrence, whose organization and direction of the Hedjaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war, has written this article at our request in order that the public may be fully informed of our Mesopotamian commitments.) "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Bagdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster." {This first paragraph might indicate how history repeats itself; the parallels to present day geo-politics are uncanny.} written in August of 1920

----------


## Xcape

Possession - A S Byatt





> And I listened to the increasing Quiet - and my horse went softly on the beech-mast - which was wet after rain - not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become - all at once, all wound in one - and I moved on indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remainded still. Now to me such moments are poetry.


The next I laughed out loud to this morning.




> 'Just at the moment, I'm trying celibacy, I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.'
> 'Oh, I did, for a month, back in the Fall. It was great at first. I got to be quite in love with myself, and then I thought I was unhealthily attached to me, and I should give myself up.'

----------


## quasimodo1

To Xcape: Your quote is a revelation; it sounds a little like Samuel Beckett. quasi

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 161: To Bernard Shaw, written August 17, 1922 from 14 Barton Street, Westminster........."Dear Mr. Shaw, You will be puzzled at my writing to you: but Cockerell some months ago took me round to you and introduced me, and you did not talk too formidably. I want to ask you two questions: the first one, 'Do you still read books?', doesn't require an answer. If you still go on reading I'm going to put the second question: if you don't, then please skip the two inside pages of this note and carry over to my signature at the end, and burn it all without replying. I hate letter-writing as much as I can, and so, probably, do you. My real wish is to ask if you will read, or try to read, a book which I have written. It's about the war, which will put you off, to start with, and there are technical unpleasantnesses about it. For instance it is very long: about 300,000 words I suspect, though I have not counted them. I have very little money and do not wish to publish it: however it had to be printed, so I got it done on a lino. press, in a newspaper office. That means it's beastly to look at, two columns on a quarto page, small newspaper type which hurts your eyes, and dozens of misprints, corrected roughly in ink: for only five copies exist, and I could not afford a proof. The punctuation is entirely the compositor's fancy: and he had an odd fancy, especially on Mondays." {This letter refers to T.E. Lawrence's book, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom".}

----------


## karo

I spoke of a memoir. Is this what this chronicle will prove to be? At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier...But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but 'recollection in tranquility'. To repent of a life of egoism? Not exactly, yet something of the sort. I never said this to the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre. They would never have stopped laughing.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin sooner?

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 350: To H.S. Ede (sent April 16, 1928) mailed from Karachi, Pakistan. From Chapter "The Years of Hide and Seek"............"I hope that the Gallery has now re-opened, and restored itself, as the best art entertainment in London. You may feel that it's hopelessly slow and cloggy: but I confess that Frys and Ivor Churchills and Courtaulds* do not sum up more than the yesterday of expression, in my backward regard. It makes me smile, sometimes, to think that all the varying pictures produced in 1928 will all date themselves, by some subtlety of likeness to 1928, in the eyes of 2028. Yet today we are hardly on speaking terms. Of pictures and sculpture I'm not talking, now, but of the writing gangs: the Joyces and the Kiplings, the Steins and Wells, the Forsters and the D.H. Lawrences: they will all date within 20 years, by some yet-imperceptible solidarity. There WILL be a common thread between T.S.Eliot and Alfred Noyes."..............{comment: T.E. Lawrence is now writing in a somewhat jaded fashion of these great writers, not dismissively but with respect and yet percieving their work as books that will be quickly dated. The writing of this day had such high standards without being aware of it, that Lawrence (after years of internal ambivalence concerning his own book "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom") was maybe too close to these writers to see the genious in their work. He seems to exclude from this general opinion, the writing of T.S. Eliot and Alfred Noyes.} *footnote: Roger Fry, the critic, Lord Ivor Churchill and Samuel Courtauld have made famous collections of works of art.

----------


## quasimodo1

A LOOM OF YEARS


In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea, 
In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree, 
Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears, 
I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years. 

The leaves of the winter wither and sink in the forest mould 
To colour the flowers of April with purple and white and gold: 
Light and scent and music die and are born again 
In the heart of a grey-haired woman who wakes in a world of pain. 

The hound, the fawn, and the hawk, and the doves that croon and coo, 
We are all one woof of the weaving and the one warp threads us through, 
One flying cloud on the shuttle that carries our hopes and fears 
As it goes thro the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years. 

The green uncrumpling fern and the rustling dewdrenched rose 
Pass with our hearts to the Silence where the wings of music close, 
Pass and pass to the Timeless that never a moment mars, 
Pass and pass to the Darkness that made the suns and stars. 

Has the soul gone out in the Darkness? Is the dust sealed from sight? 
Ah, hush, for the woof of the ages returns thro the warp of the night! 
Never that shuttle loses one thread of our hopes and fears, 
As it comes thro the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years. 

O, woven in one wide Loom thro the throbbing weft of the whole, 
One in spirit and flesh, one in body and soul, 
Tho the leaf were alone in its falling, the bird in its hour to die, 
The heart in its muffled anguish, the sea in its mournful cry, 

One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moon 
One with the granite mountains that melt into the noon 
One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres, 
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years. 

Alfred Noyes 

{This poet/writer mentioned with T.S.Eliot in previous post}

----------


## karo

Hey, quasimodo. Really enjoyed the Alfred Noyes poem. It reminded me of one a poet friend of mine sent me some time ago. Here it is:

My Law-Tieme Ranapiri

The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
will sweep on its course till the cycle is run
and when into chaos the system is hurled. 
Again shall the builder reshape a new world

Your path maybe clouded, uncertain your goal,
Move on- for your orbit is fixed to your soul.
And though it may lead into darkness of night
the torch of the builder shall give it new light.

You were - you will be - know this while you are
Your spirit has travelled both long and afar
It came from the source to the source it returns
The spark which was lighted eternally burns.

It slept in a jewel, it lept in a wave
It roamed in the forest, it rose from the grave,
It took on strange garbs for long aeons of years
And now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on,
it seeks a new form when the old one has gone
and the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
on the loom of the mind from the fibre of thought

As dew is drawn upwards, in rain to descend
your thoughts drift away and in destiny blend.
You cannot escape them, for petty or great,
or evil or noble they fashion your fate.

Somewhere on some planet sometime and somehow
your life will reflect your thoughts of your now.
My law is unerring, no blood can atone,
the structure you built you will live in alone

From cycle to cycle through time and through space
your lives with your longings will ever keep pace
And all that you ask for and all you desire
must come at your bidding as flame out of fire.

Once list' to that voice and all tumult is done-
your life is the life of the infinite one
In the hurrying race you are concious of pause
with love for the purpose and love for the cause.

You are your own devil you are your own god
You fashioned the paths your footsteps have trod.
And no one can save you from error or sin
untill you have harkened to the spirit within.

Attributed to a Maori

----------


## quasimodo1

To karo: "My Law" is a fabulous piece and it's similarity to the Alfred Noyes poem jumps right out. The attribution is unknown to me, unless "a Maori" or "Maori" is a pen name (the proper name is identical to a tribe somewhere in the New Zealand part of the world.) Don't suppose you know any more about the writer? Looking here for more information... http://www.path-ways.com/forums/arch....php/f-6.html: [Tieme Ranapiri... (enhance the mind)]

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 352: To E.M. Forster, April 16, 1928 ...from Karachi, Pakistan..... " Dear E.M.F., Forgive the pencil. I am inkless this afternoon. Don't cut me off from anything you may write in future, because you've sent me one supremely good thing.* I've liked everything you've written: some of it very much, some of it less: but I liked it all. I've tried to write, myself, and know that a man doesn't ever succeed in mating sound and sense and expectation. We land, always, other than we meant to land. That's presumably the fun as well as the vexation of writing. Your less-good work is very helpful to me, as an amateur of writing: for our minds are parallel enough for me to see your intention behind the expression, (or to flatter myself that I do partly and in some senses see it...oh shades of Henry James in this style of letter!) and just because it may not completely come off, so I may be able to see the works inside it more clearly. " {*footnote, an unpublished story}

----------


## Idril

From _The Charterhouse of Parma_ by Stendhal:




> "On May 15, 1796, a whole people became aware that all it had hitherto respected was supremely ridiculous, and, occasionally hateful to boot."

----------


## Circuvico

From Finnegans Wake
"O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now."

----------


## karo

Quasimodo, unfortunately I know nothing about the author of 'My Law', but I believe it was inspired by a New Zealand Maori.

----------


## karo

Quoting from letter from Lizzie to Charles:

If I came to see you like you want, just coming because you feel in the mood to see me, to sort of try my company again, I would fall straight back into the old madness....you didn't love me enough, and now - I don't believe in miracles....Charles, I've been in hell and I've come out of it and I don't want to go there again..... My love for you is quiet at last. I don't want it to become a roaring furnace.

----------


## ngtotd_dtrt

From Don Quixote (Ormsby translation)... just finished it, very enjoyable. 
Some of may fav quotes, mostly Sancho's proverbs. (Sorry for the quantity...collected them as I read.)


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

"To be grateful for benefits received is the part of persons of good birth,
and one of the sins most offensive to God is ingratitude; 
------------------------

And still more surprised were they when they perceived that what they heard
sung were the verses not of rustic shepherds, but of the polished wits of
the city; and so it proved, for the verses they heard were these:

What makes my quest of happiness seem vain? Disdain.
What bids me to abandon hope of ease? Jealousies.
What holds my heart in anguish of suspense? Absence.
If that be so, then for my grief Where shall I turn to seek relief,
When hope on every side lies slain By Absence, Jealousies, Disdain?

What the prime cause of all my woe doth prove? Love.
What at my glory ever looks askance? Chance.
Whence is permission to afflict me given? Heaven.
If that be so, I but await The stroke of a resistless fate,
Since, working for my woe, these three, Love, Chance and Heaven, in league I see.

What must I do to find a remedy? Die.
What is the lure for love when coy and strange? Change.
What, if all fail, will cure the heart of sadness? Madness.
If that be so, it is but folly To seek a cure for melancholy:
Ask where it lies; the answer saith In Change, in Madness, or in Death.
------------------------

for virtue is more persecuted by the wicked than loved by the good. 
------------------------

for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it, but by spending it, and not by spending as he pleases, but by knowing how to spend it well. The poor gentleman has no way of showing that he is a gentleman but by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, courteous, gentle-mannered, and kindly, not haughty, arrogant, or censorious, but above all by being charitable; 
------------------------

"Teresa says," replied Sancho, "that I should make sure with your
worship, and 'let papers speak and beards be still,' for 'he who binds
does not wrangle,' since one 'take' is better than two 'I'll give
thee's;' and I say a woman's advice is no great thing, and he who won't take it is a fool."
------------------------

for learning without virtue is a pearl on a dunghill. 
------------------------

"God will guide it better," said Sancho, "for God who gives the wound gives the salve; 
------------------------

No, faith; and between a woman's 'yes' and 'no' I wouldn't venture to put the point of a pin, for there would not be room for it; 
------------------------

As a grandmother of mine used to say, there are only two families in the world, the Haves and the Haven'ts; and she stuck to the Haves; and to this day, Senor Don Quixote, people would sooner feel the pulse of 'Have,' than of 'Know;' an *** covered with gold looks better than a
horse with a pack-saddle. 
------------------------

"He preaches well who lives well," said Sancho, "and I know no more theology than that."

"Nor needst thou," said Don Quixote, "but I cannot conceive or make out how it is that, the fear of God being the beginning of wisdom, thou, who art more afraid of a lizard than of him, knowest so much."
------------------------

that love has no greater enemy than hunger and constant want; for love is all gaiety, enjoyment, and happiness, especially when the lover is in the possession of the object of his love, and poverty and want are the declared enemies of all these; 
------------------------

"Remember, O prudent Basilio," added Don Quixote, "it was the opinion of a certain sage, I know not whom, that there was not more than one good woman in the whole world; and his advice was that each one should think and believe that this one good woman was his own wife, and in this way he would live happy. 
------------------------

a good woman does not win a good name merely by being good, but by letting it be seen that she is so, and open looseness and freedom do much more damage to a woman's honour than secret depravity. 
------------------------

at the worst the hypocrite who pretends to be good does less harm than the open sinner."
------------------------

My lady the duchess kisses thy hands a thousand times; do thou make a return with two thousand, for as my master says, nothing costs less or is cheaper than civility. 
------------------------

"Secondly, thou must keep in view what thou art, striving to know
thyself, the most difficult thing to know that the mind can imagine 
------------------------

pride thyself rather upon being one of lowly virtue than a lofty sinner.

"Remember, Sancho, if thou make virtue thy aim, and take a pride in doing
virtuous actions, thou wilt have no cause to envy those who have princely
and lordly ones, for blood is an inheritance, but virtue an acquisition,
and virtue has in itself alone a worth that blood does not possess.
------------------------

it is not well for those that administer governments to be long without their wives

[but choose wisely, for] all that may be gained by a wise governor may be lost and wasted by a boorish stupid wife.
------------------------

"Abuse not by word him whom thou hast to punish in deed, for the pain of punishment is enough for the unfortunate without the addition of thine objurgations.
------------------------

diligence is the mother of good fortune, and indolence, its opposite, never yet attained the object of an honest ambition.
------------------------
never engage in a dispute about families, at least in the way of comparing them one with another; for necessarily one of those compared will be better than the other, and thou wilt be hated by the one thou hast disparaged, and get nothing in any shape from the one thou hast exalted.
------------------------

'they'll come for wool and go back shorn;' 
------------------------

'whether the pitcher hits the stove, or the stove the pitcher, it's a bad business for the pitcher;' 
------------------------

'the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man in another's.'"
------------------------

and if there's any reason to think that because of my being a governor the devil will get hold of me, I'd rather go Sancho to heaven than governor to hell."
------------------------

for I place a barrier between my inclinations and my virtue, and I do not wish to break this rule through the generosity your highness is disposed to display towards me; 
------------------------

show thyself grateful to them, for ingratitude is the daughter of pride, and one of the greatest sins we know of; and he who is grateful to those who have been good to him shows that he will be so to God also who has bestowed and still bestows so many blessings upon him.
------------------------

keep a safe conscience and let them say what they like; for trying to stop slanderers' tongues is like trying to put gates to the open plain. 
------------------------

"for what thou hast to give to the mouse, give to the cat, and it will save thee all trouble."
------------------------

For the sense of being under an obligation to return benefits and favours received is a restraint that checks the independence of the spirit. Happy he, to whom heaven has given a piece of bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but heaven itself!"
------------------------

'For giving and keeping there's need of brains.'
------------------------

for pledges don't trouble a good payer."
------------------------

for jests that give pain are no jests, and no sport is worth anything if it hurts another. 
------------------------

Her companion then came up and said, "I should like to know, Head,
whether my husband loves me or not;" the answer given to her was, "Think
how he uses thee, and thou mayest guess;" and the married lady went off
saying, "That answer did not need a question; for of course the treatment
one receives shows the disposition of him from whom it is received."
------------------------

'a good hope is better than a bad holding
------------------------

They did not embrace each other [publicly], for where there is deep love there will never be overmuch boldness. 
------------------------

for, as sensible people hold, 'the fault of the *** must not be laid on the pack-saddle;' 
------------------------

'better a clear escape than good men's prayers.'
------------------------

"it is the part of brave hearts to be patient in adversity just as much as to be glad in prosperity
------------------------

"No, no, senor," replied Sancho; "it shall never be said of me, 'The money paid, the arms broken;' 
------------------------

----------


## Idril

From _The Rat_ by G&#252;nter Grass:




> And I saw the She-rat on top of the garbage mountain, proclaiming that man is no more. This, she cried out, is your heritage.

----------


## Riesa

> Then one arose in the host of Olwe, which was ever the hindmost on the road; Lenwe he was called. He forsook the westward march, and led away a numerous people, southwards down the great river, and they passed out of the knowledge of their kin until long years were past. Those were the Nandor; and they became a people apart, unlike their kin, save that they loved water, and dwelt most beside falls and running streams. Greater knowledge they had of living things, tree and herb, bird and beast, than all other Elves. In after years Denethor, son of Lenwe, turned again west at last, and led a part of that people over the mountains into Beleriand ere the rising of the Moon.



J.R.R Tolkien _The Silmarillion_

_The Rat_'s lookin' pretty good right 'bout now.  :Tongue:   :Wink:

----------


## Idril

> J.R.R Tolkien _The Silmarillion_
> 
> _The Rat_'s lookin' pretty good right 'bout now.


Okay, right there, Olwe really isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, nor are the Nandor all that important so feel free to wipe all that from your memory. That's the kind of stuff you can just skim over.  :Wink:

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 205: To Lionel Curtis, dated March 19, 1923. .........."There again, perhaps there's a solution to be found in multiple personality. It's my reason which condemns the book (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) and the revolt, and the new nationalities: because the only rational conclusion to human argument is pessimism such as Hardy's, a pessimism which is very much like the wintry heath, of bog and withered plants and stripped trees, about us. Our camp on its swelling in this desolation feels pustular, and we (all brown-bodied, with yellow spots down our front belly-line), must seem like the swarming germs of its fermentation. That's feeling, exterior-bred feeling, with reason harmonising it into a picture: but there's a deeper sense which remembers other landscapes, and the changes which summer will bring to this one: and to that sense nothing can be changeless: whereas the rational preference or advantage of pessimism is its finality, the eternity in which it ends: and if there isn't an eternity there cannot be a pessimism pure."

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 234: December 19, 1923. To Subscribers to 'Seven Pillars' postmarked at Clouds Hill, Moreton ...............[On May 31st, 1923, Bernard Shaw wrote a private memorandum to Mr. Baldwin, then Prime Minister, expressing his great concern at Lawrence's poverty. 'Clearly this is a bad case of Belisarius begging obols in an ungrateful country...the fact remains that he is serving as a private soldier for his daily bread: and however much his extraordinary character may be accountable for this, it strikes all who know about it as a scandal that should be put an end to by some means. They feel that the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery and are amazed to find that Lawrence is not in a position of a pensioned commanding officer in dignified private circumstances.' Bernard Shaw sent the letter to Hogarth, who corrected some of his statements, before sending it to the Prime Minister. Shaw did not rest content with a refusal but continued to press Mr. Baldwin, and afterwardes Mr. MacDonald, on the subject of a pension for Lawrence, but without success. From several of Lawrence's letters it would appear that he would have accepted a pension, had one been offered him, but I cannot think he would have been pleased that the sentence 'the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery' should be read by Mr. Baldwin]

----------


## NickAdams

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

"The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye)." 

"He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pic-
tured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was
no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world out-
side. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at is head,
wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat
hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one
fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the
man sleeping."

----------


## Woland

Canto 1 from Purgatorio

"Who are you that up the blind river have fled
the eternal prison?

Who has guided you, or what has been your
lantern, coming forth from the deep night that
makes the valley of Hell forever black?

Can the laws of the abyss be broken, then? or
has some new counsel been adopted in Heaven,
that although damned, you come to my cliffs?"

----------


## NickAdams

A humorous description:

"Age. Unimportant
Head. Small and round.
Eyes. Green.
Complexion. White.
Hair. Yellow.
Features. Mobile.
Neck. 13 3/4".
Upper arm. 11".
Forearm.9 1/2".
Wrist 6".
Bust. 34".
Waist. 27".
Hips, etc. 35".
Thigh. 21 3/4".
Knee. 13 3/4".
Calf. 13".
Ankle. 8 1/4".
Instep. Unimportant.
Height. 5'4".
Weight. 123 lbs.

She stormed away from the callbox, accompanied delightedly by her hips, etc."

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 376A: Confessionn of Faith, (a note to himself), it is not clear if he sent this to any of his correspondents. Not the conquest of the air, but our entry thither. We come. Our soiled overalls were the the livery of that sunrise. The soilings of our bodies in its sevice were prismatic with its light. Moody or broody. From ground to air. First we are not earthbound. In speed we hurl ourselves behond the body. Our bodies cannot scale the heavens except in a fume of petrol. The concentration of our bodies in entering a loop. Bones, blood, flesh all pressed inward together. Not the conquest of the air. Be plain, guts. In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body. We enter it. we come. Our bodies cannot scale heaven except in a fume of burnt petrol. As lords that are expected. Yet there is a silent joy in our arrival. Years and years. Long arpeggios of chafing wires. The concentration of one's body in entering a loop. { ......this "letter" is more a poetic memorandum to himself of a personal and spiritual nature (my comment). No footnote indicates otherwise.}

----------


## Zybahn

Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things.

As he went down the passage he encountered three steps before reaching the lift. The only purpose he could assign to them was that they warned him he was going to suffer.

----------


## karo

The next morning I woke to a sense of an utterly changed world, like on the first day of war. Joy, hope, came too, but fear first, and a black sense of confusion as if the deep logic of the universe had suddenly gone wrong.

----------


## aeroport

from _Moby-Dick_
(Old Fleece preaches to the sharks eating the whale carcass)

"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves."

----------


## quasimodo1

Letter 464: To W.B. Yeats, October 12, 1932, postmarked Mount Batten, Plymouth................."I am Irish, and it has been a chance to admit it publicly- but it touches me very deeply that you should think anything I have done or been to justify this honour. I'm afraid the truth-if people could look inside- would destroy the flattering picture of myself that has been put about. I knew you had seen my "Revolt", because you referred to it in your foreward to Gogarty's last Cuala selection: but I never expected this. It is very good of you, and touches me particularly, for I have been reading your work for years. ..............I set eyes on you once, in Oxford, many years ago, and wanted then to call the street to attention but fortunately did nothing. I hope that you are going further yet, in poetry, for our benefit."

----------


## River

From "Cry, The Beloved Country" by Alan Paton:

"Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the women and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart."

----------


## karo

What an excellent quote, river. It's moving, it's poetic. Wonderful!

----------


## River

> What an excellent quote, river. It's moving, it's poetic. Wonderful!


I'm glad you liked it. At about four parts in the novel thus-far he begins a paragraph with those four words. When he finally sat down after writing it and need to come up with a title, he and his editor (I think!) decided to both write down what they thought it should be called. They both wrote 'Cry, The Beloved Country' which really go to show how memorable the parts which started with those lines were.

----------


## quasimodo1

"The tendon of the day is strained,/The week is plunged into deep shadow/ Lighter than the skin of my face." .....from the poem, "Head of a Woman" by Medbh McGuckian

----------


## Duna

I´m Reading a Song of Ice and Fire III  :Yawnb:

----------


## thelastmelon

"Drygt en månad efter _Sommarkväll_ sjunger Cornelis åter kärleksvisor till Bim, men deras relation är på väg att rämna. Misshandeln på Castle Hotel är början till slutet, i ytterligare ett och ett halvt år ska de separera och återförenas."

You understood a lot of that, didn't you?  :Smile:  
I'll try to translate it for you:

"About a month after _Summernight_, Cornelis is once again singing love-songs to Bim, but their relationship is falling apart. The abuse on Castle Hotel is the beginning of the end, for another one and a half years they shall separate and reunite."

----------


## Idril

From _World Light_ by Halld&#243;r Laxness:

*But when a man is both spiritually and physically ill, one becomes a poet involuntarily; you simply can't help it.*

----------


## Harpo Marx

From _War and Peace_:

"Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory's object- it's practical application" (Book 9).

----------


## byquist

"The position of the humanities in our colleges and universities today is discouraging. They stand at the bottom of the hierarchy of authority and prestige. They lack the obvious value, and easy self-confidence, that the natural and social sciences possess ... The technical imperative that rules our lives imprisons the devout and their bemused critics alike ... At the very heart of our civilization, with its vast powers of control, there is an emptiness that science has created and cannot fulfill."

These quotes can't do justice to this persuasive, 2007 book by ex-Head of Yale Law School, not that he necessarily provides the accurate solution. But he covers a very wide swath of concerns: 

Education's End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of LIfe, by Anthony T. Kronman

----------


## Princess_1986

"The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 1

I love the George Orwell quote, Harpo. Some funky quotes on here. It's ironic that we read so many lines of text and there are very few which stick to our mind and spark inspiration.

----------


## HailStorm

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Pg 28 February 1808, the Stones of York

A great old church in the depths of winter is a discouraging place at the best of times; the cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in its stones and to seep out of them.

----------


## lilydantes

> The invention of printing is the greatest event of history. It is the Revolution's Mother. It is humanity's mode of expressing, totally renewed, it is man's thought shedding one form and arraying itself in another, the complete, definite casting off of the skin of that symbolic serpent which, since Adam, has stood for intelligence.


Victor Hugo, _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_, p. 168 (Modern Library)

Though I really loved this entire chapter ("This Will Kill That").

----------


## white camellia

There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition - for why should I not so term it? - served mainly to accelerate the increase itself.

Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

----------


## yewon

i've just read some of the quotes and they were really interesting! 
these days i'm reading "pride an prejudice" by jane austin for 4th time. 
here are some quotes i really like i this book:

(the very first sentence of this book)"It is a truth niversally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortun must be in want of a wife"

"pride realtes more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us."

"she was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet"

"you must learn some of my philosophy. think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure"

"i am the happiest creature in the world. perhaps othe people have said so before, but no one in such justice."

----------


## Dark Muse

It was acutally a while back ago sense I read 1984 but this secne just stayed with me, and I thought it was really powerful and wonderful. 

Tierelessely the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, signing and fallen silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more, and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living, or was merely a slave to twenty or thirty grandchildern. Julia had come acorss to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the strudy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characterstic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occured to him that the body of a woman of fifity, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardend, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid contourless body, like a block of granite and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

"She is beautiful" he murmured 

"She is a meter acorss the hips eaisly" said Julia

'That is her style of beauty" said Winston

----------


## Pensive

Stand upshot upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

- Cry The Beloved Country

----------


## mayneverhave

...standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for
hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a
tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the
buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than
when, just now, I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I
will turn a corner... but... the goal is in my heart...


- Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time) - Marcel Proust

----------


## Reepicheep

"I'll sit my four-hundred-pound *** on you and that is _not_ how you want to die."

Odd Thomas--Dean Koonz

----------


## Dori

"At that point, probably to satisfy himself that I was not a little girl, he glanced at me and blushed up to his ears. I did not understand. I stood before him staring in amazement. He got up, came towards me with an embarrassed air, was horribly confused, said something, seemed to be be apologising for something, perhaps for having only just noticed that I was such a big girl. At last I understood. I don't remember what happened to me then; I was overcome with confusion, lost my head, blushed even more crimson than Pokrovsky, hid my face in my hands and ran out of the room."

This is great example of Dostoevsky's budding talent (which is, of course, a passage from _Poor Folk_).

----------


## rmd

"Few people of attainments take easily to a plan of self improvement. Some discover very early their perfection cannot endure the insult. Others find their intellectual pleasure lies in the theory, not the practice. Only a few stubborn ones will blunder on, painfully, out of the luxuriant world of their pretentions into the desert of mortification and reward." 

From _Voss_ by Patrick White.

----------


## Viola Kent

The Name of the Rose is a wonderful book but you must have patience to read it. i took to do it.

I'm reading Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. If someone thinks I should stop reading, I'd apreciate the hands up.




> "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it" George Bernard Shaw

----------


## thescholar

I'm reading the Templar Legacy by Raymond Khoury. yeah, pop novels... im ashamed. anyways:
It has served us well, this myth of Christ.
-Pope Constantine (undisclosed number) :P

----------


## Dori

"I realized that besides the loss of freedom, besides the forced labor, there is another torture in prison life, almost more terrible than any other---that is, compulsary life in common. Life in common is to be found of course in other places, but there are men in prison whom not everyone would care to associate with and I am certain that every convict felt this torture, though of course in most cases unconsciously." (from _The House of the Dead_, pages 26--27)

"Swearing, 'wagging your tongue' is allowed. It is to some extent entertainment for all...And indeed the combatants swear at one another rather for entertainment, for the exercise of their linguistic powers...I could not imagine at first how they could abuse one another for pleasure, find in it amusement, pleasant exercise, enjoyment. But one must not forget their vanity. A connoisseur in abuse was respected. He was almost applauded like an actor." (from _The House of the Dead_, page 31)

I'll be back with more.

----------


## Janine

> The Name of the Rose is a wonderful book but you must have patience to read it. i took to do it.
> 
> I'm reading Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. If someone thinks I should stop reading, I'd apreciate the hands up.


*Viola Kent,* Hi and welcome to Lit Net; I see you are new, from your number of posts. I read "Under the Greenwood Tree", since I have read nearly all of Hardy's novels - one of my goals. I enjoyed it, but it might not be for everyone. It is a very pastoral example of Hardy's work; involves country musician's, correct? They travel from tavern to tavern performing; am I correct in remembering the book; doesn't it take place around Christmas? I think it is one of Hary's lighter novels, and is quite amusing, as well; it is not one of his major works. 
Have you read any other's of his? I do recall it being one of the last books of Hardy's, I have read. I think I only have one or two more to read to complete my novel reading of Hardy. I have heard that "The Trumpet Major" is another less noted work, but a very good novel; a friend highly recommended it to me, awhile back. I am never inclined to give up on a book, so I would keep reading; I don't think "UTGT" is that long a book, is it? If you have not read Hardy's most noted novels, you must. They are all good reads. My favorites were "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", "Mayor of Casterbridge", "The Woodlanders", "Jude the Obscure", and "Return of the Native". :Thumbs Up:

----------


## Dark Muse

The Viking, by Edison Marshall, pg 193

It was to meet my fate, as a warrior must, that I fought to stay alive. All day we were a merry band, and the thought came to me that every mother's son of us might be Fey. I'd never seen the sky so blue, and the sea so beautiful.

----------


## bluelightstar

"The only way to avoid the hand of God is to get into it." -- Sula, Toni Morrison

----------


## ashbash1990

See my Signature...

----------


## Dark Muse

_The Silver Wolf_ by Alice Borchardt, pg. 223

To the wolf there was no right or wrong, good or evil. There was only the pattern and she was part of the patter. To judge as the woman did was as foregin to her nature as were hope and despair.

To the wolf, the world was a tapestry of things given--sunrises scarlet, then gold; sunsets arrayed in purple shadow and bloody light; plains awash in tall grasses and mountains drifting against blue skies; and gray storms that rose, coalescing seemingly out of nothing in the upper air, then roaming at random, drenching the earth with rain. Spending thier fury in wild bursts of lightening

Life was part of the pattern and death, too, as were blood and pain. She herself had struggled uncountable times, sodden with suffering, down the long, dark path into starless night. But this, too was part of the pattern, part of the seamless tapestry of light and darkness whose only assurance was its own endless ever-changing repetition, always different, yet the same forever.

The pattern was beauty, somehow always in everlasting harmony with itself. Beautuy was! Ugiliness, saddnes, despair, were human judgements imposed by lesser frightend minds on the whole shinning spectrum of reality whose boundries the wolf couldn't even dimly comprehend.

----------


## Pensive

I just like the rhythm and the dramatic tone of this sentence:

"It is better to burn out than fade away." 

- Someone's suicide note from 'Or Not To Be' - A Collection of suicide notes

----------


## igalviola

Hello everybody.
I am a musician from Belgium and I entered this site because I am looking for some answers in the literature field.
Write now I am doing a research on the similarity in classical music form and classical literature form.
Actually my goal is to see if the sonata form in music (I am tlking about 18 century and the very begining of 19 , mostly beethoven) has a similarity in the roman or novel written in the same period .
So if someone could tell me if he knows some Novels or romans which are considered as "classic" in Literature and has a very wll structured smple and orgenised form i would really apriciate this.

----------


## Lioness_Heart

_"Heaven's net is wide but its mesh is fine_

from _Heaven's net is wide_ (obviously this is the basis of the title) by Lian Hearn.

It's a really beautiful book (all of hers are) and has lots of lovely quotes; this is the only one I could remember off the top of my head. Apparently it is an ancient proverb.

I really like it because it's really simple, but you can still read it in loads of different ways.

----------


## quasimodo1

To Dr. Lewis.

Gloucester, April 2.

DOCTOR,

THE pills are good for nothing; I might as well swallow snowballs to cool my reins. I have told you over and over, how hard I am to move; and at this time of day, I ought to know something of my own constitution. Why will you be so positive? Prithee send me another prescription. I am as lame and as much tortured in all my limbs as if I was broke upon the wheel: indeed, I am equally distressed in mind and body. As if I had not plagues enough of my own, those children of my sister are left me for a perpetual source of vexation; what business have people to get children to plague their neighbours? A ridiculous incident that happened yesterday to my niece Liddy, has disordered me in such a manner, that I expect to be laid up with another fit of the gout; perhaps, I may explain myself in my next. I shall set out to-morrow morning for the Hot Well at Bristol, where I am afraid I shall stay longer than I could wish. 
{re-read of an old and humourus favourite} quasimodo1

----------


## quasimodo1

To Sir Watkin Phillips, of Jesus college, Oxon.

Hot-well, April 18.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

I GIVE Mansel credit for his invention, in propagating the report that I had a quarrel with a mountebanks merry Andrew at Gloucester: but I have too much respect for every appendage of wit, to quarrel even with the lowest buffoonery; and therefore I hope Mansel and I shall always be good friends. I cannot, however, approve of his drowning my poor dog Ponto, on purpose to convert Ovids pleonasm into a punning epitaphdeerant quoque Littora Ponto; for, that he threw him into the Isis, when it was so high and impetuous, with no other view than to kill the fleas, is an excuse that will not hold water. But I leave poor Ponto to his fate, and hope Providence will take care to accommodate Mansel with a drier death.

As there is nothing that can be called company at the Well, I am here in a state of absolute rustication. This, however, gives me leisure to observe the singularities in my uncles character, which seems to have interested your curiosity. The truth is, his disposition and mine, which, like oil and vinegar, repelled one another at first, have now begun to mix by dint of being beat up together. I was once apt to believe him a complete Cynic; and that nothing but the necessity of his occasions could compel him to get within the pale of society. I am now of another opinion. I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation.

----------


## Dori

"She had been a comet in the sky, exciting to observe, quick to evaporate." (Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth, and History ~ Timothy Wilson-Smith)

----------


## quasimodo1

Chapter 4 


To Miss Willis, at Gloucester.

Bath, April 26.

MY DEAREST COMPANION,

THE pleasure I received from yours, which came to hand yesterday, is not to be expressed. Love and friendship are, without doubt, charming passions; which absence serves only to heighten and improve. Your kind present of the garnet bracelets, I shall keep as carefully as I preserve my own life; and I beg you will accept, in return, of my heart-housewife, with the tortoiseshell memorandum-book, as a trifling pledge of my unalterable affection.

Bath is to me a new world. All is gaiety, good-humour, and diversion. The eye is continually entertained with the splendour of dress and equipage; and the ear with the sound of coaches, chaises, chairs, and other carriages. The merry bells ring round, from morn till night. Then we are welcomed by the city- waits in our own lodgings: we have music in the Pump-room every morning, cotillons every fore-noon in the rooms, balls twice a week, and concerts every other night, besides private assemblies and parties without number. As soon as we were settled in lodgings, we were visited by the Master of the Ceremonies; a pretty little gentleman, so sweet, so fine, so civil, and polite, that in our country he might pass for the prince of Wales; then he talks so charmingly, both in verse and prose, that you would be delighted to hear him discourse, for you must know he is a great writer, and has got five tragedies ready for the stage. He did us the favour to dine with us, by my uncles invitation; and next day squired my aunt and me to every part of Bath; which, to be sure, is an earthly paradise. The Square, the Circus, and the Parades, put you in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and pictures; and the new buildings, such as Princes-row, Harlequins-row, Bladuds-row, and twenty other rows, look like so many enchanted castles, raised on hanging terraces.

{quasimodo1}

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## Etienne

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Don Quichotte de la démanche
It's part of a nightmare, horrible images...

"Steven was furious, he was holding the pig by it's ears and hitting it with his head. "Steven! Steven!" Abel was shouting. The pig was letting his ears be twisted and even seemed to enjoy it, corkscrewing it's tail and showing with grace his humid sexual organ."

My translation.

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## schadenfreude

"Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars"

Madame Bovery, Gustave Flaubert

----------


## crazefest456

"but I remember I preferred the soldier to a philosopher at the time; a preference which life has only confirmed. One was a man, and the other was either more--or less."
Youth - Joseph Conrad

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## quasimodo1

Before I was born, she had gone such lengths in the way of flirting with a recruiting officer, that her reputation was a little singed. She afterwards made advances to the curate of the parish, who dropped some distant hints about the next presentation to the living, which was in her brothers gift; but finding that was already promised to another, he flew off at a tangent; and Mrs. Tabby, in revenge, found means to deprive him of his cure. Her next lover was lieutenant of a man of war, a relation of the family, who did not understand the refinements of the passion, and expressed no aversion to grapple with cousin Tabby in the way of marriage; but before matters could be properly adjusted, he went out on a cruise, and was killed in an engagement with a French frigate. Our aunt, though baffled so often, did not yet despair. She laid all her snares for Dr. Lewis, who is the fidus Achates of my uncle. She even fell sick upon the occasion, and prevailed with Matt to interpose in her behalf with his friend; but the Doctor, being a shy ****, would not be caught with chaff, and flatly rejected the proposal: so that Mrs. Tabitha was content to exert her patience once more, after having endeavoured in vain to effect a rupture betwixt the two friends; and now she thinks proper to be very civil to Lewis, who is become necessary to her in the way of his profession.
{excerpt from Chapter 5}

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## sreeja

I start reading .I start to read Shakespearian drama.The first book i got for reading is Julius Caesar.Brutus is my favorite character.

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## white camellia

Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.

Things are naturally contrary, that is, cannot exist in the same object, insofar as one is capable of destroying the other.

Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.

The endeavor, wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.

from The Road to Inner Freedom
Baruch Spinoza
Edited and with an introduction by
Dagobert D. Runes

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 10 


To Dr. Lewis,

London, June 2.

YES, Doctor, I have seen the British Museum; which is a noble collection, and even stupendous, if we consider it was made by a private man, a physician, who was obliged to make his own fortune at the same time: but great as the collection is, it would appear more striking if it was arranged in one spacious saloon, instead of being divided into different apartments, which it does not entirely fill. I could wish the series of medals was connected, and the whole of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms completed, by adding to each, at the public expence, those articles that are wanting. It would likewise be a great improvement, with respect to the library, if the deficiences were made up, by purchasing all the books of character that are not to be found already in the collection. They might be classed in centuries, according to the dates of their publication, and catalogues printed of them and the manuscripts, for the information of those that want to consult, or compile from such authorities. I could also wish, for the honour of the nation, that there was a complete apparatus for a course of mathematics, mechanics, and experimental philosophy; and a good salary settled upon an able professor, who should give regular lectures on these subjects.

But this is all idle speculation, which will never be reduced to practice. Considering the temper of the times, it is a wonder to see any institution whatsoever established, for the benefit of the public. The spirit of party is risen to a kind of phrenzy, unknown to former ages, or rather degenerated to a total extinction of honesty and candour. You know I have observed, for some time, that the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation: every rancorous knave, every desperate incendiary, that can afford to spend half a crown or three shillings, may skulk behind the press of a newsmonger, and have a stab at the first character in the kingdom, without running the least hazard of detection or punishment.

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## protagonist

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing" - Macbeth

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## Dori

"Don't trust a horse in the field, or your wife in your house." ("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

"...the Ten Commandments seem to be used only in order to pass the priest's examination, and even then are not regarded as very important, not nearly so much as the rule for the use of _ut_* in conditional sentences." *In order that (Latin). ("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

"It is a marvelous thing how full of illusion is the notion that beauty is an advantage. A beautiful woman says all sorts of foolishness, you listen and you don't hear any foolishness, but what you hear seems to you wisdom itself. She says and does vulgar things, and to you it seems lovely. Even when she does not say stupid or vulgar things, but is simply beautiful, you are convinced that she is miraculously wise and moral." ("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 12 


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

London, June 10.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

IN my last, I mentioned my having spent an evening with a society of authors, who seemed to be jealous and afraid of one another. My uncle was not at all surprised to hear me say I was disappointed in their conversation. A man may be very entertaining and instructive upon paper (said he), and exceedingly dull in common discourse. I have observed, that those who shine most in private company, are but secondary stars in the constellation of genius. A small stock of ideas is more easily managed and sooner displayed, than a great quantity crowded together. There is very seldom and thing extraordinary in the appearance and address of a good writer; whereas a dull author generally distinguishes himself by some oddity or extravagance. For this reason, I fancy that an assembly of Grubs must be very diverting.

My curiosity being excited by this hint, I consulted my friend Dick Ivy, who undertook to gratify it the very next day, which was Sunday last. He carried me to dine with S, whom you and I have long known by his writings. He lives in the skirts of the town, and every Sunday his house is open to all unfortunate brothers of the quill, whom he treats with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calverts entire butt beer. He has fixed upon the first day of the week for the exercise of his hospitality, because some of his guests could not enjoy it on any other, for reasons that I need not explain. I was civilly received in a plain, yet decent habitation, which opened backwards into a very pleasant garden, kept in excellent order; and, indeed, I saw none of the outward signs of authorship, either in the house or the landlord, who is one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage, and above dependence. If there was nothing characteristic in the entertainer, the company made ample amends for his want of singularity.

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## AdoreroDio

He is a women. 

She had prayed for the moon to rise. But now she found thehalf-light of the incipient moon more terrifying then darkness.The world was now peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady gaze and then formed again in new shapes.

Yam stood for manliness and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.

In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.

- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 13 


To Sir Watkin Phillips, of Jesus college, Oxon.

London, June 10.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

THE moment I received your letter, I began to execute your commission. With the assistance of mine host at the Bull and Gate, I discovered the place to which your fugitive valet had retreated, and taxed him with his dishonesty. The fellow was in manifest confusion at sight of me, but he denied the charge with great confidence, till I told him, that if he would give up the watch, which was a family piece, he might keep the money and the clothes, and go to the devil his own way, at his leisure; but if he rejected this proposal, I would deliver him forthwith to the constable, whom I had provided for that purpose, and he would carry him before the justice without further delay. After some hesitation, he desired to speak with me in the next room, where he produced the watch, with all its appendages, and I have delivered it to our landlord, to be sent you by the first safe conveyance. So much for business.

I shall grow vain, upon your saying you find entertainment in my letters; barren, as they certainly are, of incident and importance, because your amusement must arise, not from the matter, but from the manner, which you know is all my own. Animated, therefore, by the approbation of a person, whose nice taste and consummate judgment I can no longer doubt, I will chearfully proceed with our memoirs. As it is determined we shall set out next week for Yorkshire, I went to-day in the forenoon with my uncle to see a carriage, belonging to a coach-maker in our neighbourhood. Turning down a narrow lane, behind Long-acre, we perceived a crowd of people standing at a door; which, it seems, opened into a kind of a methodist meeting, and were informed, that a footman was then holding forth to the congregation within. Curious to see this phaenomenon, we squeezed into the place with much difficulty; and who should this preacher be, but the identical Humphry Clinker. He had finished his sermon, and given out a psalm, the first stave of which he sung with peculiar graces. But if we were astonished to see Clinker in the pulpit, we were altogether confounded at finding all the females of our family among the audience. There was lady Griskin, Mrs. Tabitha Bramble, Mrs. Winifred Jenkins, my sister Liddy, and Mr. Barton, and all of them joined in the psalmody, with strong marks of devotion

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## Dori

"Ask an experienced coquette who has set herself the task of entrapping a man, which she would prefer to risk: being detected in falsehood, cruelty, even immortality, in the presence of the onewhom she is trying to entice, or to appear before him in a badly made or unbecomig gown,---and everytime she would choose the first."
("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 15 


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

Harrigate, June 23.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

THE very day after I wrote my last, Clinker was set at liberty. As Martin had foretold, the accuser was himself committed for a robbery, upon unquestionable evidence. He had been for some time in the snares of the thief-taking society; who, resenting his presumption in attempting to incroach upon their monopoly of impeachment, had him taken up and committed to Newgate, on the deposition of an accomplice, who has been admitted as evidence for the king. The postilion being upon record as an old offender, the chief justice made no scruple of admitting Clinker to bail, when he perused the affidavit of Mr. Mead, importing that the said Clinker was not the person that robbed him on Blackheath; and honest Humphry was discharged. When he came home, he expressed great eagerness to pay his respects to his master, and here his clocution failed him, but his silence was pathetic; he fell down at his feet, and embraced his knees, shedding a flood of tears, which my uncle did not see without emotion. He took snuff in some confusion; and, putting his hand in his pocket, gave him his blessing in something more substantial than words. Clinker (said he), I am so well convinced, both of your honesty and courage, that I am resolved to make you my life-guard-man on the highway.

He was accordingly provided with a case of pistols, and a carbine to be slung a-cross his shoulders; and every other preparation being made, we set out last Thursday, at seven in the morning; my uncle, with the three women in the coach; Humphry, well mounted on a black gelding bought for his use; myself a- horseback, attended by my new valet, Mr. Dutton, an exceeding coxcomb, fresh from his travels, whom I have taken upon trial. The fellow wears a solitaire, uses paint, and takes rappee with all the grimace of a French marquis. At present, however, he is in a riding-dress, jack-boots, leather breeches, a scarlet waistcoat with gold binding, a laced hat, a hanger, a French posting-whip in his hand, and his hair en queue.

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## lavendar1

Then they came upon it from a turn in the road and they stopped and stood with the salt wind blowing in their hair where theyd lowered the hoods of their coats to listen. Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of itHe looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. Im sorry its not blue, he said. Thats okay, said the boy. 

_The Road_, Cormac McCarthy

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 17 


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

Newcastle upon Tyne, July 10.

DEAR WATT,

WE made a precipitate retreat from Scarborough, owing to the excessive delicacy of our squire, who cannot bear the thoughts of being praetereuntium digito monstratus.

One morning while he was bathing in the sea, his man Clinker took it in his head that his master was in danger of drowning; and, in this conceit, plunging into the water, he lugged him out naked on the beach, and almost pulled off his ear in the operation. You may guess how this atchievement was relished by Mr. Bramble, who is impatient, irascible, and has the most extravagant ideas of decency and decorum in the oeconomy of his own person. In the first ebullition of his choler, he knocked Clinker down with his fist; but he afterwards made him amends for this outrage, and, in order to avoid the further notice of the people, among whom this incident had made him remarkable, he resolved to leave Scarborough next day.

We set out accordingly over the moors, by the way of Whitby, and began our journey betimes, in hopes of reaching Stockton that night; but in this hope we were disappointed. In the afternoon, crossing a deep gutter, made by a torrent, the coach was so hard strained, that one of the irons, which connect the frame, snapt, and the leather sling on the same side, cracked in the middle. The shock was so great, that my sister Liddy struck her head against Mrs. Tabithas nose with such violence that the blood flowed; and Win Jenkins was darted through a small window, in that part of the carriage next the horses, where she stuck like a bawd in the pillory, till she was released by the hand of Mr. Bramble. We were eight miles distant from any place where we could be supplied with chaises, and it was impossible to proceed with the coach, until the damage should be repaired. In this dilemma, we discovered a black-smiths forge on the edge of a small common, about half a mile from the scene of our disaster, and thither the postilions made shift to draw the carriage slowly, while the company walked a-foot; but we found the blacksmith had been dead some days; and his wife, who had been lately delivered, was deprived of her senses, under the care of a nurse, hired by the parish. We were exceedingly mortified at this disappointment, which, however, was surmounted by the help of Humphry Clinker, who is a surprising compound of genius and simplicity. Finding the tools of the defunct, together with some coals in the smithy, he unscrewed the damaged iron in a twinkling, and, kindling a fire, united the broken pieces with equal dexterity and dispatch. While he was at work upon this operation, the poor woman in the straw, struck with the well- known sound of the hammer and anvil, started up, and, notwithstanding all the nurses efforts, came running into the smithy, where, throwing her arms about Clinkers neck, Ah, Jacob! (cried she) how could you leave me in such a condition?

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 19 


To Dr. Lewis.

Edr. July 18.

DEAR LEWIS,

THAT part of Scotland contiguous to Berwick, nature seems to have intended as a barrier between two hostile nations It is a brown desert of considerable extent, that produces nothing but heath and fern; and what rendered it the more dreary when we passed, there was a thick fog that hindered us from seeing above twenty yards from the carriage. My sister began to make wry faces, and use her smelling-bottle; Liddy looked blank, and Mrs. Jenkins dejected; but in a few hours these clouds were dissipated; the sea appeared upon our right, and on the left the mountains retired a little, leaving an agreeable plain betwixt them and the beach; but, what surprised us all, this plain, to the extent of several miles, was covered with as fine wheat as ever I saw in the most fertile parts of South Britain. This plentiful crop is raised in the open field, without any inclosure, or other manure than the alga marina, or sea-weed, which abounds on this coast; a circumstance which shews that the soil and climate are favourable; but that agriculture in this country is not yet brought to that perfection which it has attained in England. Inclosures would not only keep the grounds warm, and the several fields distinct, but would also protect the crop from the high winds, which are so frequent in this part of the island.

----------


## Chicopac

Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in... some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention...

From _Gravity's Rainbow_ by Thomas Pynchon

----------


## Scheherazade

"We've just spent a Saturday morning - Kathleen, her mother and me - helping out at a Mile of Pennies in King's Square for the Junior NSPCC. I'm more than happy to help out - banking up good will and good deeds with the Lamb, for although He is meek and mild He is also (inexplicably) part of the trio that can consign you to the Inferno."

from _Behing the Scenes at the Museum_ by Kate Atkinson

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 22 


To Miss Laetitia Willis, at Gloucester.

Glasgow, Sept. 7.

MY DEAREST LETTY,

NEVER did poor prisoner long for deliverance, more than I have longed for an opportunity to disburthen my cares into your friendly bosom; and the occasion which now presents itself, is little less than miraculous. Honest Saunders Macawly, the travelling Scotchman, who goes every year to Wales, is now at Glasgow, buying goods, and coming to pay his respects to our family, has undertaken to deliver this letter into your own hand. We have been six weeks in Scotland, and seen the principal towns of the kingdom, where we have been treated with great civility. The people are very courteous; and the country being exceedingly romantic, suits my turn and inclinations. I contracted some friendships at Edinburgh, which is a large and lofty city, full of gay company; and, in particular, commenced an intimate correspondence with one miss Rtn, an amiable young lady of my own age, whose charms seemed to soften, and even to subdue the stubborn heart of my brother Jery; but he no sooner left the place than he relapsed into his former insensibility. I feel, however, that this indifference is not the family constitution. I never admitted but one idea of love, and that has taken such root in my heart, as to be equally proof against all the pulls of discretion, and the frosts of neglect.

----------


## quasimodo1

2. Humphry Clinker as satire 
“Satire”: 
Dr Johnson: “a poem [or prose] in which wickedness or folly is censured”; 

John Dryden: “the purpose of satire is the amendment of wickedness or folly”. 

An active MORAL purpose: presupposes the engagement of this text in the society around it, which it is trying to change, to reform, or at least to criticise. 

{comments on Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker from this link: http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/...hryclinker.htm



is ON a breakdown of traditional distinctions of rank or status in British society (in Bath and London) as a result of huge flow of wealth into Britain as a result of colonial trade and the wars that have been fought to expand it: 
All these absurdities arise from the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept all away, even the very dregs of the people. Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as the very focus of observation—Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation; usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder that their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity and presumption . . . [A]ll of them hurry here to Bath, because here, without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land. 

. . .[T]his will ever be the case, till the streams that swell this irresistible torrent of folly and extravagance, shall either be exhausted, or turned into other channels . . . 

(Matt Bramble, Bath, April 23) 

happens THROUGH a lack of any PHYSICAL gap between Bramble and the world around him. Bramble is physically CONTINUOUS with the society he criticises: he is in pain because it is decaying: he is sick because it is sick. 
I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation. 

(Jery, Bristol, April 18) 

I find my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally—that is to say, every thing that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in my body . . . 

(Bramble, London, June 14) 

is summed up in the image of the divisions between bodies dissolving in the waters of the spa at Bath, like the divisions between ranks dissolving in the “flood” of wealth from colonies: 
. . . [W]e know not what sores may be running into the water while we are bathing, and what sort of matter we may thus imbibe . . . 

I can't help suspecting, that there is, or may be, some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below . . . 

(Matt Bramble, Bath, April 28)

3. Matthew Bramble in Scotland 
Bramble enjoys physical recovery on arrival in Scotland. Why? 

To make Scotland look good. Generally represented here as a site of the traditional social hierarchies, of intact sentimental bonds between masters and servants, being eroded in the south. 
Scots unpopular in mid-eighteenth century England as a result of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, and an unpopular Scottish Prime Minister (the U.K.’s first), Lord Bute: Smollett ran a pro-Bute newspaper. Horace Walpole: “a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots.” 

See also proven loyalty to Britain of Lismahago in contrast to toleration of a known French spy by the fashionable set in London: “Britain”, a common British identity, emerging from shared project of Empire: a good effect of the empire discovered in contact with Scots, to counteract the bad effects encountered in England. 

But in Scotland the physical continuity of Bramble with the society around him also broken. 
In England, one of the aspects of modernity satirised is modern science’s calling into question the naturalness of our spontaneous responses to things: 

. . . that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose . . . In short, he used many learned arguments to persuade his audience out of their senses; and from stench made a transition to filth, which he affirmed was also a mistaken idea, in as much as objects so called, were no other than certain modifications of matter, consisting in the same principles that enter into the composition of all created essences, whatever they may be . . . 

(Jery, Bristol, April 18)

In this Smollett echoes Swift’s similar ridicule of trying to put nature in reverse: 

His employment from his first coming into the Academy was an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance from the Society of a vessel filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel. 

(Gulliver's Travels III.v) 

But in Edinburgh, attitudes to excrement are NOT used by Bramble in this way as a measure of the corruption of a society. The custom of emptying chamber-pots into the street at night he classes as 

—A practice to which I can by no means be reconciled; for notwithstanding all the care that is taken by their scavengers to remove this nuisance every morning by break of day, enough still remains to offend the eyes, as well as other organs of those whom use has not hardened against all delicacy of sensation. 

The inhabitants seem insensible to these impressions, and are apt to imagine the disgust that we avow is little better than affectation; but they ought to have some compassion for strangers, who have not been used to this kind of sufferance . . . 

(Bramble, Edinburgh, July 18)

That is, as part of a set of customs, specific to the society in which Bramble finds himself. He is no longer the satirist, continuous with the society around him: he has become instead a detached (sociological) observer of that society, understood as a coherent, knowable, whole, from which he stands apart. 

Bramble and Jery’s letters discuss both the distinct nature of Scottish Law, education, and religion, and the modernisation of Scotland with the rise of Glasgow as a commercial centre, agricultural improvement, industry, and colonisation. 


But also using the CATEGORIES of Enlightenment historiography to understand this change. E.g. Highland society is based 
on something prior to the feudal system, about which the writers of this age have made such a pother, as if it was a new discovery, like the Copernican system. Every peculiarity of policy, custom, and even temperament, is affectedly traced to this origin . . . The connection between the clans and their chiefs is, without all doubt, patriarchal. 

(Bramble, Sept 6.) 

The feudal system marks that stage of human history, prior to the commercial stage, when the economy is based on agriculture and the power on the ownership of land, with the whole culture and legal systems that go with this; the patriarchal system marks the stage before this, when production is based on herding animals (a pastoral economy). These categories, these distinctions, are straight out of the Scottish speculative historians such as Adam Ferguson and William Robertson.

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 25 


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. at Oxon.

Oct. 3.

DEAR KNIGHT,

I BELIEVE there is something mischievous in my disposition, for nothing diverts me so much as to see certain characters tormented with false terrors. We last night lodged at the house of sir Thomas Bullford, an old friend of my uncle, a jolly fellow, of moderate intellects, who, in spite of the gout, which hath lamed him, is resolved to be merry to the last; and mirth he has a particular knack in extracting from his guests, let their humour be never so caustic or refractory. Besides our company, there was in the house a fat- headed justice of the peace, called Frogmore, and a country practitioner in surgery, who seemed to be our landlords chief companion and confidant. We found the knight sitting on a couch, with his crutches by his side, and his feet supported on cushions; but he received us with a hearty welcome, and seemed greatly rejoiced at our arrival. After tea we were entertained with a sonata on the harpsichord by lady Bullford, who sung and played to admiration; but sir Thomas seemed to be a little asinine in the article of ears, though he affected to be in raptures, and begged his wife to favour us with an arietta of her own composing. This arietta, however, she no sooner began to perform, than he and the justice fell asleep; but the moment she ceased playing, the knight waked snorting, and exclaimed, O cara! what d ye think, gentlemen? Will you talk any more of your Pargolesi and your Corelli? At the same time, he thrust his tongue in one cheek, and leered with one eye at the doctor and me, who sat on his left hand. He concluded the pantomime with a loud laugh, which he could command at all times extempore. Notwithstanding his disorder, he did not do penance at supper, nor did he ever refuse his glass when the toast went round, but rather encouraged a quick circulation, both by precept and example.

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## quasimodo1

Chapter 26 


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

Oct. 4.

DEAR WATKIN,

I YESTERDAY met with an incident which I believe you will own to be very surprising. As I stood with Liddy at the window of the inn where we had lodged, who should pass by but Wilson a-horseback! I could not be mistaken in the person, for I had a full view of him as he advanced; I plainly perceived by my sisters confusion that she recognized him at the same time. I was equally astonished and incensed at his appearance, which I could not but interpret into an insult, or something worse. I ran out at the gate, and seeing him turn the corner of the street, I dispatched my servant to observe his motions, but the fellow was too late to bring me that satisfaction. He told me, however, that there was an inn, called the Red Lion, at that end of the town, where he supposed the horseman alighted, but that he would not inquire without further orders. I sent him back immediately to know what strangers were in the house, and he returned with a report that there was one Mr. Wilson lately arrived. In consequence of this information I charged him with a note directed to that gentlemen, desiring him to meet me in half an hour in a certain field at the towns end, with a case of pistols, in order to decide the difference which could not be determined at our last rencounter: but I did not think proper to subscribe the billet. My man assured me he had delivered it into his own hand; and, that having read it, he declared he would wait upon the gentleman at the place and time appointed.

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## AuntShecky

This comes from Ch. Forty-Six of _The Way of All Flesh_ by Samuel Butler (1903) in which Ernest has evoked
a bit of a "sensation" at the University over an essay he'd
written with the angle that Greek dramatists were under-rated.

The speaker is Overton, the book's narrator:

"[T]his was his one idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not another thing left to write about. . ."

". . .He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him someday, and that the development of this would in turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket, but it took him a long time to find out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities.

"Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is parallelled in the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends or an action or indeed anything, there being a unity
in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought that ideas came into clever people's heads by a kind of spontaneous germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the course of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he well knew he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he thought it was."

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## Dark Muse

From _World Enough and Time_ by Robert Warren, Ch. 9, pg. 323

"Ah, that is the thing to fear, not the lie the world tells as a lie, but the lie the world holds as its truth."

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## quasimodo1

This memoir by Gunter Grass is a revelation; the writer of "The Tin Drum" speaks of his life in Germany both before and after the war. From the first chapter entitled "Skins Beneath the Skin"..."Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way. When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disquised."

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## Janine

Interesting quote *Quasimodo*; so true it is.

*Dark Muse,* that is good quote from you, also.

Afraid that is as far back as I read tonight...too tired to read them all.

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## subterranean

> He is a women. 
> 
> She had prayed for the moon to rise. But now she found thehalf-light of the incipient moon more terrifying then darkness.The world was now peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady gaze and then formed again in new shapes.
> 
> Yam stood for manliness and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.
> 
> In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.
> 
> - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe



I have read only until the part where Okonwo decided to follow the tribe's command and killed the boy (Ikemefuna).

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## HunterBrown1968

"Envy and Arrogance and Avarice, Are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled." (Canto VI, lines 74-75) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation.

"Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire." (Canto IV, lines 41-42) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation.

"He (Adam) learned Spanish words for food and pleasure, and he learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it. He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself. And by now he was an expert tramp, using humility as a working principle." (Chapter 7 from "East of Eden")

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## genoveva

"The books are junk, the paint peels, the cellar stinks, the teachers call you nigger, and the windows fall in on your heads." p. 33
Jonathan Kozol, _Death At An Early Age_

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## quasimodo1

From chapter 2, "Encapsulations"....."One word evokes the other: Schulden, Schuld, debts, guilt. Two words so close and so deeply rooted in the soil of the German language. But while debts can be mitigated by installment payments, long-term as they may be (witness my mother's clientele), guilt--whether proven, presumed, or consealed--remains, ticking on and on, and holds its place, even on journeys to nowwhere".

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## quasimodo1

from "Encapsulations", ..."But because so many kept silent, the temptation to great to discount one's own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself all but abstractly, in the third person: he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent...and what's more, silent within, where there is plenty of room for hide and seek."

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## Beijing-Doll

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

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## jen182

^like that quote^

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."

J.D. Salinger-Franny and Zooey

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## loggats

She completely avoided the trap of sentimentality in writing about animals. Though her pets were obviously close favourites, she recorded their deaths or misadventures coolly in her journal. And she seems to have had a special affection for the memory of her great-grandfather Abraham Crompton, who used to pick snails off an ivy-covered wall in his garden and eat them alive. 

Beatrix Potter: the ironist in arcadia

secret gardens,humphrey carpenter

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## Sara Almqvist

"En algún lugar de la mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..."

Now that I have nothing to do (No school!), I decided to read "El Quijote" (by Miguel de Cervantes), and that lovely quote is the beginning of the novel...and, I guess, one of my favourite beginnings ever!

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## quasimodo1

Gunter Grass, quote from "Peeling the Onion" from Chapter two...Encapsulations.....speaking of himself much younger..."I observe him reading. It's the only thing he can do for any length of time." ....."Books have always been his gap in the fence, his entry into other worlds." from Chapter 2, Encapsulations

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## karo

"Ever wonder,"'Switters asked, "why people get so worked up over whale hunts, yet object very little to the killing of cattle? It's because whales are rare and intelligent and untamed, whereas cows are commonplace and stupid and domesticated." Presumably, he was referring to the manner in which the powers that be, with the greedy compliance of the media and the eager assistance of evangelicals, were busily bovanizing humanity, seeking to produce a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and beyond basic job skills, not too smart; two legged cows that could be easily milked and, when necessary, guiltlessly slaughtered. This was his meaning, however, he did not belabor her with it.

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## DavidM

Tao Te Ching

"When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can find their own way" (Lao Tzu Chapter 65). 

The Souls of Black Folk, re-reading this one. 

"they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world" (W.E.B. Du Bois 104).

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## dongbei

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

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## karo

.There are certain channels of communication that operate outside the frequencies of the most prying investigators. A hundred blackbirds will evacuate a tree precisely at the same second  without a discernible signal of any kind. A variety of orchid, lacking nectar as an enticement but needing to be pollinated, attracts male bees by emitting odours like that of a female bee. A wasp will bore for an hour into the hard wood of a tree at the exact spot where hides a tiny grub in whose body she will lay her eggs: there is no outward sign that the grub is there, yet the wasp never misses. At the disposal of the lower animals are invisible clocks and computers about which science can only speculate. Similarly, scientists have discovered and recorded laws to which electricity, gravity and magnetism adhere  but they have practically no understanding of what these forces are or why. It would seem that there exists in the space-time grid a system of natural order, a mathematics of energy whose numbers are even more of a riddle to us than their progressions. It is this arithmetic of consciousness that more simple men call the supernatural. The mystery of migrating butterflies, the mystery of gravity and dreams are but operating arms of the Great Mystery, the perpetuation of which sustains us all. If that declaration has a taste of corn about it, so be it. Language grows a bit sticky in areas such as these. However, concerns of this nature can be quite practical and concrete, as we shall see. It is in the realm of High Mystery that certain men and women are destined to act out their lives.

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## quasimodo1

Gunter Grass, part one, "Encapsulations" ....."Still, the case contained Dostoevsky's 'Possessed', Wilhelm Raabe's 'Sparrow Street Chronicle', Schiller's 'Collected Poems' and Selma Lagerlof's 'Gosta Berling'. Something by Sudermann stood side by side with Hamsun's 'Hunger', Keller's 'Green Henry' next to his 'Holiday from Myself'. Fallada's 'Little Man' and 'What Now' was between Raabe's 'Hunger Pastor' and Storm's 'The White Horseman'. Dahn's 'Battle for Rome' was most likely the support for the illustrated volume with the title 'Rasputin and Women', which I later gave to a certain character to read as an antidote to Goethe's 'Elective Affinities'..."

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## bouquin

Maybe we remember, anyway, by selectively forgetting, and vice versa ... Then again, some of the things you try most to forget come back and ambush you, often in your calmest moments.

- from *The Bird Artist* by Howard Norman.

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## ben.!

'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.' - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

The opening is just so awesome. :-D

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## quasimodo1

" ....That is an issue neither onion nor amber cares about. They want accurate information about other things, about what else has been encapsulated, about what has been swallowed in shame, about secrets in varying disguise, about nits nesting in sackhair. Eloquently avoided words. Slivers of thought. Things that hurt. Even now..."

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## Dori

*"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won't take it."*
_From_ Doctor Zhivago_ by Boris Pasternak
(Part I, Chapter 1, Section 5)_

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## quasimodo1

from Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass........................."Soon thereafter I witnessed an event that should have made the downfall of the German Reich evident--the organized chaos of defeat moving slowly, then with dispatch, and finally at break-net speed. Was I able to recognize what things ere coming to? Did I realize what was going on with us, with me? Did the never-endinng activity, the all-consuming need for a ladle of soup and a crust of bread, along with fears of various magnitudes, leave any room for insight into the general situation? Was the seventeen year old at all conscious of the beginning of the end, of the gradually increasing dimensions of what was later called the collapse?"................from chapter III

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## Tersely

> I can't describe to you how chapfallen and angry my cousin looked. She sniffed once or twice, and then said, rather bitterly, in a subdued tone:- "Well, now; I hope you are pleased?"


-Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

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## bouquin

_... the mind can keep its freshness to the last, and ... it is only fools that are overbored. There was a way of never being bored, and the wise man's duty was to find it out... one grows tired of one's self sooner than of anything else in the world... One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently occupied; one was always idle when one's occupation had not a high aim. One was idle, therefore, when one was working simply for one's self... Ennui was at the end of everything that did not multiply our relations with life._

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## Hira

_
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

-- Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death - the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without - cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?_

~~ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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## knightss

"The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerge all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is the flood."

-Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Pantheon Books, 182)

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## 1n50mn14

"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicillian when death is on the line.'"

-The Princess Bride, William Godman/S.Morgenstern (Del Ray, 156)

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## Dori

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion! _from_ Dr. Zhivago _by Boris Pasternak (Part II, Chapter 5, Section 5)_

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## quasimodo1

Gunter Grass from "Peeling the Onion" Chapter 5, "Guests at Table" ..."Not a single one of the ten thousand starved to death, of course, but the want of food gave us an ascetic appearance. Even those not so inclined underwent a spiritual transformation. My new spiritual look must have suited me: my enlarged eyes saw more than was before them, choirs rejoicing beyond the senses. And since hunger brought home the maxim 'Man does not live by bread alone' not only as camp cynicism but also as consolatory bromide, many of us felt an increased desire for spiritual food"

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## Igetanotion

I actually just finished this book a few days ago, but there were two things that I thought were very much worth quoting. (I underline a lot in my books..  :Goof:  )

They are both from Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal"

"The proud husband told the reporter ' My wife and I have a saying that you can tell the health of a marriage by the number of teeth marks on your tongue.' I wonder, when I'm around such people, What are they being punished for? Thirty-four years. One stands in awe of the masochistic rigor required." 

and 

"The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. Your grandparents go long before your parents, and your parents go long before you."

the first one cracks me up.  :FRlol:

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## Abs

"And I am treating my poor heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted. Tell no one of this; there are people who would it take it amiss."

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Von Goethe 

 :Thumbs Up:

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## Igetanotion

> "So it goes." - Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut


OH MY!!!! That is one of my favorite books, I must have read it a dozen times. I am having that put on my gravestone. 
just my name and "So it goes" in the middle. Great quote! :Thumbs Up:

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## bouquin

Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

- from the short story *Her First Ball*  by Katherine Mansfield

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## Hira

_
The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the children laugh.

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:

"Damned Italians! coming over here!"

As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being -- that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:

"Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!"

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her._

From Eveline ~ The Dubliners, James Joyce




> Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion! _from_ Dr. Zhivago _by Boris Pasternak (Part II, Chapter 5, Section 5)_


That is a beautiful line, Dori!

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## Lulim

In the middle of January, schoolwork turned its attention to letter-writing. After learning the basics, each student was to write two letters, one to a friend and one to somebody in another class.
Liesel's letter from Rudy went like this:

_Dear Saumensch,

Are you still as useless at football as you were the last time we played? I hope so. That means I can run past you again just like Jesse Owens at the Olympics …_

When Sister Maria found it, she asked him a question, very amiably.

Sister Maria's Offer: 'Do you feel like visiting the corridor, Mr. Steiner?'

Needless to say, Rudy answered in the negative, and the paper was torn up and he started again.

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## The Intended

From "Youth," by Joseph Conrad:

"Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within . . ."

Joseph Conrad is the only author that can make me emotional from sheer mastery of language. I can't read this story without bursting into tears.

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## Anza

It was a bit disconcerting this side of Felicity, like having a pet shark that thinks itself a goldfish."
A Great and Terrible Beauty

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## Simao

Last night I bought like five books one of them was A Portrait of Dorian Gray. It seems like a good book but that is only from ten pages read so I don't know yet.

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## Dark Muse

_The Book Of Shadows_ James Rese

What finer tribute might a man know than to be mistrusted by the stupid for being clever, envied by the inept for making good, loathed by the dull for his wit, by the boors for his breeding an by the ugly for his successes?

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## NikolaiI

"the Joyous Cosmology," by philosopher, thinker and writer, Alan Watts

_ The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems to be, the more I am moved to marvel at the ingenuity with which divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this cosmic joie de vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so reassuring—nothing around here but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I were to step up and say, "Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be.* When people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the unconscious—"You know....You know!"_

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## NikolaiI

" I recall the words of an ancient Tantric scripture: "As waves come with water and flames with fire, so the universal waves with us." Gestures of the gesture, waves of the wave—leaves flowing into caterpillars, grass into cows, milk into babies, bodies into worms, earth into flowers, seeds into birds, quanta of energy into the iridescent or reverberating labyrinths of the brain. Within and swept up into this endless, exulting, cosmological dance are the base and grinding undertones of the pain which transformation involves: chewed nerve endings, sudden electric-striking snakes in the meadow grass, swoop of the lazily circling hawks, sore muscles piling logs, sleepless nights trying to keep track of the unrelenting bookkeeping which civilized survival demands. 

How unfamiliarly natural it is to see pain as no longer a problem. For problematic pain arises with the tendency of self-consciousness to short-circuit the brain and fill its passages with dithering echoes—revulsions to revulsions, fears of fear, cringing from cringing, guilt about guilt—twisting thought to trap itself in endless oscillations. In his ordinary consciousness man lives like someone trying to speak in an excessively sensitive echo-chamber; he can proceed only by doggedly ignoring the interminably gibbering reflections of his voice. For in the brain there are echoes and reflected images in every dimension of sense, thought, and feeling, chattering on and on in the tunnels of memory. The difficulty is that we confuse this storing of information with an intelligent commentary on what we are doing at the moment, mistaking for intelligence the raw materials of the data with which it works. Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we mistake the double image for two selves—mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering. " 
Same book

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## bouquin

The following is a line from Carson McCullers's *The Heart is a Lonely Hunter* . It sort of reflects my sentiment of the moment:

_It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated._

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## optimisticnad

This made me laugh so much: 

'At any rate they were an amazingly ugly gang....'

THe Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G.Wells

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## Dark Muse

A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to bewaiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then almostat the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standimng far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the floor far away and begining again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfation shook his soul to know he had not yielded nor undone all.

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## islandclimber

"I'm a bachelor of myself, of course I understand... Forward. I shall quickly... Good players do not take a long time to think. Forward. I caught just a glimpse of your spouse- a juicy little piece, no two ways about it- what a neck, that's what I like... Hey, wait a minute, that was an oversight, allow me to take my move back. Here, this is better. I am a grat aficionado of women, and the way they love me, the rascals, you simply wouldn't believe it. You were writing to your spouse there about her pretty eyes and lips. Recently, you know, I had... Why can't my pawn take it? Oh, I see. Clever, clever. All right, I retreat. Recently I had sexual intercourse with an extraordinarily healthy and splendid individual. What pleasure you experience, when a large brunette... What is this? That's a snide move on your part. You must warn your opponent, this won't do. Here, let me change my last move. So. Yes, a gorgeous, passionate creature- and, you know, I'm no piker myself, I've got such a spring that- wow! Generally speaking, of the numerous earthly temptations, which, in jest, but really with the utmost seriousness, I intend to submit gradually for your consideration, the temptation of sex... No, wait a minute, I haven't decided yet if I want to move that piece there. Yes, I will. What do you mean, checkmate? Why checkmate? I can't go here; I can't go there; I can't go anywhere. Wait a minute, what was the position? No, before that. Ah, now that's a different story. A mere oversight. All right, I'll move here. Yes, a red rose between her teeth, black net stockings up to here, and not-a-stitch besides-that's really something, that's the supreme... and now, instead of the raptures of love, dank stone, rusty iron, and ahead- well, you know yourself what lies ahead. Now this I overlooked. And what if I move otherwise? Yes, this is better. The game is mine, anyways- you make one mistake after another. What if she was unfaithful to you- didn't you hold her in your embraces? When people ask me for advice I always tell them, 'Gentlemen, be inventive. There is nothing more pleasant, for example, than to surround oneself with mirrors and watch the good work going on there- wonderful! Hey! Now this is far from wonderful. Word of honour, I thought I had moved to this square, not to that. So therefore you were unable... Back, please. Simultaneously I like to smoke a cigar and talk of insignificant matters, and I like her to talk too- there's nothing to be done, I have a certain streak of perversion in me... Yes, how grievous, how frightening and hurtful to say farewell to all this- and to think that others, who are just as young and sappy, will continue to work and work... ah! I don't know about you, but when it comes to caresses I love what we French wrestlers call 'macarons': You give her a nice slap on the neck, and, the firmer the meat... First of all, I can take your night, secondly, I can simply move my king away; all right- there. No, stop, stop, I'd like to think for a minute after all. What was your last move? Put that piece back and let me think. Nonsense, there's no checkmate here. You, it seems to me- if you do not mind my saying so- are cheating: this piece stood here, or maybe here, but not there, I am absolutely certain. Come, put it back, put it back..."

Mr. Pierre, talking at Cincinattus while they play chess in prison...

Nabokov --- 'Invitation to a Beheading'

cheers

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## Alexei

As you can see by my signature I am reading *"Against nature"*. While I was reading it I stumbled on this passage, which I want to share:




> "The gardeners brought still other varieties which had the appearance of artificial skin ridged with false veins, and most of them looked as though consumed by syphilis and leprosy, for they exhibited livid surfaces of flesh veined with scarlet rash and damasked with eruptions. Some had the deep red hue of scars that have just closed or the dark tint of incipient scabs. Others were marked with matter raised by scaldings. There were forms which exhibited shaggy skins hollowed by ulcers and relieved by cankers. And a few appeared embossed with wounds, covered with black mercurial hog lard, with green unguents of belladonna smeared with grains of dust and the yellow micas of iodoforme."


_"Against nature"_ by Karl Joris Huysmans

I was surprised by this description which sounds so "out of the box" in comparison with what I usually hear. I was captured by it.

----------


## superunknown

_'Your identification cards?' She was gazing in amazement at Koroviev's pince-nez, and also at Behemoth's primus and Behemoth's torn elbow.
'A thousand pardons, but what identification cards?' asked Koroviev in surprise.
'You're writers?' the citizeness asked in her turn.
'Unquestionably,' Koroviev answered with dignity.
'Your identification cards?' the citizeness repeated.
'My sweetie...' Koroviev began tenderly.
'I'm no sweetie,' interrupted the citizeness.
'More's the pity,' Koroviev said disappointedly and went on: 'Well, so, if you don't want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don't have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of his novels and you'll be convinced, without any identification card, that you're dealing with a writer. And I don't think he even had any identification card! What do you think?' Koroviev turned to Behemoth.
'I'll bet he didn't,' replied Behemoth, setting the primus down on the table beside the ledger and wiping the sweat from his sooty forehead with his hand.
'You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.
'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!'_

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

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## superunknown

_I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too._

Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

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## ben.!

Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.

_The Time Machine_ - H. G. Wells

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## bouquin

Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.
~ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (by Michael Chabon)

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## quasimodo1

Gunter Grass Peeling the Onion "In the debate among the gods of the existentialist 

doctrine of salvation, a debate ranging over years and borders, I took sides--first gingerly, 

then vehemendtly--with Camus. But I went further: mistrusting all ideologies and rejecting 

all faiths, I made stone rolling my daily discipline. I liked that Sisyphus. Damned by the 

gods, as sure of the absurdity of human existance as he was of the sun's coming up and 

going down, and thus aware that the stone he rolled up the hill would not stay put--he 

became a saint to me, a saint I could worship. A hero beyond hope or despair. A man made 

happy by a restless stone. A man who never gives up."

----------


## Kafka's Crow

> She was my incubus, but she filled my house. I was like a dazed fly alone in the empty rooms.


Luigi Pirandello _Six Characters in Search of an Author_ Act I

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## Hira

> A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce
> 
> This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to bewaiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then almostat the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standimng far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the floor far away and begining again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfation shook his soul to know he had not yielded nor undone all.


Hey Dark Muse, how did you find the book? Are you still reading it? Read it several weeks ago, truly liked it.

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## Mockingbird_z

The catcher in the rye
It's not too bad when the sun's out but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
and this one:
Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody.

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## goodmanbrown

From Jim Harrison's Memoir "Off to the Side"

On writers and drinking: 

"For instance, Hemingway scholars have not been quite up to the fact that his accident-proneness was a result of getting pie-eyed everyday after his morning work"

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## thom

"My thesis is that the language of all poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry." 
Robert Graves - The White Goddess

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## quasimodo1

O fleeting soul of mine, my body's friend and guest, whither goes thou, pale, fearful, and pensive one? Why laugh not as of old?
[Lat., Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis!
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, frigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis joca?]
- Hadrian (Adrian), Aelius Publius Hadrianus Aelius, 
Ad Animam, 
according to Aelius Spartianus 
{introductory expression in Latin, From "The Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar}

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## quasimodo1

From "The Memoirs of Hadrian" (first chapter, Animula Vagula Blandula) "Already certain portions of my life are like dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy in its entirety. I can hunt no longer: if there were no one but me to disturb them in their ruminations and their play the deer in the Etrurian mountains would be at peace. With the Diana of the forests I have always maintained the swift-changing and passionate relations which are those of a man with the object of his love: the boar hunt gave me my first chance, as a boy, for command and for encounter with danger: I fairly threw myself into the sport, and my excesses in it brought reprimands from Trajan."

----------


## quasimodo1

Marguerite Yourcenar..."Memoirs of Hadrian" From personal notes titled "Reflections on the Composition" "This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F. ...and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to efface the personal. But even the longest dedication in too short and too comonplace to honor a friendship so uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique: that in the whole adventure of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even inn the entire life of some fortunate writers, there must have been sometimes, in the backround, perhaps, someone who will not let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain, out of fatigue; someone who would re-read with us for the twentieth time, if need be, a questionable page; someone who takes down for us from the library shelves th heavy tomes in which we may find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse rthem long after weariness has made us give up: someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes, our ideas; who shares with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless work which both require, never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque."

----------


## bouquin

There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him.
(Chapter 9)

To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.
(Chapter 13)

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age.
(Chapter 13)

And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. 
(Chapter 13)

Nothing is too bloody much. You just have to take it and fight out of it and now stop prima-donnaing and accept the fact...
(Chapter 14)

How simple it is when one knows nothing.
(Chapter 14)

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
(Chapter 43)

----------


## karo

"You will never know the truth, and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones."

Iris Murdoch

----------


## quasimodo1

from "Memoirs of Hadrian" chapter title..."Varius Multiplex Multiformis" "And it was then that the wisest of my good geniouses came to my aid: Plotina. ... Both of us had a passion for adorning, then laying bare, our souls, and for testing our minds on every touchstone. She leaned toward Epicurean philosophy, that narrow but clean bed whereon I have sometimes rested my thought. The mystery of the gods, which haunted me, did not trouble her, nor had she my ardent love for the human body. She was chaste by reason of her disgust with the merely facile, generous by determination rather than by nature, wisely mistrustful but ready to accept anything from a friend, even his inevitable errors. Friendship was a choice to which she devoted her whole being; she gave herself to it utterly, and as I have done only to my loves. She as known me better than anyone has; I have let her see what I carefully concealed from everone else; for example, my secret lapses into cowardice. I like to thinnk that on her side she has kept almost nothing from me. No bodily intimacy ever existed between us; in its place was this contact of two minds closely intermingled."

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## AdoreroDio

"Something well said is something well said, something said superbly is a poem."
- Reality of Fiction

----------


## quasimodo1

from "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar Chapter: Tellus Stabilita 

"I should say outright that I have little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, 

and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip 

easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. Respect for ancient laws 

answers to what is deepest rooted in human piety, but it serves also to pillow the 

inertia of judges. The oldest codes are a part of that very savagery which they 

were striving to correct: even the most venerable among them are the product of 

force."

----------


## Andro

I just finished up a rereading of Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five." Kilgore Trout is one of my favorite characters and this quote is in reference to one of the books he published.

"Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. So it goes."

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## bouquin

_...forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.


_

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## Scheherazade

> _...forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.
> 
> 
> _


That was the first Fowles book I read (about 20 years ago) and loved it. Hope you enjoy it too!  :Smile: 

When you finish reading, maybe you can post a review for us?

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## dum_spiro_spero

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning."
Haruki Murakami "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

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## ben.!

'He made out that he was the only real horrorshow prestoopnick in the whole zoo, going on that he'd done this and done the other and killed ten rozzes with one crack of his rooker and all that cal. But nobody was impressed, O my brothers.' - _A Clockwork Orange_, Anthony Burgess.

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## kelby_lake

'why was too black for the newspaper to print and too deep for Giovanni to tell'

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## aeroport

But there is reason to suspect that a people are waning to decay and ruin, the moment that their life becomes fascinating either to the poet's imagination or the painter's eye.
Chapter XXXII: "Scenes By the Way"

One of two or three passages in this book that might be called 'funny.'

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## Kirby

I won't give you all of the details, but I will tell you that the Candide & his fellow traveler are found sleeping on the ground by 'Oreillons'. The Oreillons have Candide, who is wearing a Jesuit hat, and his fellow traveler tied up, as they all begin to cry out, one and all, "A Jesuit! a Jesuit! we shall be revenged; we shall have excellent cheer; let us eat this Jesuit; let us eat him up." Needless to say it put a big smile on my face.

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## SirRaustusBear

Sure enough, below the big embankment, along the river, in a little street of old houses, youths were standing outside or sitting in doorways, chatting with one another across the road and asking about the battle. Until the bullets hit them in the head, they couldn't help being curious, even excited, by it all.

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## Pseudōnumos

> I won't give you all of the details, but I will tell you that the Candide & his fellow traveler are found sleeping on the ground by 'Oreillons'. The Oreillons have Candide, who is wearing a Jesuit hat, and his fellow traveler tied up, as they all begin to cry out, one and all, "A Jesuit! a Jesuit! we shall be revenged; we shall have excellent cheer; let us eat this Jesuit; let us eat him up." Needless to say it put a big smile on my face.


I think an even more memorable part of Candide would have to be "I was in this state of weakness and languor, between life and death, when I felt myself touched by something which moved over my body. Opening my eyes, I saw a white man, rather attractive, who was groaning and saying under his breath: _O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni_ (Oh what a misfortune to have no testicles!)

----------


## djy78usa

> I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.


 -_George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant,_ from a collection of his essays.

In the essay he describes a time that he shot an elephant, which he did not really want to shoot, in colonial Burma. He only shot it because that is what the "natives" expected him to do after the elephant killed an Indian resident. He would look like a fool if he grabbed his rifle, headed down to the paddy where the elephant was, and then left without having killed it. 

Earlier in the essay he mentions that the worst thing that could happen to a white man in the Asian colonies was being laughed at by the local population. When he is contemplating what would happen if the elephant charged him, he says he is not scared of the thought of dying, just the thought of how his dying would reflect on the Empire:




> The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong, those two thousannd Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

----------


## Mockingbird_z

Won't you let me try to make up a little for all I've failed to do in the past?
(Painted Veil by S. Maugham)

----------


## Camán

" Start bravely, not to reason but to act. 
As soon as you begin to act you will immediately become aware 
of the necessity of justifying your actions."

Stanislavski - An Introduction

----------


## JaneB

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens

"Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mamnals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plent of time for silence. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

----------


## Sir Bartholomew

> Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure to be talked of.


- Jane Austen, _Emma_

----------


## Lioness_Heart

'What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?'
(Last line of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell)

----------


## Dark Muse

_The Blithedale Romance_ Hawthorne

Chapter XVI: Leave-Takings 




> When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred past with any show of those common-place civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead henceforth to him, and he to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtsey with eyes that were inpenetrable beneath the glaze and film. We passed, therefore, as if mutuall invisible.

----------


## Sir Bartholomew

> Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world! - and unfortunately, there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late.


 _Miss Smith,_ Persuasion (Austen)

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## tractatus

This is very strong expression.

Yet when six oclock comes and I touch my hat to the commissionaire, being always too effusive in ceremony since I desire so much to be accepted; and struggle, leaning against the wind, buttoned up, with my jaws blue and my eyes running water, I wish that a little typist would cuddle on my knees; I think that my favourite dish is liver and bacon; and so am apt to wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there are frequent public-houses, and the shadows of ships passing at the end of the street, and women fighting. But I say to myself, recovering my sanity, Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty. The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
*The Waves , Woolf*

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## naomi moon

"...je suis las de tuer tout tes amants, c'est toi que je tuerai."
"J'ai toujours pensait que tu me tuerais. La premiée fois que je t'ai vu, je venais de rencontrer un prétre à la porte de ma maison. Et cette nuit, En sortant de Cordoue, n'as tu rien vu? Un liévre a passé entre les pieds de ton cheval. C'est écrit." Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.
It was said by Carmen to Don José.

----------


## bounty

a young man named adam, on the run from the law, trying to survive in the desert..."To starve was nothing, but to eat while starving was hell!"

----------


## mickitaz

"Great events have incalculable results" pg 8 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo

----------


## Scheherazade

"It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one."

from _Birdsong_ by Sebastian Faulks

----------


## Scheherazade

"[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

----------


## Joreads

I know how but I do not know why

1984 by George Orwell

----------


## CognitiveArtist

Hi, it's nice and comfortable to be here in this forum  :Smile:  I'm currently read the eccentric Strindberg's _A Madman's Defense_ and here's a passage from it:

"And while I, completely absorbed in my daily toil, lived unsuspectingly from day to day, a false legend took shape and form, grounded on nothing but the talk of the envious and the rumormongering of the café crowd. And I, idiot that I was, believed everybody except myself. Ah!..."

It's a paranoid and melodramatic piece, but not without it's charm.

----------


## Domer121

"But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her but once in his life!"
~ THe unbearable lightness of being~ Milan Kundera

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## Dark Muse

_A Passage To India_~ E.M Forster




> They removed their turbans, and one put a lump of butter on his forehead, and waited for it to slide down his nose into his mouth. Before it could arrive, another stole up behind him, snatched the melting morsel, and swallowed it himself. All laughed exultantly at discovering that the divine sense of humour coincided with their own. "God si love!" There is fun in heaven. God can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs away from beneath His own posteriors, set His own turbans on fire, and steal His own petticoats when He bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment. All spirit as well as all matter must participate in salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle is incomplete.

----------


## Janine

> _A Passage To India_~ E.M Forster


*Dark Muse,* I love that book; I like everything I have read by Forster. Is it required reading for you course? I love the movie adaptation, too. In fact, I own it; stars Judy Davis, so it is an older film, but a true classic, directed by the late David Lean. Enjoy your reading, *DM.*

Here is a quote from Willa Cather's short novel ~ "Alexander's Bridge":




> After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without obtrusions of ugliness or change.


I just love that description of someone's personal study.

----------


## Dark Muse

> *Dark Muse,* I love that book; I like everything I have read by Forster. Is it required reading for you course? I love the movie adaptation, too. In fact, I own it; stars Judy Davis, so it is an older film, but a true classic, directed by the late David Lean. Enjoy your reading, *DM.*


Yes it is one of the books required for my Brit. Lit. class. I am throughly enjoying the novel and only have but a few pages left from it.

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## Janine

> Yes it is one of the books required for my Brit. Lit. class. I am throughly enjoying the novel and only have but a few pages left from it.


Good for you *DM.* It is a wonderful book! Have you read any others by Forster? I went through a stage of reading his books. I love "A Room With a View"...it actually makes me laugh out loud; it is not a long book, either.

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## Dark Muse

No, I have not yet read any of his other books

----------


## Janine

> No, I have not yet read any of his other books


I only read "Howard's End" and "A Room with a View"....I loved them both...and also, "Passage to India"...they all were fine reads!

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## cipherdecoy

"Justice. . . limps along, but it gets there all the same."

In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez.

----------


## andave_ya

"Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didn't crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever."

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.

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## bouquin

_Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

----------------------------------------------------
And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

----------------------------------------------------
How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!

----------------------------------------------------
Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.

----------------------------------------------------
... hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

----------------------------------------------------
... beauty ... flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident._

_---------------------------------------------------
"You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good."

----------------------------------------------------
... the good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.


_

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## 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  :Smile:

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## Pyrrho

I am not yet confident enough to post a review.  :Smile:  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.

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## 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.

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## 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."_

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## 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?

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## 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."

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## BREWNING

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

You can find it at amazon / barnesandnoble . com

It's worth checking out!

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## 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._

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## 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

----------


## 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."

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## 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.  :Smile:

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## 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_

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## 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)

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## 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.

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## Hypercrit Htd

after that Greek introduced whore,porn to western world.

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## 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*

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## 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.

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## 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.

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## bouquin

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

------------------------------------------------------
_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._


------------------------------------------------------
_"... 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."_

------------------------------------------------------
_... 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._

-------------------------------------------------------
_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._

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

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## 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!

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## 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.

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## 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.

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## 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.

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## 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_."

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## 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?
> ...


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

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## 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)

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## 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.

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## Logos

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

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## Dori

"What an idiot!" 
_from_ *The Idiot* _by Fyodor Dostoevsky_

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## 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

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## 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*

 :FRlol:

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## 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*


 :Biggrin: 




__________________

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## 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

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## 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

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## Idios_Daemon

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

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## 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.

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## 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!"

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## bouquin

_"And what we fear we often rage against."

-------------------------------------------------
"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."

-------------------------------------------------
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._

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## FranzKafka

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

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## muchado22

"You know, I, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory like perfume and it never faded never got stained. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and, and live the memory all over again."- "Rebecca"

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## Muhammad Sarhan

> 20 years on love road , but it still unknown 
> one time I was killer, but more than time I was killed
> 20 years love book , but I still on first it page !


"Nizar Qabbany "
arabic poet

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## wizrd

"I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, i loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." - H.H.

fell in love with it as soon as i read it. im finished reading it now. :] great book.

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## Dark Muse

_Youth, Beautiful Youth_ Hermann Hesse 




> To be up and about outdoors at night, beneath the silent sky and beside quietly flowing water, is always mysterious and stirs the soul to its very depths. At such times we are close to our origins; we feel a kinship with animals and plants, feel dim memories of a primeval life before houses and town were built, when man, the homeless wanderer, could regard the woods, streams, mountains, wolves, and hawks as his equals and could love them as friends or hate them as deadly foes. Night also removes our customary sense of community life, when lights are no longer heard, one who is still awake feels solitary and sees himself parted from others and thrown upon his own resources.

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## Dark Muse

I hate to post twice in a row, but I just came upon this quote in my reading and found it very interesting. 

_The Name of the Rose_ Umberto Eco




> Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

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## curlyqlink

"To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable of it."

--Tolstoy, _War and Peace_

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## MorpheusSandman

> "To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable of it."
> 
> --Tolstoy, _War and Peace_


 :Thumbs Up:  Excellent quote from the very book I'm currently reading. In fact, I just read that a few days ago. Here's a companion:




> Berg, judging by his wife, considered all women weak and stupid. Vera, judging by her husband alone and extending the observation to everyone, supposed that all men ascribed reason only to themselves, and at the same time understood nothing, were proud and egoistic.

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## miyagisan

"Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."

Moby-Dick

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## Dark Muse

_The Fountainhead_ ~ Ayn Rand 




> This is pity, he thought, and than he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

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## GatsbyTheGreat

PROCTOR, _laughs insanely, then:_A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud-God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!"
-_The Crucible,_ Arthur Miller

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## junpei

A small collection of quotes from Dune




> How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.





> Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.





> The concept of progress is a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

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## byquist

"Welcome to the bickering world of theoretical physics, where one professor's theory is claptrap to all the others and 1,000 rival theories abound."

Time by Alexander Waugh, quite readable and entertaining as well as education-based

----------


## Scheherazade

"'Don't feel sorry for yourself,' he said. 'Only arseholes do that.'"

from _Norwegian Wood_ by Haruki Murakami

----------


## Dharmabeat

> "Since the order of world is regulated by death, perhaps is it better for God we do not believe in him and we fight with all our might against death, without raising our eyes heavenward where he keeps silent."


From _'The Plague'_ by Albert Camus.

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## byquist

from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
(title by permission of Raymond Carver's widow)

"No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel kind of lethargic and don't want to run. Actually it happens a lot."

"Up till then I'd made it a point of pride that no matter how hard things might get, I never walked. A marathon is a running event, after all, not a walking event. But in that one race, even walking was a problem."

"In most cases lerning something essential in life requires physical pain."

2008 book trans. Japanese to English from this apparently famous author; found it in the new book section at a college library entrance.

A combo of a writer's and runner memoir; a meditation about life and the passage of 20-25 yrs. or so. Very pleasant reading.

----------


## Pensive

> "'Don't feel sorry for yourself,' he said. 'Only arseholes do that.'"
> 
> from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami


Yeah, that's a good one (and reminds me I should better go and finish the other half of Norwegian Wood that needs to be completed) 

"Forgetting is not something you do. It happens to you. Only it did not happen to me."

- The Collector by John Fowles.

----------


## wilbur lim

*The quote*



> The descendants of Shang
> Exceed a hundred thousand in number,
> But because God so decreed,
> They submit to Chou,


This is from 'Mencius'.

----------


## Dark Muse

_The Name of the Rose_ by Umberto Eco




> The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God, or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.





> Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, becasue the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passaion for the truth.

----------


## karo

Sometimes when Sirius was out on the hills alone in the winter dawn, examining the condition of the snow and looking for sheep in distress, the desolation of the scene would strike him with a shivering dread of existence. The universal carpet of snow, the mist of drifting flakes, the miserable dark sheep, pawing for food, the frozen breath on his own jaws, combined to make him feel that after all this was what the world was really like.

Olaf Stapledon

----------


## rewalker

A small collection of quotes from the Dune Series -Heratics of Dune-




> Most dicipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask "why?" Be catious with "how?" Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.





> Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person

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## wilbur lim

> ACCORDING to the promise given above, I shall commence this book with. a brief account of the evidences which the venerable man gave of his power. By virtue of his prayer, and in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, he healed several persons suffering under various diseases; and he alone, by the assistance of God, expelled from this our island, which now has the primacy, innumerable hosts of malignant spirits, whom he saw with his bodily eyes assailing himself, and beginning to bring deadly distempers on his monastic brotherhood. Partly by mortification, and partly by a bold resistance, he subdued, with the help of Christ, the furious rage of wild beasts. The surging waves, also, at times rolling mountains high in a great tempest, became quickly at his prayer quiet and smooth, and his ship, in which he then happened to be, reached the desired haven in a perfect calm.


Adapted from *The Life of ST Columba*

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## Idril

_"The straight lines, the uniform size of the surfaces converted his thoughts into squares, ruled lines through his soul and, by simplification, turned the freedom of it's organic life into a pattern and brought the rich, primaeval forest vegetation of his brain, full of varying impressions, back to nature's first child-like attempts at organization."_

From *By The Open Sea* by August Strindberg

----------


## Dark Muse

I really liked this passage 




> If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): "Here I am, the One and they don't know it." If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize, and move on, even though you're God and with a snap of you're fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.


From _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco

----------


## wessexgirl

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity".

"When I began to write I said this was a story of hatred, but I am not convinced. Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love. I looked up just now from writing and caught sight of my own face in a mirror close to my desk, and I thought, does hatred really look like that? For I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright, unobtainable objects within". 

From *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. My first Greene, but certainly not my last. *Brighton Rock* is calling me....  :Thumbs Up:

----------


## Bvalltu

"Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless." -Confucius and the Madman

----------


## Dark Muse

I thought this conversation about blushing was quite amusing 




> MIRA. Are you? Pray then walk by yourselves. Let not us be
> accessory to your putting the ladies out of countenance with your
> senseless ribaldry, which you roar out aloud as often as they pass
> by you, and when you have made a handsome woman blush, then you
> think you have been severe.
> 
> PET. What, what? Then let 'em either show their innocence by not
> understanding what they hear, or else show their discretion by not
> hearing what they would not be thought to understand.
> ...


The Way of the World by William Congreve

----------


## bouquin

_"We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice."

-----------------------------------------------------
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

-----------------------------------------------------
Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

-----------------------------------------------------
... it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy ... it is impossible to rehearse life.

-----------------------------------------------------
"... and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old."

-----------------------------------------------------
"There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light ... We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."

-----------------------------------------------------
The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended ..._

----------


## mangueken

That night, after she returned from Tatsumara's shop, Chieko had a dream. SChools of all colors of carp gathered as knelt at the edge of the pond. The carp piled one on top of another, dancing as they stuck their heads out above the surface of the water.
That was all there was to the dream. It was midday. The fish drew closer when Chieko put her hand in the water and made ripples on the surface of the pond....
"I wonder what kind of fragrance, what kind of spirit, emanates from your hand?" Ryusuke said.

The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata

----------


## subterranean

> A fight between two bald men over a comb


Borges on Falklands War between England and Argentina, quoted in Naomi Klein's _The Shock Doctrine_

----------


## Idril

_"What's interesting about our society is that everyone knows everything, but everyone pretends to know nothing."_

From *Moscow 2042* by Vladimir Voinovich

----------


## Nyx's Child

And day had broken on the streets
Ere it broke upon the brain.
Between us by the peace of God, 
Such truth can now be told;
Yes, there is strength in striking root,
And good in growing old.
We have found common things at last,
And marriage and a creed, 
And I may safely wright it now, 
And you may safely read.

G.K.G

-The Man Who Was Thursday G.K.Chesterton

----------


## Abdiel

> And day had broken on the streets
> Ere it broke upon the brain.
> Between us by the peace of God, 
> Such truth can now be told;
> Yes, there is strength in striking root,
> And good in growing old.
> We have found common things at last,
> And marriage and a creed, 
> And I may safely wright it now, 
> ...


Awesome; I've wanted to read The Man Who Was Thursday for a while now. How is it? Are you reading it for school or fun, and have you read any of Chesterton's other works?

----------


## Nyx's Child

so far it's really good read it!! i'm reading it for fun it took me a little while to get in to it but its really worth picking up i havn't read anything else by him so far but i definitly will now  :Smile:  enjoy!

----------


## Gracewings

"...for they dare not speak the thoughts of their minds. For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if these thoughts are the thoughts of all, and so they fear to speak." ~ from _Anthem_ by Ayn Rand

----------


## Nyree Ingle

> Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 
> mi ritrovai per una selva oscura 
> ché la via diritta era smarrita. 
> 
> In the middle of our life's walk 
> I found myself in a dark wood 
> for the straight road was lost] 
> 
> 
> I am overwhelmed by Dante, his brain must have been continually smoking.


 Nyree I like this version:
When I had journeyed half of our life's way
I found myself within a shadowed forest
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
(I think he was having a mid life crisis)

----------


## fleaaaaaa

"I COULD MURDER A CURRY" - Death


Mort, Terry Pratchett

Lol not quite as amazing as the rest of the quotes.  :FRlol:

----------


## Riesa

"His failure lay in underestimation - in being, if you like, not quite mad enough."

Viriconium ~ M. John Harrison

----------


## Dark Muse

From _Thee Lives_ by Gertrude Stein 




> The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centers of the earth that comes always with the early soarking spring, when it is not answered with an active frevent joy, gives always anger, irritation and unrest.

----------


## quasimodo1

Ah, Gertrude Stein...what a writer. Part of the "lost generation".

----------


## Dark Muse

Though I do not hate her as I had thought I would based on what I heard of her, when it comes to writers like her, I cannot help but to wonder, is being experimental really enough to qualify one as a "great" writer? Simply becasue they do something that has not been done before, is that merit within itself? To do something just becasue it can be done.

----------


## jikan myshkin

...and god created women

----------


## ntropyincarnate

> Though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.


From _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_

----------


## Sancho

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols:

"Yet Milagro was a town whose citizens had a penchant not only for going crazy, but also for precipitating miracles.
Take for example, an early nineteenth-century sheepherder named Cleofes Apodaca and the scruffy sheepdog he irreverently called Pendejo, which, translated loosely, means 'idiot' or 'fool' - or, translated more literally, means "pubic hair."
Today, Cleafes Apodaca might qualify to be called the Patron Saint Crazy of Milagro."

----------


## Scheherazade

I was actually reading another book when I came across this passage from Walt Whitman's "Preface" to _Leaves of Grass_ but thought it is still quote-worthy:

_This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured … others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches … and shall master all attachment._

----------


## traytray

"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink." 

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 1797

----------


## curlyqlink

_She had the sense that Poppy was one of those girls who very quickly become girlfriends who like to fix up their other girlfriends with their friends and have coffee shop fantasies about the whole thing._

--from _Keeping it Real_ by Justina Robson


If other sci-fi/fantasy books were as literate as this one, I'd read a lot more sic-fi/fantasy.

----------


## weltanschauung

"amar uma apenas é demasiado pouco; amar todas é uma imprudência de caráter superficial; porém, conhecer-se a si próprio e amar um número tão grande quanto possível, encerrar na sua alma todas as energias do amor de modo que cada uma receba o alimento que lhe é próprio, ao mesmo tempo em que a consciência engloba o todo - aí está o prazer, aí está o que é a vida." (s. kierkegaard - diário de um sedutor)

----------


## Serenity5815

_"The reason he was late was that he was enjoying the twentieth century immensely. It was much better than the seventeenth, and a lot better than the fourteenth. One of the nice things about Time, Crowley always said, was that it was always taking him steadily further away from the fourteenth century, the most bloody boring century on God's, excuse his French, Earth. The twentieth century was anything but boring. In fact, a flashing blue light in his rear view mirror had been telling Crowley, for the last fifty seconds, that he was being followed by two men who would like to make it even more interesting for him._

"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

----------


## zolasdisciple

"and you just want me to live like the others,get up and move around and go to parties all day?"."thats not living,this is living"

----------


## weltanschauung

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?” He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own. (m.proust, swanns way)

im actually reading Within a Budding Grove, but i was going through swanns way and found one of the many highlights with (seriously) "LOL" by it, and

----------


## Josef K

_Honesty does not fear authority._ 

Inspector Javert from Les Misérables

----------


## malwethien

"You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody." ~ The Graveyard Book

----------


## andave_ya

"To slur a good man's name with baseless slander is one crime--another is rashly to mistake bad men for good. Cast out an honest friend, and you cast our your life, your dearest treasure. Time will teach the truth of this; for time alone can prove the honest man, one day proclaims the sinner." ~ Oedipus by Sophocles.

----------


## Dark Muse

From The Princess by D.H. Lawrence 




> "My little Princess must never take too much notice of people and the things they say and do," he repeated to her. "People don't know what they are doing and saying. They chatter-chatter, and they hurt one another, and they hurt themselves very often, till they cry. But don't take any notice, my little Princess. Because it is all nothing. Inside everybody there is another creature, a demon which doesn't care at all. You peel away all the things they say and do and feel, as cook peels away the outside of the onions. And in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can't peel away. And this green demon never changes, and it doesn't care at all about all the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person, all the chatter-chatter, and all the husbands and wives and children, and troubles and fusses. You peel everything away from people, and there is a green, upright demon in every man and woman; and this demon is a man's real self, and a woman's real self. It doesn't really care about anybody, it belongs to the demons and the primitive fairies, who never care. But, even so, there are big demons and mean demons, and splendid demonish fairies, and vulgar ones

----------


## WrdOrnitologist

"At round rock's top, note: it lies asleep do no disturb it, do not hate it, it senses such voids of the soul, remove the child underneath it, feel love by that time, otherwise it wiil stop your blood and you'll be dead - alive!"

----------


## bouquin

_We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns._

----------


## djy78usa

> There is love enough in this world for everbody, if people will just look.


-Newt Hoenikker from Kurt Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_

----------


## RG57

'When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape.'

The opening line to Godbye Mr Chips by James Hilton

----------


## weltanschauung

man, why is proust so wonderful??

Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when such a grief has its birth—as was now happening—at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end. The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte's presence. But she would have said to herself: "Back again! Evidently I can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he'll be." Besides, I was irresistibly drawn towards her in thought, and those alternative orientations, that mad careering between them of the compass-needle within me, persisted after I had reached home, and expressed themselves in the mutually contradictory letters to Gilberte which I began to draft.

(...)

I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later, the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those 'nevermores' so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believe them to be false and translate 'nevermore' by 'this very evening, if you want me,' or believe them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations which make so little difference to our lives when the other person is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the next persons whom we shall presently have become, and who will then be in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, so as to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same speeches that she would make if she loved us. When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.

(...)

I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

(within a budding grove)

----------


## PabloQ

Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory in the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.

----------


## bouquin

_There are two choices only. You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery.

-----------------------------------------------------
We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
Heaven only knows why we love it so._

----------


## Scheherazade

> _There are two choices only. You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery._


Great book!

----------


## Cailin

"A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there's no river" 

Classic line from Chapter 12 of _Shantaram_

----------


## Vintage34

> _We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
> Heaven only knows why we love it so._


I've read this paragraph from The Hours, so many times, that the page in my book is actually worn and wrinkled. The older you are, the more you relate to those words. I love that book. I've read it many times and never tire of it.

----------


## _Shannon_

"_He shut their voices out of his mind. He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, they shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair._"

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## prendrelemick

"Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigour."

From The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

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## polgara

> "Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigour."
> 
> From The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver


That is such a wonderful sentence! Thank you for sharing it  :Thumbs Up:  :Biggrin:

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## Jeremiah Jazzz

'It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?' (94)
-Finnegans Wake

----------


## Jack_Aubrey

I am sitting over coffee and cigarets at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.

----------


## Babyguile

"It's like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now."

"The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."

"Many that live deserve death and many that die deserves life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so quick to deal out death and judgement for even the very wise cannot see all ends." 

"Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped." 

- *The Lord of The Rings*, J.R.R Tolkien.

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## Cailin

> I am sitting over coffee and cigarets at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
> Here is what I tell her.


Intriguing! Where does this come from?

----------


## TheFifthElement

_I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honour the wood they rest upon.
I know it's going to rain.
Clouds have been playing with the blue style of the sky all day long, moving their heavy black wardrobes in, but so far nothing rain has happened.

************************************************** *********************
What an abstract thing it is to take your clothes off in front of a stranger for the very first time. It isn't really what we planned on doing. Your body almost looks away from itself and is a stranger to this world.
We live most of our lives privately under our clothes, except in a case like Vida whose body lived outside of herself like a lost continent, complete with dinosaurs of her own choosing. 
'I'll turn the lights out,' she said, sitting next to me on the bed.
I was startled to hear her panic. She seemed almost relaxed a few seconds before. My, how fast she could move the furniture about in her mind. I responded to this by firmly saying, 'No, please don't.'
Her eyes stopped moving for a few seconds. They came to a crashing halt like blue aeroplanes.
'Yes,' she said. 'That's a good idea. It will be very hard, but I have no other choice. I can't go on like this forever.'
She gestured towards her body as if it were far away in some lonesome valley and she, on top of a mountain, looking down. Tears came suddenly to her eyes. There was now rain on the blue wings of the aeroplanes.
Then she stopped crying withoun a tear having left her eyes. I looked again and all the tears had vanished. 'We have to leave the lights on,' she said. 'I won't cry. I promise.'
I reached out and, for the first time in two billion years, I touched her. I touched her hand. My fingers went carefully over her fingers. Her hand was almost cold.
'You're cold.' I said.
'No,' she said. 'It's only my hand.'
She moved slightly, awkwardly towards me and rested her head on my shoulder. When her head touched me, I could feel my blood leap forward, my nerves and muscles stretch like phantoms towards the future.
My shoulder was drenched in smooth white skin and long bat-flashing hair. I let go of her hand and touched her face. It was tropical.
'See,' she said, smiling faintly. 'It was only my hand.'
It was fantastic trying to work around her body, not wanting to startle her like a deer and have her go off running into the woods. 
I poetically shifted my shoulder like the last lines of a Shakespearen sonnet (Love is a babe; then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow.) and at the same time lowered her back onto the bed.
She lay there looking up at me as I crouched forward, descending slowly, and kissed her on the mouth as gently as I could. I did not want that first kiss to have attached to it the slightest gesture or flower of the meat market.
_

----------


## PabloQ

I found this really funny:
"Her bosom is still a pavement she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness."
And then I found it sad and pathetic.

----------


## littlelit

RED- I.A.Sealy

I just started reading this book. I liked the following line in which the narrator describes the colour of a girl's tracksuit:
"...expressly chosen, that shade of blue, to dampen any ardour in the onlooker and possibly in the wearer too. It's not exactly Virgin Mary blue but nor is it water-nymph aqua, or odalisque turquoise, or even a crackling protopunk electric blue. It's by no means that bacchanalian midnight blue that verges on purple, nor a savage sadomasochistic bruised-eye indigo, and it's a long way from the gentian violet of the orgiast.
No. It's a straight-out daytime sky blue, bland as a button."

And later:
"Zach stares helplessly through the window like a prisoner who, after years in his cell, finds there are no bars."

----------


## Dr. Hill

"Call me Ishmael." 

Take a guess at that one  :Wink:

----------


## prendrelemick

Between books at the moment, so as always I like to browse through my dog-eared copy of Homer's Iliad.


Paris had also been quick and had not lingered in his lofty house. Directly he had put on his splendid armour with its trappings of bronze, he hurried off through the town at full speed, like a stallion who breaks his halter at the manger where they keep and fatten him, and gallops off across the fields in triumph to his usual bathing-place in the delightful river. He tosses up his head; his mane flies back along his shoulders; he knows how beautiful he is; and away he goes, skimming the ground with his feet, to the haunts and pastures of the mares. So Paris, priam's son, came down hot foot from the citadel of Pergamus, resplendent in his armour like the dazzleing sun, and laughing as he came.

The Iliad: (trans E V Rieu)

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## bouquin

_If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain._

--------------------------------------------------------
_She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone._

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it... It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Most of the time we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do... But the other is better... If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them."
_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."_

----------


## Sk8ynat

Anne of Green Gables - L.M.Montgomery




> Pretty? Oh pretty doesn't seems the right word to use. Nor beautiful either. They don't go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful- wonderful. It's the first thing I ever saw that couldn't be improved upon by imagination.


I love the way she describes the most simple things :Smile:

----------


## Dark Muse

Foucault's Pendulum by Umerto Eco 




> Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one is free to take it and run with it. At the end they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, through, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what is happening, it is too late.

----------


## Adagio

"The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can." 
- Howards End. 
I'm reading it for my English Literature A-Level. Fantastic book so far. Page 173/293

----------


## Amlóði

_Le premier jardin_
*Anne Hébert*




> Au matin, il a fallu demander à Céleste de partir. Elle a sauté hors du lit comme si elle avait un ressort au creux des reins.
> —Des draps frais, c’est doux à mort mais, à la longue, ça risque de me faire perdre mon âme, je pars. 
> Elle a laissé la moitié de ses bagages dans la chambre.

----------


## Trilaque

_Maximum Ride - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports_
*James Patterson*




> I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!

----------


## *Classic*Charm*

Dostoyevski's The Gambler...




> Do you know that I shall kill you one day? I shall kill you not because I shall cease to love you or be jealous, I shall simply kill you because I have an impulse to devour you.

----------


## skasian

Yes Howards End is a fantastic book, but not my favourite..
I just finished Midnight's children and one of the memorable quotes is 

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me"
Quite a clever book really

----------


## weltanschauung

In his little room, with its door of communication blocked with a
wardrobe, his frame of mind remained as uncomfortable as the chair in
which he was seated. His heart ached with a dull, unpleasant
sensation, with a sort of oppressive emptiness.

"The devil take those who first invented balls!" was his reflection.
"Who derives any real pleasure from them? In this province there exist
want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls! How absurd,
too, were those overdressed women! One of them must have had a
thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the
overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her
neighbour. Yes, we all know why bribes are accepted, and why men
become crooked in soul. It is all done to provide wives--yes, may the
pit swallow them up!--with fal-lals. And for what purpose? That some
woman may not have to reproach her husband with the fact that, say,
the Postmaster's wife is wearing a better dress than she is--a dress
which has cost a thousand roubles! 'Balls and gaiety, balls and
gaiety' is the constant cry. Yet what folly balls are! They do not
consort with the Russian spirit and genius, and the devil only knows
why we have them. A grown, middle-aged man--a man dressed in black,
and looking as stiff as a poker--suddenly takes the floor and begins
shuffling his feet about, while another man, even though conversing
with a companion on important business, will, the while, keep capering
to right and left like a billy-goat! Mimicry, sheer mimicry! The fact
that the Frenchman is at forty precisely what he was at fifteen leads
us to imagine that we too, forsooth, ought to be the same. No; a ball
leaves one feeling that one has done a wrong thing--so much so that
one does not care even to think of it. It also leaves one's head
perfectly empty, even as does the exertion of talking to a man of the
world. A man of that kind chatters away, and touches lightly upon
every conceivable subject, and talks in smooth, fluent phrases which
he has culled from books without grazing their substance; whereas go
and have a chat with a tradesman who knows at least ONE thing
thoroughly, and through the medium of experience, and see whether his
conversation will not be worth more than the prattle of a thousand
chatterboxes. For what good does one get out of balls? Suppose that a
competent writer were to describe such a scene exactly as it stands?
Why, even in a book it would seem senseless, even as it certainly is
in life. Are, therefore, such functions right or wrong? One would
answer that the devil alone knows, and then spit and close the book."
(dead souls, n.gogol)

----------


## ChinaRose

> Anne of Green Gables - L.M.Montgomery
> 
> 
> 
> I love the way she describes the most simple things


When i was in middle school, this book inspired me very much. Nowadays, I picked up it again, and it still inspires me.  :Wink:  :Biggrin:

----------


## Snowqueen

Soldiering, my dear madam, is the cowards art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong and keeping out of harms way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms. 
Arms and the Man 
(Bernard Shaw)

----------


## ryan.778

"in abstract love for humanity one must always love no one but oneself" from the idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. truely an amazing novel.

----------


## curlyqlink

Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason. We can conceive of St.Paul or even our Lord Himself drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking a cigarette, or a churchwarden. Earnest could not deny this, and admitted that Paul would almost certainly have condemned tobacco in good round terms if he had known of its existence.

--_The Way of All Flesh_, Samuel Butler

----------


## Jeremiah Jazzz

'Truth hath no confine'
-Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

----------


## bouquin

_'Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'Be honest and poor, by all means - but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'I must look down upon any thing contented with obscurity when it might rise to distinction.'_

----------


## Maletbon

I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired.

from H.M.S Surprise by Patrick OBrian

For lovers of literature, and sea stories, Patty O is freakin sweet. As you can tell, his humor can be wicked.

----------


## Silas Thorne

'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

----------


## Virgil

_The Death of Virgil: A Novel_ by Hermann Broch, Translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer.

This is one long stream of conscious of Virgil's (yes, the Roman poet) last hours before his death. It supposed to be a great novel by an Austrian writer, but frankly I'm not finding it so great. Well, here's a sample sentence.




> The heavy portal of fear had sprung open and behind it the cavern of horror reared up, mighty, and all-encompassing. Something unkown, fearful, ghastly, assailing him simultaneously from within and without, ripped him up; a sudden malignant outbreak, superlatively painful, tore him aloft with all the devastating, convulsive, stiflingly desperate force inherent in the first lightening-and-thunderclap of a rising storm; thus chokingly it drove into him, death-dealing, death-threatening, yet the seconds follwed hard upon each other enriched in flashes the empty space between them with that inconceivable thing called life, and it seemed to him as if hope blinked up once again in those flashes while, with the fleetness of breath or a glance, he was being torn aloft in the clutch of the iron hand; it seemed to him that all this was happening so that the neglected, the lost, the unfinished might still be retrieved if only in this instant of renewed second wind; overcome as he was by pain, by fear, by torpor, he knew not whether it was hope or no hope, but he did know that every second of new-lived life was needful and momentous, he knew he had been hounded for the sake of this up-flickering of life, whether it lasted a short or a long time, chased up and away from the couch of torpor; he knew he had to escape the breath-lack of the narrow-walled and shut-in room, that once more he must send his glance outward, turned away from himself, turned away from the zones of himself, turned away from the dreary field of death, that once more, for a single time, perhaps for the last time, he must come to comprehend the vastness of life, he must, oh he must again behold the stars; and starkly lift up from the bed, held in the clutching fist that gripped into his whole body and yet grasped him from without, he moved himself with stiff-jointed legs, like a marionette conveyed on wires, uncertainly as though on stilts, back to the window against the frame of which he leaned exhausted, a little bent over because of his weakness but despite this held upright so that, as with elbows drawn back he satisfied his hunger for air with deep regular breaths, his being might disclose itself anew, participating in the breath-stream of the yearned-back spheres.


Yes, that sentence is that long.  :Sick:  And that is a typical sentence in the book. In fact that's one of the better ones. One sentence actually went for almost two pages long. I don't know if I'm going to finish this novel. Perhaps I'll have to slug through.

----------


## mona amon

LOL, Vigil, I'm curious to know how many pages that novel has!

I'm reading Pickwick Papers.




> 'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.'
> 
> 'Ah! I see- in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, sir?'
> 
> 'An observer of human nature, sir,' said Mr. Pickwick.
> 
> 'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get. Poet, sir?'
> 
> 'My friend, Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn.' said Mr. Pickwick.
> ...


 :FRlol:

----------


## bazarov

There are two types of human - kind and animalistic. First will try to achieve happiness for him and for the whole world; and a second one will try achieve his happiness but he will be ready to destroy happiness of all the world for that.

----------


## Tallon

> At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night. When the young men serenaded only the flute was forbidden. Why, i had asked. Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night. The peasant all called you "Don" and when you met them they took off their hats. His father hunted everyday and stopped to eat at the houses of peasant. They were always honored. For a foreigner to hunt he must present a certificate that he had never been arrested. There were bears on the Gran Sasso D'Italia but it was a long way. Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good because they fed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses. After a while i went to sleep.


A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemmingway.

----------


## AshleyMare

"It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into th golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the wierdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy."
-Page 300 from the Historian by Elizabeth Kostovo

----------


## Terror Firmer

A book I just finished *Blind Voices* by Tom Reamy...

The boys tiptoed to the cot, barely breathing. A noise reached their ears, a rustling of bedclothes, and a darker darkness rose from the cot. Jack made a little squeeking noise deep in his throat and they backed away until they bumped against the wall.

"Angel?" Finney said in an almost inaudible whisper.

There was movement from the cot. A match struck, momentarily blinding them. They squinted and pressed against the wall. The match moved to a candle. The lighted candle was lifted and the light fell on a mass of snakes writhing over a pair of glittering eyes.

Finney and Jack shrieked and grabbed each other. They hid their eyes, turned their backs and hunkered against the wall, feeling their flesh already turning to stone. Medusa sat on the cot, watching them curiously.

Finney slowly raised his arm and peeked out with one eye. Jack's arm was only an inch away. It looked , not a bit like stone. Then Jack's arm lowered slightly, uncovering his round eye.They stared at each other in amazement. They turned hesitantly, ready to flee if necessary, and saw the Medusa sitting motionless on her cot watching them.

"I looked at her and I didn't turn to stone," Jack said with a slow exhalation.

"I guess that part of it was just a myth after all," Finney said with some disappointed, "but she's certainly a real Medusa all right."

"How do you know?" Jack asked doubtfully. "She didn't turn us to stone."

Finney sighed and looked at him sideways. "If she was a fake she'd take her snakes off before she went to bed, wouldn't she?"

Jack twisted his mouth, thinking seriously. "Yeah, you're right," he said. "She's a real Medusa, sure enough."

They looked around the wagon. The mermaid floated in her tank, possibly asleep, but appearing to be dead. Beyond her the snake woman lay coiled in her cage.

"Look, Finney!" Jack hissed in excitement. "The Snake Goddess! I want to get a closer look."

"We're supposed to be looking for Angel, Jack," Finney said impatiently, feeling slightly betrayed.

"We've got time to look at the Snake Goddess, haven't we?" Jack demanded, arching his eyebrows.

Finney rolled his eyes and nodded reluctantly.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Jack said to the Medusa, his voice cracking. "Pardon us for bustin'in. We were lookin' for Angel and we got the wrong wagon. Is it all right if we take a closer look at the Snake Goddess?"

"And could you tell us which wagon Angel is in?" Finney added.

The Medusa looked from one to the other, moving her whole head instead of just her eyes. Her face showed only curiousity. Jack and Finney looked at each other.

Jack jerked his head and they moved cautiously to the snake woman's cage, casting wary glances at the Medusa. The snake woman was asleep, but stirred at their approach, candlelight sparkling dully on her gun-metal scales. Medusa followed them with her fascinated gaze, moving nothing but her head. Finney and Jack knelt down and pressed their faces against the bars. The snake woman looked back at them, her silver hair cresting over her head like a startled cockatoo. Her coils shifted slightly and she moved closer to them, her head making quick, birdlike movements. She watched them for a moment, then reached out her little hand and placed it delicately on Jack's brown grubby fingers, grasping one of the bars.

"Hey!" he breathed. "She likes me."

He suddenly reached up and unfastened the latch of the cage.

"You shouldn't do that," Finney protested.

"Ssssssh!" Jack hissed and opened the cage door. The snake woman looked at him expectantly. Jack reached his hand in.

Then Medusa stood up and went to them, leaning over to see what they were doing. Finney and Jack both jerked their heads around and stared into the nest of snakes two inches from their noses. Jack slammed the cage door and they bolted. They clattered across the wagon floor and clumped down the steps and were in the street before they even slowed down.

Medusa turned and watched them go with startled eyes. She heard a squeak behind her and twisted her head around. The door of the snake woman's cage opened slowly under its own weight. One hinge made a thin, rusty protest. The snake woman watched the opening door and swayed slightly. She hesitated for a moment, then flowed from the cage, across the floor, through the wagon door and down the steps, holding her little arms before her, rushing to the meet the night.

Medusa watched her leave and nothing moved but her head.

I'll probably post another episode later from the novel.

----------


## bazarov

''Ideas will come; if you think about things enough.''
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath

----------


## Silas Thorne

Kress and van Leewen, 2006 'Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design'




> Real authors and real readers we cannot ultimately know. This bracketing out of real authors and real readers carries the risk of forgetting that texts, literary and artistic texts as much as mass media texts, are produced in the context of real social institutions, in order to play a very real role in social life  in order to do certain things to or for their readers, and in order to communicate attitudes towards aspects of social life and towards people who participate in them, whether authors and readers are consciously aware of this or not.

----------


## Virgil

> LOL, Vigil, I'm curious to know how many pages that novel has!


Almost five hundred, and I've read a little over a hundred. I can't make up m mind if I should continue.

----------


## wron

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth: That all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her upon the treacherous, slavish shore.

----------


## Dr. Hill

> There are two types of human - kind and animalistic. First will try to achieve happiness for him and for the whole world; and a second one will try achieve his happiness but he will be rady to destroy happiness of all the world for that.


Is that worth a read?

----------


## bazarov

> Is that worth a read?


Yes, of course.

----------


## JimmyRow

The Sun Over Breda - Auturo Perez Reverte

"Colonels always arrive midmorning," he said, and from his cold, gray-green eyes it was impossible to know whether he was speaking seriously or in jest. "Which is why we ourselves must get up so early."

----------


## Emil Miller

From A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh.

'But you know I've felt low for weeks now... bloody low...how about some brandy?'
'Yes, why not? After all there are other things in life besides women and pigs.'

----------


## Dark Muse

A Room With A View ~ E. M. Forster




> "The Garden of Eden," pursued Mr. Emerson, still descending, "which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies." 
> Mr. Bebe disclamied placing the Garden of Eden anywhere.
> "In this-not in other things-we men are ahead. We despise our bodies less than women do. But not until we are comrades shall we enter the garden."

----------


## mystery_spell

From _King Lear_ by William Shakespeare:

"Might I but live to see thee in my touch,/I'd say I had eyes again."

"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:/Had I your tongue and eyes, I'd use them so/That heaven's vaults should crack. She's gone for ever!"

"Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/According to my bond; no more nor less."

----------


## Dark Muse

A Room With a View ~ E.M. Forster




> "There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light," he continued in measured tones. "We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; becasue the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do very much harm-yes choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."

----------


## Zee.

" ' Oh. Brown. Yes. Tall, young. Dark complected; women folks calls him handsome, a right smart do, i hear tell. A big hand for laughing and frolicking and playing jokes on folks. But I...' His voice ceases, He cannot look at her, feeling her steady, sober gaze upon his face.
' Joe Brown ' she says, ' Has he got a little white scar right here by his mouth? '
And he cannot look at her, and he sits there on the stacked lumber when it is too late, and he could have bitten his tongue in two. "


Any guesses?

----------


## weltanschauung

m.foucault- history of sexuality

----------


## bouquin

_'This is what is called speaking... When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'But we have so much to be thankful for. Time makes us grow old, but it also gives us the day and the night.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'... to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next._

--------------------------------------------------------
_Every life is inexplicable ... No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge - none of that tells us very much._

----------


## Pewnut

_Blood Meridian_ by Cormac McCarthy

*"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."*

*"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."*

*"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way is was and will be. That way and not some other way."*

*"When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf."*

----------


## andave_ya

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life by C.S. Lewis

"And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say _It is_. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to "have it again" was the supreme and only important object of desire."

"All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be.'"

"A fear that guarded the road to Faerie was one I could face. No one is a coward at all points."

----------


## Remarkable

"To kill a mocingbird" ~ Harper Lee

"...Atticus,he was real nice..."

----------


## Remarkable

"To kill a mockingbird" ~ Harper Lee

"...Atticus,he was real nice..."
His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover,tucking it around me.
"Most people are,Scout,when you finally see them."

----------


## Cat_Brenners

Mine is a Thesaurus so it's too hard to pick a quote.
Cat

----------


## Dark Muse

Paradise Lost ~ Milton




> O shame to men! Devil with Devil damn'd 
> firm conrod holds, men only disagree 
> of creatures rational, though under hope
> of heavenly Grace: and God procliaming peace,
> yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
> among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
> wasting the Earth, each other to destroy:
> as it (which might induct us to accord)
> man had not hellish foes enow besides,
> that day and night for his distruction wait.

----------


## Silas Thorne

> Mine is a Thesaurus so it's too hard to pick a quote.
> Cat


Don't read your thesaurus. It's a story with no end. Every word finds a new one.  :Smile:

----------


## semi-fly

You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, _The Sorrows of Young Werther_

----------


## HumanScream

"All this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud." 
- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

----------


## wron

I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices
From peak snow-diademed to regal star;
Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices,
The pregnant voices of the Things That Are,

The Here, the Now, the vast Forlorn around us;
The gold-delirium, the ferine strife;
The lusts that lure us on, the hates that hound us;
Our red rags in the patch-work quilt of Life.

Robert W. Service

----------


## oopsycandy

If the cult of the head had survived into Jesus' time among the Nazarites, and members of this sect continued the ritual removal and embalming of heads 'touched by the hand of God', then (as the leader of the sect, and as acknowledged Messiah) it is logical to assume that Jesus' own head would have been taken after his death and kept as a relic.
Keith Laidler The Divine Deception

----------


## Zee.

" Most people depend heavily on their sense of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch something they know it's real. And it is not an accident that we describe the deepest parts of ourselves - our emotions - in terms of the sense of touch. Sad tales touch our feelings. Bad situations irritate us or hurt us. This is an inevitable result of the fact that we are biological organisms...

You must fight and change this orientation. You're intelligent creatures - each of you has a brain. Use it. Use it to recognize danger.
Use it to train yourself to stay alive. "

----------


## semi-fly

Behold the monster with the pointed tail,
Who cleaves the hills, and breaketh walls and weapons,
Behold him who infecteth all the world.
Dante Alighieri, _The Inferno_ 
Canto XVII, lines 1-3

----------


## Emil Miller

'Admirable! And then there is the Press. We must ring up the Flint and Denbigh Herald and get them to send a photographer. That means whisky.
Will you see to that Philbrick? I remember at one of our sports I omitted to offer whisky to the Press, and the result was a most unfortunate photograph.
Boys do get into such indelicate positions during the obstacle race, don't they?

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

----------


## vsopvs

«Droll thing life is- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself  that comes too late  a crop of unextinguishable regrets.» - Heart Of Darkness

----------


## JarethDrakul

"It doesn't matter what they say about me, and it doesn't matter what they say about you. Some people are set apart from everyone else, Cassie. But whatever they say about you, they can never truly hurt you...be true to youself"

The Unwanted by John Saul

----------


## aBIGsheep

Being interesting has been replaced with being identifiable.

----------


## semi-fly

My grandpa always said that asking questions is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.
Haruki Murakami, _Kafka on the Shore_

----------


## Phangirl7

"She is singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!"
-Erik, Phantom of the Opera

----------


## bailo

The Moon and Sixpence by Maugham:

"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."

----------


## rimbaud

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face.

O.Wilde "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

----------


## JoeLopp

Zoran Zivkovic, _Line On The Palm_ (from: _Steps Through The Mist_)




> I carefully examined the client at my door. This is extremely important in my work. A person's outward appearance says a lot about his future. Or rather, about what he would like to hear about his future.

----------


## semi-fly

Marriage...a dead state carried over into and existing still among the living like two shadows chained together with the show of a chain.
William Faulkner, _Light in August_

----------


## bouquin

_'But soon we shall die ... and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'_

----------


## Emil Miller

Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: 'Of course I've got one,' he insisted,'--a man can't live without a moral code. Mine is that I'm against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.'

----------


## hellsapoppin

Michener's *Fires of Spring* hit me like a ton of bricks. It is an extraordinary book that I strongly recommend. Here is a quote for your consideration:


_tell yourself the truth ... you'll be miles ahead of those who live on dreams_

----------


## Phangirl7

This is from Phantom of the Opera. The original novel which I am almost done reading for the 6th or 7th time.

"Three weeks later, the Epoque published this advertisement: Erik is dead."
P.G.7.

----------


## Moloko87

"Hold on tight, I'll pull you in. Don't let go. Pull with your eyes while I pull with my hands. In a few seconds you'll be aboard and we'll be together."

I love that line.

----------


## Lokasenna

Currently reading the Merchant of Venice, so:

"To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

Sigh... I'd love to play Shylock on the stage...

----------


## bailo

I'm reading Don DeLillo and I love how he writes so i've got a bunch. but one is:

"The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in ****face fear."

and

"He imagined the sound waves passing over the land and lapping forward in time, over weeks and months, cross-country, eventually becoming the gentlest sort of rockabye rhythm in a small safe room where a mother nurses a baby and a man stands with his arm over his head, a research fellow, not in fear of shattered plaster and flying glass but only to draw down the shade-- the sky is going dark, and a tangy savor drifts from the kitchen, and there is music in the house."

Underworld by Don DeLillo

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## bouquin

_Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness._

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## semi-fly

I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increase enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.
- William S. Burroughs, _Junky_

----------


## Eugenie

The Age of Fable:

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
by the known laws of ancient liberty,
When straight a arbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cucoos, asses apes and dogs,
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latonia' s twin progeny,
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.

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## semi-fly

Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move it.
- William S. Burroughs, Junky

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## Tsuyoiko

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."

- Jack Kerouac, _On the Road_

----------


## Idril

From the story, "The Church in Novograd" in the collection called _Red Cavalry_ by Isaac Babel:




> "Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixtion. Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican."

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## bouquin

_'I'd take all your troubles from you if I could ... and give you mine instead... Mine you wouldn't find so bad. Other people's troubles never are.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_How do you wake up in the morning if you've never been to sleep?_

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## optimisticnad

> _'I'd take all your troubles from you if I could ... and give you mine instead... Mine you wouldn't find so bad. Other people's troubles never are.'_[/I]


Man that's a great line!

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## seanlol

"In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister."

- Jodi Picoult, _My Sister's Keeper_

----------


## jon1jt

> "Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."
> 
> - Jack Kerouac, _On the Road_


Beautiful quote.

*
*

*"One afternoon we were drinking beer, and then we changed to Courvoisier brandy. Then Neal, Jack and a few others started playing baseball in the yard. This time Jack played right field, Neal was pitcher...and I covered first base! It was hilarious, none of us were "feeling any pain," and the game did not last long. Then Tyne suggested we eat. We had a ball sitting on that wonderful porch, looking out at beautiful Lake St. Clair. Jack wrote about it all in On The Road but his editor, Malcolm Cowley, cut out most of what he wrote about his Detroit visits and changed the name of Lake St. Clair to Lake Michigan, which is clear across the state from Grosse Pointe."*

You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac
by Edie Kerouac-Parker

----------


## Anarchy Device

From Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg


"The people will have their light-and every center of habitation goes up in flames! There is the end of the world you used to live in."

----------


## Chava

"She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her, and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complementary vibration in him."

Tender is the Night, F.S. Fitzgerald

----------


## Sapphire

_Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure_
The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years. 
(Ch1, P16)

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## bouquin

_"To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."_

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## Phangirl7

Here's one from a short story called The People of Sound and Slag. One of 20-some stories in a Science-fiction anthology I'm reading.
Last line actually:
"Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled it's shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it."

I hated that story, but this line was it's one redeeming quality.
P.G.7.

----------


## MilksABadChoice

Not things I'm currently reading, but I just recently have finished.

*2001: A Space Odyssey*
"After ten thousand years, man had at last found something as exciting as war."

*High Fidelity*
"Anyway. Here's how not to plan a career: a) split up with girlfriend: b) junk college; c) go to work in record shop; d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven't let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can't is kind of the point of them). I'm stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, for ever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, ort he nearest abattoir. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way."

*Winter Dreams*
Im nobody, he answered. My career is largely a matter of futures.

----------


## Stella Mica

'A bell was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of light from the opened door, and the smoking and the steaming of the heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.'

Dickens, 'Bleak House'

say what you will about Dickens, he can write beautifully when he wants to -- 

Good night, too late for me!

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## rtc143

"And so we beat on, boats against the current..." 

The Great Gatsby~Fitzgerald

----------


## Dark Muse

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 





> Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look to the east at sunset, you can see the night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, a little black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, bushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it is heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.

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## bazarov

Herman Melville - Moby Dick




> However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

----------


## PoeticPassions

"To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit, the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions."

_Les Miserables_, Victor Hugo

and (from the same novel)
(after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo)

"It was Napoleon, still trying to go forward, the giant somnambulist of a shattered dream."

----------


## hampusforev

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free."

----------


## Sapphire

Still _Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure_
I can't bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way! It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!
(Part 5, p309)

----------


## The Comedian

Buddha -- Osamu Tezuka

----------


## Scheherazade

_"I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, or make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak and erring pal, or make 'em think you're God-Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to give 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try tto improve their minds."_

from _All the King's Men_ by Robert Penn Warren

----------


## Dark Muse

From All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren




> I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle of the floor. And kept moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: _Flee, all is discovered_. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you here that thar is gold in then-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

----------


## mmmmmm

"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."

_All Quiet on the Western front_ Remarque.

yeah, i just finished it

----------


## Reccura

_Come not between the dragon and his wrath._ - King Lear

_I do desire we may be better strangers._ - As You Like It

----------


## Zee.

“The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.”

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## bouquin

_'Sometimes, when I felt real mean, and got to wondering why things are so queerly fixed in the world, I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere.'_

----------


## Tsuyoiko

""Dreadful crimes? But I can assure you that crimes just as dreadful, and probably more horrible, have occurred before our times, and at all times, and not only here in Russia, but everywhere else as well. And in my opinion it is not at all likely that such murders will cease to occur for a very long time to come. The only difference is that in former times there was less publicity, while now everyone talks and writes freely about such things--which fact gives the impression that such crimes have only now sprung into existence. That is where your mistake lies--an extremely natural mistake, I assure you, my dear fellow!" said Prince S."

_The Idiot_ by Dostoevsky

I've said pretty much the same thing so many times when people go on about how terrible it is nowadays.

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## Desolation

"- Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. - There's nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom." 

From _The Vanishing American Hobo_ by Jack Kerouac

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## Tsuyoiko

"Occasionally I was so much better that I could go out; but the streets used to put me in such a rage that I would lock myself up for days rather than go out, even if I were well enough to do so! I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice--that's what it is--they are all full of malice, malice!"

_The Idiot_ by Dostoevsky

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## prendrelemick

Reading, The Eye of the Leopard, by Henning Mankell. ( the Inspector Wallender author) 

Its a a book with almost nothing quotable in it. But here goes;

In our time the journeys have ceased, he thinks. Like stones with passports we are flung in giant catapults across the world. Time allotted to us is no more than that of our fore-fathers, but we have augmented it with our technology.

----------


## electricpenguin

Child Ballad #93, _Lamkin_.

I'd quote the whole thing if I could. The eponymous stonemason Lamkin has build Lord Wearie a castle, but Lord Wearie has refused to pay him for the work. With the Lord away at sea, Lamkin, with the help of the 'fause nourice', has broken into his house and tourtured his baby son in an attempt to get the Lady of the castle to come down from her room. This verse appears after a tension-building exchange between the nurse and the Lady:

'O the firsten step she steppit,
she steppit on a stane;
But the neisten step she steppit,
she met him -- Lamkin.'

See the variants at: http://www.peterrobins.co.uk/ballads/list/titles.html

See the text with accompanying essay at: http://cfmb.icaap.org/content/36.1/BV36.1art10.pdf

EP  :Biggrin:

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## Tsuyoiko

"We sometimes have strange, impossible dreams, contrary to all the laws of nature. When we awake we remember them and wonder at their strangeness. You remember, perhaps, that you were in full possession of your reason during this succession of fantastic images; even that you acted with extraordinary logic and cunning while surrounded by murderers who hid their intentions and made great demonstrations of friendship, while waiting for an opportunity to cut your throat. You remember how you escaped them by some ingenious stratagem; then you doubted if they were really deceived, or whether they were only pretending not to know your hiding-place; then you thought of another plan and hoodwinked them once again. You remember all this quite clearly, but how is it that your reason calmly accepted all the manifest absurdities and impossibilities that crowded into your dream? One of the murderers suddenly changed into a woman before your very eyes; then the woman was transformed into a hideous, cunning little dwarf; and you believed it, and accepted it all almost as a matter of course--while at the same time your intelligence seemed unusually keen, and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and logic! Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained some real idea, something that belongs to your true life,--something that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. It has left a deep impression upon you, joyful or cruel, but what it means, or what has been predicted to you in it, you can neither understand nor remember."

_The Idiot_ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

----------


## Lynne Fees

"Now, we have noticed that judges usually so arrange matters that the day upon which they hold court is also the day on which they are out of temper, in order that they may always have some one upon whom to vent their rage, in the name of the king, law and justice."

I was amazed at how well this 178-year-old quote described one of the judges before whom I practice law :Tongue:

----------


## Lynne Fees

> Here is a thread to share the sections you like in the book you are reading at the moment.
> 
> I have been reading _The Name of the Rose_, which I find a little hard because it is full of religious references (Christianity), some of which I don't understand (practical) and some of which I don't care about (historical). However, it is a good book to make one consider and reconsider blind obedience to religion -or any teaching for that matter. 
> 
> Here are some quotes I really like:


I've never heard of this book. Who wrote it and when?

----------


## blp

'But that perfect happiness is a contemplative activity will appear from the following consideration as well. We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks because it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, every one supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.'

----------


## qimissung

> "Now, we have noticed that judges usually so arrange matters that the day upon which they hold court is also the day on which they are out of temper, in order that they may always have some one upon whom to vent their rage, in the name of the king, law and justice."
> 
> I was amazed at how well this 178-year-old quote described one of the judges before whom I practice law



 :FRlol:

----------


## qimissung

_Book One: Italy:_

"How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her."

_Book Two: India:_

"I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water."

_ Book Three: Bali:_

' "Ketut, why is life all crazy like this?" I asked my medicine man...He replied, "Bhuta ia, dewa ia."
"What does that mean?"
"Man is demon. Man is god. Both true." '

----------


## jinjang

Two quotes from _Stone Diaries_ by Carol Shields

"All that was the matter with her was nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness."

"The real troubles in the world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women."

I could apply the second quote to "the misalignment between money and time."

----------


## JBI

> Two quotes from _Stone Diaries_ by Carol Shields
> 
> "All that was the matter with her was nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness."
> 
> "The real troubles in the world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women."
> 
> I could apply the second quote to "the misalignment between money and time."


How is that book? I should read it, but haven't gotten around to it.

----------


## jinjang

I would compare that with the book _Middlemarch_ by George Eliot, but shorter, less number of characters and events. It is about the whole life of Daisy Goodwill who marries two times and becomes a successful columnist on gardening and others. The author describes well Daisy's inner developments. I would disappoint you if I say, except a few quotes and events, I may not read it again. I will remember it with warmth.

----------


## K.K.

> I've never heard of this book. Who wrote it and when?


The Name of the Rose was written in the 14th century by Umberto Eco. It was originally written in Italian, and it is a murder-mystery type of book set at a monastery.
(that my be over-reducing it a bit-- but it gives you an idea.)  :Wink:

----------


## weltanschauung

_"generally we call cruelty that which we do not have the heart to endure, while that which we endure easily, which is ordinary to us, does not seem cruel. thus what we call cruelty is always that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it as soon as it is ours. such weakness suppress nothing but make it a difficult task for anyone who seeks in these byways the hidden movement of the human heart." 


"this is not an apology for horrible things, it is not a call for their return. but in this inexplicable impasse where we move in vain, these interruptions - which are only seemingly promises of resolution, which in the end promise us nothing but to be caught in the trap - contain all the truth of emotion in the instant of ravishment: that is, emotion, if the sense of life is inscribed therein, cannot be subordinated to any useful end. emotion that is not tied to the opening of horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night. art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts art without harm at the height of the worst and reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the opening onto all possibility. that is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the vicinity of death."_ 
georges bataille - the cruel practice of art

----------


## jinjang

> georges bataille - the cruel practice of art


Those were great quotes and I will add that book in my reading list. I just started rereading _Death in Venice_ by Mann.

Introduction by Michael Cunningham to "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann"

"A novel in its earliest form, before it begins to be rendered into language, is a cloud of sorts that hovers over the writer's head, a mystery born with clues to its own meanings but also, at its heart, insoluble. One hopes- a novel is inevitably an expression of unreasonable hopes- that the finished book will contain not only characters and scenes but a certain larger truth, though that truth, whatever it may be, is impossible to express fully in words. It has to do with the fact that writer and reader both know, beneath the level of active consciousness, something about being alive and being mortal, and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us. We are creatures whose innate knowledge exceeds that which can be articulated. Although language is enormously powerful, it is concrete, and so it can't help but miniaturize, to a certain extent, that which we simply know. All the writers I respect want to write a book so penetrating and thorough, so compassionate and unrelenting, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the spectacle of life itself. And all writers I respect seem to know (though no one likes to talk about it) that our efforts are doomed from the outset. Life is bigger than literature."

----------


## weltanschauung

> Those were great quotes and I will add that book in my reading list. I just started rereading _Death in Venice_ by Mann.
> 
> Introduction by Michael Cunningham to "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann"
> 
> "A novel in its earliest form, before it begins to be rendered into language, is a cloud of sorts that hovers over the writer's head, a mystery born with clues to its own meanings but also, at its heart, insoluble. One hopes- a novel is inevitably an expression of unreasonable hopes- that the finished book will contain not only characters and scenes but a certain larger truth, though that truth, whatever it may be, is impossible to express fully in words. It has to do with the fact that writer and reader both know, beneath the level of active consciousness, something about being alive and being mortal, and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us. We are creatures whose innate knowledge exceeds that which can be articulated. Although language is enormously powerful, it is concrete, and so it can't help but miniaturize, to a certain extent, that which we simply know. All the writers I respect want to write a book so penetrating and thorough, so compassionate and unrelenting, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the spectacle of life itself. And all writers I respect seem to know (though no one likes to talk about it) that our efforts are doomed from the outset. Life is bigger than literature."


check this out: http://www.sauer-thompson.com/essays...elPractice.pdf

ive heard a lot about death in venice, the book. i did watch the movie and was very disappointed at the acting, though.

----------


## Mortis Anarchy

"A degenerate. A filthy degenerate! Arthus, please, for my sake. I know. I know. Leave your brother alone. Please. Brother???) -- O god, theyll bug me. They know I cant stay down. They know it. Nothing to see. To look at. Why me? Why wont somebody help me. I dont want to be alone. I cant stand it. Please help me. At least Goldie has bennie. I cant stay down. Always alone. O jesus, jesus jesus...why me??? Mommy? Mommy? O god I need something. Those sick johns. Always? I dont want to be straight. I just need something. I/ll go crazy. Theyre keeping me down. Down. Why do they want to kill me?"

-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.

(All punctuation is straight out of the book--I had to backspace so many times to type it correctly!) :Smile:

----------


## Rococo

I've been reading "Heart of Darkness" these past few days. The description at the beginning of the book struck me as being very beautiful:

"The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun"

- god, i wish i could write like that! It just brings the most vivid, beautiful images to mind.

----------


## Scheherazade

_Happy people exist too. Why should not they?

...

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

...

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you._

from _American Pastoral_ by Philip Roth

----------


## parapony

"I consider anybody who borrows a book instead of buying it, or lends one, a twerp. When I was a student at Shortridge High School a million years ago, a twerp was defined as a guy who put a set of false teeth up hes rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs.

But I hasten to say, should some impressionable young person here tonight, at loose ends and from a dysfunctional family, resolve to take a shot at being a real twerp tomorrow, that there are no longer buttons on the back seats of taxi-cabs. Times change!"

Armageddon Revisited, Kurt Vonnegut

----------


## bouquin

_"We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have more money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him."_

----------


## Tsuyoiko

"I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with 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 completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws"

- _Madame Bovary_ by Gustave Flaubert

----------


## Dark Muse

The Agony and the Ecstasy ~ Irving Stone




> His first lesson had been that the power and the durablity lay in the stone, not in the arms or tools. The stone was master; not the mason. If ever a mason came to think he was master, the stone would oppose and twart him. And if a mason beat his stone and an ignorant contadino might beat his beasts, the rich warm glowing breathing material became dull, colorless, ugly; died under his hand. To kicks and curses, to hurry and dislike, it closed a hard stone veil around its soft inner nature. It could be smashed by violence but never forced to fullfill. To sympathy, it yielded: grew even more luminous and sparkling, acheived fluid forms and symmetry.

----------


## Tsuyoiko

"Something stronger than herself forced her to him"

- _Madame Bovary_

----------


## Dark Muse

From Passing by Nella Larsen 




> She didn't like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudly as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all soft, as like April, as possible.

----------


## Phangirl7

From the Watchmen graphice novel:
"The world will look up and shout 'save us!', and I'll look down and whisper, "No."
-Rorscach
P.G.7.

----------


## King314

"I reached down to feel my knee, but it wasn't there. I reached further and found my knee in my shin." A Farewell to Arms

----------


## Pewnut

> The Name of the Rose was written in the 14th century by Umberto Eco. It was originally written in Italian, and it is a murder-mystery type of book set at a monastery.
> (that my be over-reducing it a bit-- but it gives you an idea.)


I think you mean "the story takes place in the 14th century"? Because _The Name of the Rose_ was published in 1980...

----------


## Mics

I hate intro posts so I figured that this would be a good place to start on the forum  :Smile: 

_"...I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for a millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves."
_
--_Fugitive Pieces_ by Anne Michaels

----------


## lilith44

"If he is not the word of God, God never spoke."

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

----------


## Lekter

I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Hunter S. Thompson

----------


## IJustMadeThatUp

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.

The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

----------


## bouquin

_Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known._

----------


## curlyqlink

Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No one asks your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.

--_The Kindly Ones_, Jonathan Littell

----------


## Dionido

"I was always embarassed by the words _sacred, glorious,_ and _sacrifice_ and the expression _in vain_. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot ... and we had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, ...and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything."

from _A Farewell to Arms_

----------


## Tsuyoiko

"Orthographical
Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry."

- James Joyce, _Ulysses_

----------


## Adagio

"I am that very insect, brother, and those words are precisely about me. And all of us Karamazovs are like that, and in you, an angel, the same insect lives and stirs up storms in your blood. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, more than a storm! Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it's undefinable, and cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles."

- The Brothers Karamazov

----------


## BlackPuma

Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?
-Netherland by Joseph O'Neil

----------


## lichtrausch

"Als Oskar nach Hause kam, stand das Mittagessen schon auf dem Tisch: Falschen Hasen gab es mit Salzkartoffeln, Rotkohl und zum Nachtisch Schokoladenpudding mit Vanillesoße. Matzerath ließ kein Wörtchen hören. Oskars Mama war während des Essens mit den Gedanken woanders. Dafür gab es am Nachmittag einen Familienkrach wegen Eifersucht und Polnischer Post. Gegen Abend bot ein erfrischendes Gewitter mit Wolkenbruch und wunderschön trommelndem Hagel eine längere Vorstellung. Oskars erschöpftes Blech durfte ruhen und zuhören."

- Die Blechtrommel, Günter Grass

----------


## Eryk

> "Als Oskar nach Hause kam, stand das Mittagessen schon auf dem Tisch: Falschen Hasen gab es mit Salzkartoffeln, Rotkohl und zum Nachtisch Schokoladenpudding mit Vanillesoße. Matzerath ließ kein Wörtchen hören. Oskars Mama war während des Essens mit den Gedanken woanders. Dafür gab es am Nachmittag einen Familienkrach wegen Eifersucht und Polnischer Post. Gegen Abend bot ein erfrischendes Gewitter mit Wolkenbruch und wunderschön trommelndem Hagel eine längere Vorstellung. Oskars erschöpftes Blech durfte ruhen und zuhören."
> 
> - Die Blechtrommel, Günter Grass


Just for fun, I went to Google Translate and translated this from German to French to English:

"Oskar at home, lunch was already on the table: faux rabbit with salt, there were potatoes, red cabbage and chocolate sauce dessert vanilla pudding. Matzerath suggested no word. Oskars Mom was in dinner with the thoughts elsewhere. To do this, there was the afternoon, a family of noise because of jealousy and the Polish position. In the evening, offered a refreshing with storm clouds break and beautiful trommelndem hail a long presentation. Oskars exhausted plate could rest and listen. "

----------


## BlackPuma

That virtue which requires to be ever guarded, is scarcely worth the sentinel
- Vicar of Wakefield by, Oliver Goldsmith

----------


## Dark Muse

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence 




> As for the certain greif he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being ahere to humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He loved now the soft, delicate vegitation, that was so cool and perfect. He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state.





> What a dread he had of mankind, of other people! It amounted almost to horror. To a sort of dream terror--his horror of being observed by some other poeple. If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegitation and be quite happy and unquestioned, by himself.

----------


## JoBourne

I have been reading Tanith Lee's 'Saint Fire' and 'Faces Under Water'. Eloquent books with beautiful cadence. The matrix of the words is just lovely.

Not baggage now, but bleeding men were being carried up the passages and stairs of Santa Lallo Lacrima's sister-house.

The nuns pressed back against stone walls. They were in awe. Less at the gravity of wounds, the largess of damage, than at this general peacefulness. Even men writhing in agony, turning to say through pain-black lips, "Bless you, sister, for your charity."

----------


## Dark Muse

I love Birkin! Almost everything he says captures the essence of my own beleifs and philsophy at least in regaurds to the human race. 

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrecne 




> Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human begins hanging on the bush--and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall apples. It isn't true that they have any significance--their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.





> I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do. Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest and charity is the greatest--and see what they are doing all the time. By their own works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.





> It's a lie to say that love is the greatest. You might as well say that hate is the greatest, since the opposite of everything balances. What people want is hate--hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love, they get it. They distill themselves with nitro-glycerine, all the lot of them, out of very love. It is the lie that kills. If we want hate let us have it--death, murder, torture, violent destruction--let us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished to-morrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of moral lies.





> Do you think that creation depends on man! It merely doesn't. There are the trees and the grass and the birds. I much prefer to think of a lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. Man is a mistake, he must go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels to go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't interrupt them--and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.





> If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvelously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation--like the ictchyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;--things straight out of the fire.


This just sums up the essence of the misantrhope so perfectly.

----------


## whatsername

> I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.





> I asked myself whether there was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action.


The Moon and Sixpence - W. Somerset Maugham

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## amarna

> The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.





> 'The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.'


Flann O'Brien: "The Third Policeman". I love this book so much!

----------


## Mr Endon

'Is it about a bicycle?'

----------


## Dark Muse

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence 




> Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without and real significance.How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be found? No flowers grow on busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a rotary motion, mechanized, cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for in life--it was the same in countries, and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look out onto the great dark sky of death with emotion, as one had looked out the class room window as a child, and seen perfect freedom on the outside. Now one was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner in this sordid vast edifice of life, and there is no escape, save in death. 
> 
> But what a joy! What gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea they turned into a murderous alley, and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they claimed too, shared it up, parceled it out to certain owners, they trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep between spiky walls to the labyrinth of life. 
> 
> But the great dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in the face of it.
> 
> How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward too. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that his remained to look forward to, the pure inhumanness of death. 
> 
> Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward to like heirs to their majority.

----------


## amarna

> "So they've done it to us," said the cleaning woman to Mr. Svejk. "They've
> killed our Ferdinand."
> 
> Svejk had been discharged from military service years ago when a military
> medical commission had pronounced him to be officially an imbecile. Now, he
> was making his living by selling dogs, ugly mongrel mutants that he sold as
> purebreds by forging their pedigrees. In addition to this demeaning
> vocation, Svejk also suffered from rheumatism and was just now rubbing his
> aching knees with camphor ice.
> ...


Hasek: Good Soldier Svejk

----------


## Cassandra-lee

I'm reading Oryx and Crake and I really like these quotes:
_"These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away."_

"Why is it that he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?"

----------


## tailor STATELY

The Founding Fathers of the USA held Cicero (106-43 B.C.) in high esteem as a great political thinker:

"Cicero's compelling honesty led him to conclude that once the reality of the Creator is clearly identified in the mind, the only intelligent approach to government, justice, and human relations is in terms of the laws which the Supreme Creator has already established. The Creator's order of things is called Natural Law."

_The 5000 Year Leap/A Miracle That Changed the World/Principles of Freedom 101_: Skousen

----------


## Dark Muse

From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence




> In the last resort, she believed in Mammon, the flesh, and the devil--those at least were not sham. She was a priestess without belief, without conviction, suckled in a creed outworn, and condemned to the reiteration of mysterious that were not divine to her. Yet there was no escape. She was a leaf upon a dying tree. What help was there then, but to fight still for the old, withered truths, to die for the old, outworn belief, to be a sacred and inviolate priestess of desecrated mysteries? The old great truths had been true. And she was a leaf on the old great tree of knowledge that was withering now. To the old and last truth she must be faithful even though cynicism and mockery took place at the bottom of her soul.

----------


## Enamored Reader

I have just finished George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss". It was beautiful and in some ways inspiring. Here are some lines:

"If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whome...I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes- love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But i see- I feel it is not so now: there are things we must renounce in life- some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me- but I see one thing clearly- that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural- but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I didn't obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don't urge me; help me- help me, because I love you."

----------


## qimissung

"So we sit, eternally weaving stories, he on his couch, I in my chair; behind us, the oblong circle of light in front of the rocking chair becomes narrower and smaller, and now it disappears. He turns on the lamp and we continue our talk."

Azar Nafisi, _Reading Lolita in Tehran_

----------


## Tsuyoiko

"He Who Himself begot, middler the Holy Ghost, and Himself sent himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already."

- James Joyce, _Ulysses_

I always said the concept of god was incoherent  :Biggrin:

----------


## Dark Muse

From the On the Road by Jack Kerouac 




> I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some strange, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

----------


## lupe

"What is strongly anticipated by the mind, is often supplied by it" 

Margaret Atwood ("Alias Grace")

----------


## King Mob

"The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?"
-John Barth, short story _Life-Story_ from _Lost in the Funhouse_

I've just fiinished reading that story. Amazing.

----------


## JoBourne

Humpty Dumpty.
Did he fall, or was he pushed, or was it that he jumped?
Or was it, in fact, none of the above?

From Robert Rankin's, 'the hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse.' 

It's not Kai Lung and it's not Jasper Fforde, but it's a fast amusing read. Glad I picked it up.

----------


## Olga4real

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer." the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams."
Paulo Coelho "The Alchemist"

----------


## Page Turner

_"Even useless rubbish is collected in the courtyards nowadays and used for some purpose,even broken glass is considered a useful commodity, but something so precious, so rare, as the love of a refined, young, intelligent, and good woman is utterly thrown away and wasted."_

An Anonymous Story ~ From the Essential Tales of Chekhov.

----------


## mikemaster70

i recently just read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and loved it! one of my favorite quotes is towards the end, so it might be somewhat considered a spoiler:

"He looked around, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant."

----------


## Pryderi Agni

> What is history? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superflous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the _Cambridge Modern History_.


From _What Is History?_ by E.H. Carr.

----------


## Beautifull

> i recently just read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and loved it! one of my favorite quotes is towards the end, so it might be somewhat considered a spoiler:
> 
> "He looked around, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant."


I do believe my brother who is currently going to fifth grade has picked up that book, though I doubt that he shall finish it...he tends to pick up large books with millions of words and turns it back in the next week, only reading a couple of pages  :Tongue:  Hopefully this one he'll finish. :Sick:

----------


## mikemaster70

> I do believe my brother who is currently going to fifth grade has picked up that book, though I doubt that he shall finish it...he tends to pick up large books with millions of words and turns it back in the next week, only reading a couple of pages  Hopefully this one he'll finish.


haha, i was the same way, although i would pick the book back up in the next year or so and attempt to finish it :Biggrin:

----------


## semi-fly

_The Bishop_, Anton Chekhov



> "You know, your holiness, your mamma arrived while you were away," the lay brother informed the bishop as he went into his cell.
> 
> "My mother? When did she come?"
> 
> "Before the evening service. She asked first where you were and then she went to the convent."
> 
> "Then it was her I saw in the church, just now! Oh, Lord!"
> 
> And the bishop laughed with joy.

----------


## Mathor

"Sir Walter, without hesitation, declared the Admiral to be
the best-looking sailor he had ever met with, and went so far as to say,
that if his own man might have had the arranging of his hair,
he should not be ashamed of being seen with him any where;"

_Persuasion_ by Jane Austen

----------


## Pryderi Agni

> The oft-quoted credo ut intellegam is not an intellectual abdication. Anselm was not claiming to embrace the creed blindly in the hope of it making sense one day.


From A History of God by Karen Armstrong.

----------


## weltanschauung

_What would it be like, he wondered, to really know the Tao? The Tao is that which first
lets the light, then the dark. Occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there
is always renewal. It is that which keeps it all from wearing down. The universe will never
be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly
transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When
the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life._ (p.k.dick- the man in the high castle)

----------


## Copernicus

> "If I found a job, a project an idea or a person that I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and we're all pushed into it by one single desire."


The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

----------


## curlyqlink

Sejanus was a liar but so fine a general of lies that he knew how to marshall them into an alert and disciplined formation... Tiberius envied him this talent as he envied Neva his honesty: for although he had progressed far in the direction of evil, he still felt hampered by unaccountable impulses towards the good.

--I, Claudius by Robert Graves

----------


## Desolation

"A prayer. Sure, one prayer: for sentimental reasons. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book!" - John Fante, _Ask the Dust_
 :FRlol:

----------


## weltanschauung

_``Oh! certainly,'' cried his faithful assistant, ``no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.''

``All this she must possess,'' added Darcy, ``and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.''_ (j.austen - pride and prejudice)

we must be clowns to entertain the monkeys!
*takes notes*

----------


## weltanschauung

_Apuleius, at the end of the God of Socrates, expresses his wonder at seeing the carelessness of his contemporaries with regard to themselves: "All men should desire to live most happily, and should know that they cannot so live in any other way than by cultivating the soul, and yet leave the soul uncultivated [animum suum non colunt]. If, however, anyone wishes to see acutely, it is requisite that he should pay attention to his eyes, through which he sees; if you desire to run with celerity, attention must be paid to the feet, by which you run... In a similar manner, in all the other members, attention to each must be paid according to one's preferences. And, as all men may easily see that this is true, I cannot sufficienty... wonder, in such a way as the thing deserves wonder, why they do not also cultivate their soul by reason [cur non etiam animum suum ratione excolant].

(..) it is good to want to correct one's friends, if need be, but reproof is too extreme and gives offense instead of helping: it is good to convince those who don't know, but it is necessary first to choose such people as are capable of being taught.
_ (foucault, history of sexuality v.3)

----------


## Dark Muse

From Fifith Business by Robertson Davies 




> She knew she was in disgrace with the world, but did not feel disgraced; she knew she was jeered at but felt no humiliation. She lived by a light that arose within; I could not comprehend it, except that it seemed to be somewhat to the splendors I found in books, though not in any way bookish. It was as though she were an excile from a world that saw things her way, and thought she was sorry Deptford did not understand her she was not resentful. When you got past her shyness she had quite posistive opinions, but the queerest thing about her was that she had no fear.

----------


## weltanschauung

death's merciless love - slavoj zizek

"_Why did Christ die on the cross?

How, then, are we to break out of the deadlock of the thrifty consumption, if these two exits are false? Perhaps, it is the Christian notion of agape that points towards the way out: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."(John 3:16) How, exactly, are we to conceive of this basic tenet of the Christian faith?11 Problems emerge the moment we comprehend this "giving of his one and only Son," i.e. the death of Christ, as a sacrificial gesture in the exchange between God and man. If we claim that, by sacrificing that which is most precious to Him, His own son, God redeems humanity, buying off its sins, then there are ultimately only two ways to explain this act: either God himself demands this retribution, i.e. Christ sacrifices himself as the representative of humanity to satisfy the retributive need of God his father; or God is not omnipotent, i.e. He is, like a Greek tragic hero, subordinated to a higher Destiny: His act of creation, like the fateful deed of a Greek hero, brings about unwanted dire consequences, and the only way for Him to reestablish the balance of Justice is to sacrifice what is most precious to Him, His own son - in this sense, God Himself is the ultimate Abraham. The fundamental problem of Christology is how to avoid these two readings of Christ's sacrifice that impose themselves as obvious:

"Any idea that Gods 'needs' reparation either from us or from our representative should be banished, as should the idea that there is some kind of moral order which is above God and to which God must conform by requiring reparation."12

The problem, of course, is how exactly to avoid these two options, when the very wording of the Bible seems to support their common premise: Christ's act is repeatedly designated as "ransom," by the words of Christ himself, by other biblical texts, as well as by the most prominent commentators of the Bible. Jesus himself says that he came "to give his life as a ransom for many"(Mark 10:45); Timothy 2:5-6 speaks of Christ as the "mediator between God and humanity /.../ who gave his life as a ransom for all"; St Paul himself, when he states that Christians are slaves who have been "bought at a price" (Corinthians 6:20), implies the notion that the death of Christ should be concieved as purchasing our freedom. So we have a Christ who, through his suffering and death, pays the price for setting us free, redeeming us from the burden of sin; if, then, we have been liberated from captivity to sin and the fear of death through the death and resaurrection of Christ, who demanded this price? To whom was the ransom paid? Some early Christian writers, clearly perceiving this problem, proposed a logical, if heretic, solution: since Christ's sacrifice delivered us from the power of the Devil (Satan), then Christ's death was the price God had to pay to the Devil, our "owner" when we live in sin, in order that the Devil set us free. Again, therein resides the deadlock: if Christ is offered as a sacrifice to God himself, the question arises why did God demand this sacrifice. Was he still the cruel jealous God who wanted a heavy price for his reconciliation with humanity which betrayed him? If the sacrifice of Christ was offered to someone else (the Devil), then we get the strange spectacle of God and Devil as partners in an exchange._"

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## curlyqlink

He believed himself to be a pillar of strength, destined to do great things; and with that subtle, selfish, ambiguous sophistry to which the minds of all men are so subject, he had taught himself to think that in doing much for the promotion of his own interests, he was doing much also for the promotion of religion.

--Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

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## Twhalley

I have to say the latest book I've read is filled with some great language. I love A Clockwork Orange and I just love the plain oddness of the Nadsat/Cockney slang.

"The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence."

"Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?"

"Appy-polly-loggies. I had something of a pain in my gulliver so I had to sleep. I was not awakened when I gave orders for awakening."

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## Lord Bas

> How often we sacrifice the fulfillment of a possible happiness to our impatience for an immediate pleasure!


Swann's Way-Marcel Proust
I couldn't agree more.

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## King Mob

There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

--Samuel Beckett, _Texts For Nothing, 4_

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## Alarum

> There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.


_East of Eden_, by John Steinbeck

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## Lullaby

"He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."

_Nineteen Eighty-Four_ by George Orwell.

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## CHEKHOV

Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, move and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect- the sun gold on its slope. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever-

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring-(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)- for ever desiring - (the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)- for ever desiring truth. Red is the doom; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry 'Iron for sale'- and truth?


Monday or Tuesday- Virginia Woolf

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## mal4mac

"If ... being sick ...man's remedially instinct, his fighting instinct wears out... one great remedy: .... Russian fatalism .... exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow." - Nietzsche, Ecco Homo

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## Lynne50

This jumped out at me at the beginning of Tess of the D'ubervilles. I thought it was such a well written sentence.

...The interior in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl's senses with an unspeakable dreariness. ...

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## mal4mac

Context:

Rosalind: ...I say i will not have you.
Orlando: Then ... I die.

Quote:

Rosalind: Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

- As You Like It

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## DanielBenoit

"They were like birds beating there wings against her window and calling to her every morning, 'Nou t'aimons Marie'."

_The Idiot_ by Dostoyevsky

Tears where in my eyes by then.

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## wessexgirl

"The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched." 

A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel

A wonderful book about three of the major players in the French Revolution, Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins.

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## Mockingbird_z

what crap people believed freedom to be.
On a night like this you could understand why people robed banks.
Rich man, Poor man - Irwin Shaw

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## Zee.

What is/are your favourite, from any book you've read.

Quotes that have spoken what you couldn't quite put together in your head, quotes that have changed you, etc


"They're all the same, women like her. It's not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven't changed, we're just young. It's the silly new middle-aged people who've got to be young who've changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can't be with us. We don't want them to be with us. We don't want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can't respect them"

^ From The Collector



"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep.And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and that loss is too empty to share"

House of Leaves

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## LitNetIsGreat

Oh, I don't know about ever, or that have changed me, but I'll throw in this one, as I thought about it (again) the other day:

Work is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Oscar Wilde (of course).

Particularly APT, as that foul thing is upon me soon once again.

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## Adagio

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

- Shakespeare

That has got to be my all time favourite. Absolutely perfect.

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## Dark Muse

From Fifth Business by Robertson Favies 




> How happy they might have been if they had recognized and gloried in their talent, confronting the world as gifted egoists, comparable to painters, musicians, or sculptors! But that was not their style. They insisted on degrading their talent to the level of mere acquired knowledge and industry. They wanted to be thought of as wise in the ways of the world and astute in politics; they wanted to demonstrate in themselves what the ordinary fellow might be if he would learn to think straight and be content to reap only where he had sown. The and their wives (women who looked like parrots or bulldogs, most of them) were so humorless, and except when they were drunk, so cross that I thought the ordinary fellow as lucky not to be like them.

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## latimeri

I am quite sure if this book had some other title it could have been not called as the book of adventure, or the book for youth, yet one could ask, how many adult really understand the contest of this book and the social history where this book is connected.

There is the philosophical and ideological message of the master Larsen which  not doubt, is titled wrong making the book looking like some imaginative word apart which it wasnt, it was real word telling story about average men at their average work at that average contest during the era which have lasted for centuries until the when the new era with the new morder ro-on ro-off stated

These quotations here could have sound just the same if it has been taken twenty year ago,

_Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas. I talked with Johansen last night  the first superfluous words with which he has favored me since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was eighteen, now thirty- eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once. He had met a townsman couple of year before, in some sailor boarding -house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive. She must be a pretty old woman now, he said staring meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison who was steering a point off the course.
When did you last write to her?
He performed his mental arithmetic aloud, Eighty  one; on  eighty two, eh? no eighty three? yes eighty three. Ten year ago, from some little port in Madagascar. I was trading. 
You See, he went on , as though addressing his neglected mothers across half the girth of the earth. each year I was going to home. So what the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something happened, and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money; and the I will pay my passage home,





_

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## Hira

_"Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'some one,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must need pity the Opera ghost..."_ ~ Gaston Leroux in the Phantom of the Opera

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## Scheherazade

_Santa: You know Angelo. You shoulda seen how them sisters beat up on him when he was a kid. One sister throwed him right into a blackboard. That's how come Angelo's such a sweet, considerate man today._

from _A Confederacy of Dunces_

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## Snowqueen

"It is not to be conceived that a man of three or four-and-twenty should not have liberty of mind or limb to that amount. He cannot want moneyhe cannot want leisure. We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom. We hear of him for ever at some watering-place or other. A little while ago, he was at Weymouth. This proves that he can leave the Churchills."

Emma by Jane Austen

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Sometimes he lies so much that you wonder, why is he doing it? Two years ago he lied that his wife was dead and that he'd already married another one, and imagine, not a word of it was true: his wife never died, she's still alive and beats him once every three days." - The Brothers Karamozov

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## curlyqlink

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-- delightful if it happens to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

--Samuel Butler, _The Way of All Flesh_

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## Pollopicu

> "The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl with whom I had conversed in the veranda, dismissed in disgrace, by Miss Scatcherd, from a history class, and sent to stand in the middle of the large school-room. The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl----she looked thirteen or upwards. I expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but to my surprise she neither wept or blushed : composed, though grave, she stood, The central mark of all eyes.
> "how can she bear it so quietly---so firmly?" I asked of myself.
> "were I in her place, it seems to me I should wish the earth to open and swallow me up. She looks as if she were thinking of something beyond her punishment----beyond her situation : of something not round nor before her. I have heard of day-dreams-----is she day-dreaming now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it-----her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart : She is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present. I wonder what sort of girl she is---Whether good or naughty".


Jane Eyre

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## Permenides

I don't know if this has been posted yet, I'm not about to go through all those pages to make sure either so...

-
They say that there's a broken light for every heart on Broadway, they say that life's a game and they take the board away. They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story, then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret. In no longer pretty cities, there are fingers in the kitties, there are warrants, forms, and chitties, and a jackboot on the stair. There's sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thine dime, and at least the trains all run on time but they don't go anywhere. Facing their responsibilities either on their back or on their knees, there are ladies who just simply freeze and dare not turn away. And the widows who refuse to cry will be dressed in garter and bow-tie, and be taught to kick their legs up high in this vicious cabaret. At last the 1998 show! The ballet on the burning stage! the documentary upon the fractured screen, the dreadful poem scrawled on the crumpled page! There's a policeman with an honest soul that has seen whose head is on the pole and he grunts and fills his brier bowl with a feeling of unease. Then he briskly frisks the torn remains for a fingerprint or crimson stains and endeavors to ignore the chains that he walks in to his knees. While his master in the dark nearby inspect the hands with brutal eyes that have never brushed a lovers thigh but have squeezed a nations throat. And he hungers in his secret dreams for the harsh embrace of cruel machines but his lover is not what she seems and she will not leave a note.At last the 1998 show! The situation tragedy! Grand

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## oslemxoslem

''The only authentic ending is the one provided here : 
john and mary die. john and mary die. john and mary die. 
So much for endings. beginnings are always fun.... That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. 
Now try How and Why...'' Margaret ATWOOD

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## sadparadise

Then as all souls be emparadised in you, in whom alone I understand, and grow, and see. The rafters of my body, bone, being still with you, the muscle,sinew and vein, which tile this house, will come again.
First came across this in Look Homeward Angel by, Thomas Wolfe. However, this comes from the poem A Valediction of my name in the window by, John Donne.

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## bouquin

_"And maybe there's a value to being yoked to your enemies. You have more opportunity to learn to love them."

-----------------------------------------------------
"Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know."_

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## bazarov

Why would world care for me when I don't care for him?

Victor Hugo in Hunchback of Notre Dame

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## Babyguile

I didn't choose this at random but I really like it:

If that old philosopher Schopenhauer is right, happiness is not a human possibility, since it means the absence of pain, which, as an uncle of mine used to say, only occurs when you're dead or dead drunk. So there's Myra with all her closed doors, and here's me with all my open ones, and we're both miserable. - _The Women's Room_ by *Marilyn French.*

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## Scheherazade

_Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to be love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one._ 

from _Beloved_

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## sadparadise

Quote from the The Thin Red Line.

What is this great evil? How did it steal into this world? From what seed , what root did it spring? Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of love and life. Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known.

James Jones, The Thin Red Line.

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## isabel+

- And who are you? said he.
- Don't puzzle me, said I. 

Currently reading: Tristram Shandy.

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## CollegeGal09

All morons hate it when you call them a moron. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 6

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## Olympus21

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should forever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me.

Regards

Olympus

____
dossier surendettement

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## bouquin

_So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain._

--------------------------------------------------------
_To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is a sort of revenge which fills into the scale of virtue ..._

--------------------------------------------------------
_There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows - in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain - in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine - it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt ..._

--------------------------------------------------------
_'It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.'_ 

--------------------------------------------------------
_All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality ..._

--------------------------------------------------------
_... what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?_

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## jimmygatz

"If personality was an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him."

(Nick describing Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby.")

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## Lynne50

> _So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain._
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
> _To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is a sort of revenge which fills into the scale of virtue ..._
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
> _There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows - in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain - in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine - it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt ..._
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
> ...


Oh *Bouquin* I haven't read Mill on the Floss in a very long time, but I always remember that it was one of my favorite books. Your quotes makes me want to read the book again.

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## Phaedra's Love

"That is some outfit you're wearing -- you look like something out of the _Arabian Nights._  You appear to have an erection, as well."
"Of course I have an erection. I'm in love."

from The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst


On a graver note:
"Last line of defence for the honest man.
Free will is what distinguishes us from the animals.

And I have no intention of behaving like a ****ing animal."
-- from Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane

----------


## Kell

This description from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment really struck me-

"he was uncommonly jovial, a frank fellow, and kind and soft hearted. But under all was was concealed a depthof worth and merit. The best of his comrades knew this, and all loved him. His appearance arrested attention: he was ill shaven and black haired."

----------


## Return Journey

Coming up for Air by George Orwell

"The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without you thinking of things 
that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts 
that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, 
especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past."

"The old English order of life couldn't change. For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook 
Yorkshire pudding and apple dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woolen underclothes and sleep on feathers, 
make plumb jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda's Home Companion in the afternoons, 
with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea, bad legs, and happy endings."

(Mmm. Reminds me of me gran!)

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## Warwick

*Cider with Rosie: Laurie Lee*

They leaned over me  one, two, three  their mouths smeared with red currants and their hands dripping with juice. There, there, its all right, dont you wail any more. Come down ome and well stuff you with currants.

*As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: Laurie Lee*

The stooping figure of my mother, waist  deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheeps wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world. She stood old and bent at the top of the bank, silently watching me go, one gnarled red hand raised in farewell and blessing, not questioning why I went. At the bend of the road I looked back again and saw the gold light die behind her; then I turned the corner, passed the village school, and closed that part of my life forever.

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## Dark Muse

From Howards End by E.M Forster




> The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much--they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian--and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates. One visualizes it as a tract of quivering gray, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything: Nature with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself: the earth is explicable--from her we came and we must return to her.

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## Kell

This quote from Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' struck me as it really reminded me of someone close to me-

"He was uncommonly jovial, a frank fellow, and kind and soft hearted. But under all was concealed a depth of worth and merit. The best of his comrades knew this, and all loved him. His apperance arrested attention: he was ill shaven and black haired."

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## Snowqueen

"Lucy was naturally clever; her remarks were often just and amusing; and as a companion for half an hour Elinor frequently found her agreeable; but her powers had received no aid from education, she was ignorant and illiterate, and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars, could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her constant endeavour to appear to advantage. Elinor saw, and pitied her for, the neglect of abilities which education might have rendered so respectable; but she saw, with less tenderness of feeling, the thorough want of delicacy, of rectitude, and integrity of mind, which her attentions, her assiduities, her flatteries at the Park betrayed; and she could have no lasting satisfaction in the company of a person who joined insincerity with ignorance; whose want of instruction prevented their meeting in conversation on terms of equality, and whose conduct towards others, made every shew of attention and deference towards herself perfectly valueless."

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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## nocturnal_90s

I really liked the quote:

"For you, a thousand times over!" 

by the character of Hassan in _The Kite Runner_. For me, that one quote of 6 words had more of an emotional impact than almost any other part of the novel. It made me idolize Hassan as a friend of noble character (and later a quasi-martyr of sorts) and it made me hate Amir for his lack of respect to his friend/brother that would do anything for him.

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## bouquin

_You_  can _have your cake and eat it; the only trouble is, you get fat.
_
--------------------------------------------------------_The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously._

--------------------------------------------------------
_The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?_

--------------------------------------------------------
_When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements - the invention of some new valve or sprocket - while remaining heedless of the world's barbarism. I don't say things_ have _got worse; I merely say the young wouldn't notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be._

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## Ceebeeetc

> The big problem is, he's a mate n aw. Whit kin ye dae?


From Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. I chose to leave the first part out, for the sake of keeping my comments mostly kid-friendly.  :Biggrin:

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## Barbarous

"There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka. Haftung blinks and shudders. Wolfgang is on his back, sucking at a gurgling bottle he is clutching with his feet. Some of the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight."
-Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"These were the questions that immediately tormented his inexperienced and virgin heart, that this most righteous of righteous men should be given over to such derisive and spiteful jeering from a crowd so frivolous and so far beneath him." - The Brothers Karamazov; "An Opportune Moment"

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## Emil Miller

This deterioration in public behaviour had been caused by a naive belief in the post-war political consensus that, because what had happened in Germany was wrong, the right way to govern a country was to renounce punitive sentencing and rely on the theory of rehabilitation to uphold the rule of law. The significance of this miscalculation was not lost on either the criminal fraternity or the legal profession, for the obvious consequence of such a policy was that criminality would flourish to the benefit of both. 


From Pro Bono Publico by Emil Miller

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## Miss Juventus

> Adam, the most honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. Now Aron his son, who tried to be so pure, living all his life on the profits of a whorehouse.


From "East of Edan" for Steinbeck.

----------


## Dark Muse

I cannot say enough how much I love Camus. Reading some of the things he says, is like listening to my own thoughts.

From The Fall 




> This is true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves, or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged by default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue. We lack the energy of evil as well as the energy of good. Do you know Dante? Really? The devil you say! Then you know that Dante accepts the idea of neutral angels in the quarrel between God and Satan. And he puts them in Limbo, a sort of vestibule of his Hell. We are in the vestibule, che ami.

----------


## Dirtbag

> Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become
> enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation,
> 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident truth, one on
> which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen
> to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no
> bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But
> since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it
> becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable,
> moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--
> what is that but magic?


Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley

This book is charming.

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but its the same damned thing, the questions are all the same only from the other end. And many, many of all the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk about the eternal questions, now, in our time. Isnt it so?  Book V; Chapter 3 The Brothers Get Acquainted

----------


## wessexgirl

I've just bought *The Brothers Karamazov* Gilliat, and am really looking forward to reading it, after all the rave reviews.

*"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"*

*"If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."*

*This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"*

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol 

It's that time of year again, Good old Charlie!  :Thumbs Up:

----------


## AliceTwists

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

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

Wessexgirl, I'm happy to learn that you will be reading TBK. I'll try not to spoil it too much for you. 

Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? Its quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with suffering. Why do they get thrown into the pile, to manure someones future harmony with themselves?  The Brother Karmazov, Book V; Chapter 4 Rebellion

__________________
The following is from The Raven  A biography of Sam Houston 
by Marquis James; Copyright 1929

The brothers paddled up to find the runaway lying under a tree, scanning lines of the Iliad. He was invited to return home. Sam relates that he stood straight as an Indian, and (with a creditable touch of Cherokee imagery for a beginner) replied that he preferred measuring deer tracks to tape and the wild liberty of the Red Men better than the tyranny of his own brothers He begged to be excused as his translation from the Greek claimed his interest and he desired to read it in peace.  Book I; Chapter 2: Deer Tracks and Tape

----------


## marcolfo

just off the top of my head.

so it goes. k vonegunt

oh god we know what we are, but not what we can be. d alligieri

por su experiencia sabia que uno no se muere cuando debe sino cuando puede. g g marquez ( sorry for the spanglish)

and therefore he willed that the hearts of men should seek beyond the world, and should find no rest therein, but they should have a virtue , to shape their lives amid the powers and chances of the world. j r r tolkien

always in motion, the future is. yoda


i'll be back with more

i promise

----------


## Dark Muse

From Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh




> Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

----------


## Dinkleberry2010

(a paraphrase) Ariel to Prospero in The Tempist: Be of good cheer, sir, our revels are ended."

----------


## quasimodo1

from Olympio: The Life of 
Victor Hugo 
by Andre' Maurois
translated by Gerard Hopkins

Chapter 18 ANANKE'

"Notre-Dame is very old; but maybe she will
attend the funeral of that Paris which saw her
birth."
Gerard De Nerval

HUGO finished NOTRE-DAME de PARIS at the beginning of January, 1831. He had written the whole of this long novel in six months, bringing it to conclusion at the very end of the time-limit set by Gosselin. It had been, as a matter of fact, merely a question of the actual writing and composition. The documentary material had been accumulated over a period of three years: histories, chronicles, charters, inventories. Hugo had read widely. He had explored the Paris of Louis XI, and examined what remained of its old houses. In particular, he had made himself familiar with every nook and cranny of the cathedral -- its spiral staircases, its mysterious closets hollowed out of the stones, its inscriptions, both ancient and modern. Everything about the book, he hoped, would be historically correct: the scene-painting, the persons, the language. "But that is what matters least in it. Its sole merit, if it has one, lies in the fact that it is a work of the imagination, whim and fancy." In strict truth, if the erudition is real, the characters seem to be more than real, larger than life. The archdeacon Claude Frollo is a monster; Quasimodo, one of those hideous, bulbous-headed dwarfs with which Hugo's imagination teemed; Esmeralda, a vision of grace rather than a woman.

----------


## Dark Muse

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens




> Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.

----------


## MarkC

hi,

This quote is from Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare
Good Night, Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow." - (Act II, Scene II)

This quote is from Candida by George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Candida, Act I (1898)

MarkC

----------


## 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._

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

--------------------------------------------------------
_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._

--------------------------------------------------------
_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?_

--------------------------------------------------------
_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.

----------


## bouquin

_"It's a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?"_

--------------------------------------------------------
_I suddenly felt peaceful again, as if I were a lake and the world could only form ripples on my surface while the calm beneath continued in solitude._

--------------------------------------------------------
_All those years gone so quickly that even describing them does not take long. Big things do not happen to you and so you think time is not passing. You jiggle the years in your pocket, thinking you are a rich man, and suddenly you have spent everything._

--------------------------------------------------------
_To be angry without power is to be ridiculous._

--------------------------------------------------------
_"People cry with you one day, two days. Then they say, 'She's always crying. Why does she bring her unlucky face here?'"_

--------------------------------------------------------
_When unhappiness is so great, how can one separate mine and yours?_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"No matter how much love you need, I can love you more."_

----------


## ozhansean

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. 

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. 

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in. 

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. 

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. 

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. 

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. 

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes. 

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall. 

Salman Rushdie

----------


## Idril

*From Gösta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöff*

_"For we were thinking of the wonder-stricken spirit of self-analysis which had already taken possession of our minds; we were thinking of him with the icy eyes and long, knotted fingers - he, who sits in the darkest corner of our souls, and pucks our being to peices as old women pluck scraps of wool and silk. Piece by piece, the long, hard fingers have dissected us till our whole being lies there like a heap of rags - till all our best feelings, our innermost thoughts, all we have said and done is examined, ransacked, disintegrated, and the icy eyes have watched, and the toothless mouth has sneered and whispered, "See, it is but rags, nothing but rags."_

----------


## bouquin

_'God takes long and punishes hard.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Who would punish if not God?"_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Well, you can't make a fur hat out of a pig's tail."_

----------


## sammyuk

Liberty and power, but above all power! Over all trembling mortals and over the whole antheap!

From Crime and Punishment

----------


## cgrillo

One of my favorite quotes is a simple one that comes from the brief introduction of Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies:

"I could say much more. But it is wisest often to be most silent on the very points on which one longs most to speak."

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

Another from TBK:
(I'm actually very near the the end after months of sporadic reading)

"The deceased, your saint here", he (Father Farapont) turned to the crowd, pointing at the coffin with his finger, "denied devils. He gave purgatives against devils. So they bred here like spiders in the corners. and on this day he got himself stunk. In this this we see a great sign from God."
Part III; Book 7, Chapter 1 - "The Odor of Corruption"

----------


## Silverblue

> "Listen, my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, 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. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carried grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people-eternal life."
> 
> Siddhartha 
> Herman Hesse



loved that book !! i was abit disappointed by other Hesse stories but this novel was just fantastic. 

 :Yesnod:

----------


## Silverblue

"But there are no small events for The Heart : it heightens everything ; it puts in the same balance the fall of a fourteen years-old empire and the fall of a woman's glove, and almost everytime the glove is heavier than the empire"

Balzac "The duchess of Langeais"

----------


## bouquin

_I don't know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of things to think about. When it comes to thinking, life is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides._

--------------------------------------------------------
_'And when a person doesn't read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and clichés.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'But pain is much harder on the mind than ignorance.'_

----------


## Ashbe Maeur

I'm re-reading 1984 right now. And this struck a certain chord with me this time through - 

"They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail, everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

Entirely random! :

"Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Full account of de big f-i-r-e! 
Here ye are!
Wuxtry!
"Woild, Joinal, Sun, Telegram! 
Here ye are, mister!
Git de latest wuxtry!
"Wuxtry!
Wuxtry"

Jimmy Small was only one of a dozen newsboys crying the same thing in City Hall Park, New York. The lads, ragged little chaps, were rushing at all in whom they saw possible customers, thrusting the papers in their very faces, a fierce rivalry taking place whenever two of the boys reached the same man at the same time. But of all who cried none shouted louder than this Jimmy Small, and none was more active in rushing here and there with papers"

From "The Newsboy Partners" by Frank Webster. 
Couples and Leon Publishers, New York
Copyright 1909.

Gilliatt

----------


## slipperyyoke

*Death in Venice - Thomas Mann*

_At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went great quivering thrusts like golden lances, the gleam became a glare; without a sound, with godlike violence, glow and glare and rolling flames streamed upwards, and with flying hoof-beats the steeds of the sun-god mounted the sky. The lonely watcher sat, the splendor of the god shone on him, he closed his eyes and let the glory kiss his lids. Forgotten feelings, precious pangs of his youth, quenched long since by the stern service that had been his life and now returned so strangely metamorphosed--he recognized them with a puzzled, wondering smile. He mused, he dreamed, his lips slowly shaped a name; still smiling, his face turned seawards and his hands lying folded in his lap, he fell asleep once more as he sat._

----------


## pooteeweet

"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."

Slaughterhouse-Five

----------


## Dark Muse

*The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood*

_The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained -- an urn in daylight._

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, cry 'Caesar!". 
Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the Ides of March.

Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Act I, Scene II

----------


## L.M. The Third

*From "The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot*




> "I think all women are crosser than men," said Maggie. "Aunt Glegg's a
> great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
> father does."
> 
> "Well, _you'll_ be a woman some day," said Tom, "so _you_ needn't
> talk."
> 
> "But I shall be a _clever_ woman," said Maggie, with a toss.





> "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable
> aphorisms,--"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.
> Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have
> a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good
> old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive
> Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a
> reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody
> sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the
> frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

----------


## Mariner

_Anthem_, Any Rand:

"It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect."

----------


## Dark Muse

*Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse*

_"How absurd those words are, such as beast, and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but they're much more right than men."

"Well look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a puma, or a giraffe. You can't help seeing all of them are right. They're never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They don't flatter and they don't intrude. They don't pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky."_

----------


## Dark Muse

*Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse*

_These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, fare more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties, and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures, and religions overlap. A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization._

----------


## JhKreisler

The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett
First lines:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

----------


## marcolfo

- who had pity for you, when you were sad among the strangers

James Joyce

----------


## bouquin

_"Oh, it's miserable to be human. You get such queer diseases. Just because you're human and for no other reason. Before you know it, as the years go by, you're just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it?"_

--------------------------------------------------------
_The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnaper - this gipsy? It is the strangeness of life - a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood._

--------------------------------------------------------
_I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation._

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Fear is a ruler of mankind. It has the biggest dominion of all. It makes you white as candles. It splits each eye in half. More of fear than of any other thing has been created ... As a molding force it comes second only to Nature itself... 
It applies to everyone. Though nothing may be visible, still it is heard, like radio. It is on almost all the frequencies. And all tremble, and all are wincing, in greater or lesser degree."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects but endless fire."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Oh, you can't get away from rhythm ... You just can't get away from it. The left hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole talks back to the diastole, the hands play patty-cake, and the feet dance with each other. And the seasons. And the stars, and all of that. And the tides, and all that junk. You've got to live at peace with it, because if it's going to worry you, you'll lose. You can't win against it. It keeps on and on and on... we'll never get away from rhythm..."_

----------


## Aragorn Elessar

"The first and the best victory is to conquer self." - Plato, _The Republic_

----------


## DougSlug

Hi,

New here; first post. I offer a few quotes from The Sound and the Fury, which I'm about halfway through right now:

"The day like a pane of glass struck a light, sharp blow."

"On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand."

"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"The watch ticked on." 
(only meaningful in context of novel, but so forceful and symbolic)

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## englishpk

"The English take and do nothing"

The above quotation is taken from "A passage to India" by E. M Forster.

It's a narration of the author about how English ruled in India in the eighteenth century.

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"What must remain striking to a teacher of languages is the Russians extraordinary love of words. They gather them up; they charish them, but they don't hoard them in their breasts; on the contrary they are always ready to pour them out by the hour or by the night with enthusiam, a sweeping abundance with such an aptness of application sometimes that, as in the case of very accomplished parrots, one can't defend oneself from the suspicion that they really understand what they say." 
---Joseph Conrad; "Under Western Eyes"

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## myhouse

Famous quotes compilation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tkhoEzwt4Y

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## BellaRose

"Poor, unhappy erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be "some one," like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius OR USE IT TO PLAY TRICKS WITH, when, with an nordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera Ghost."

~Gaston Leroux, "Le Fantome De L'Opera"

*sighs* my poor, poor Erik... Yes, we must needs pity him.  :Smile:

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## Dark Muse

The Portrait of Dorian Gray ~ Oscar Wilde




> Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion.

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## 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_

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## 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.

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## 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
> ...



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."

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## 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
> ...

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## 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.

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## bouquin

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

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_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._

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## 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.

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## Elentarri

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

"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.”

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## 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"

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## 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_.

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## 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

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## 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_

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## 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.

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## 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?  :Wink:

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## 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

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## bouquin

_Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world._

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_But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?_

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_No shortage of explanations for life's mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find._ 

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_"The true miracle of reason ... is reason's victory over the miraculous."_

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_We leave home not only to make room for ourselves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don't want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in our turn. Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes._

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_When the impossible becomes a necessity, it can sometimes be achieved._

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_"Find your enemy. When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for."_

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_If the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend._

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_The problem is not technical. You're worried about wings? Look on your shoulders. There they are. The problem, pal, is not wings but balls._ 

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_What's the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where's the nearest edge? Jump off it._

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_A man's worth reveals itself in the hour of his greatest adversity. What is our value when the chips are down? Do we merely flatter to deceive, or are we the real thing, the stuff of alchemists' dreams? These, too, are questions to which most of us, mercifully, are never required to supply answers._

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_The world is irreconcilable, it doesn't add up, but if we cannot agree with ourselves that it does, we can't make judgements or choices. We can't live._

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_In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles... Beatitude is the prisoner's surrender to his chains._

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_Down with a world where the guarantee that we won't die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom!_

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_A guest who wishes to remain welcome is not well advised to piss on his host's best rug._

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## bouquin

_"So listen ... what do you really want to do with your life? ... Just briefly, you know, summarize... And don't tell me you enjoy working with children, okay?"_

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## bouquin

_Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved... The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind... It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history._

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_The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea._

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_Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches . . . ._

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_'Everyone has a demon ... but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it.'_

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_Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet._

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_'Things get in the way ... that's what's sad about life.'_

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_People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much... Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, they treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different._

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_There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss._

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"The abrupt squeaks of the fat man seemed to proceed from that thing like a ballonn he carried under his overcoat. The stolidity of his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the enormous bloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair straggling down the fat nape of neck, fascinated Razumov into a stare on the verge of horror and laughter."

Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"

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## ktm5124

"Miss Schlegel, the real things' money and all the rest is a dream."

"You're still wrong. You've forgotten Death."

Leonard could not understand.

"If we lived for ever what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say 'I am I.'"

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## bouquin

_"Our reaction to the beautiful occurs in the face of every single one of our intellectual pretensions. We may be very well aware that the call of beauty is a siren-call, but that doesn't stop it from arresting us, seizing us, rendering us helpless. A soul-beguiling face will make anybody stop in their tracks, in spite of themselves."_

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_"Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust."_

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_"There's nothing - and I mean nothing - that doesn't look less serious if confessed, or shared... Tell the truth, and you'll see how the world carries on. Just try it."_

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_"You have to have time to create art. If you are busy surviving, then art doesn't probably get much of a look in."_

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

---*SPOILER*---*The conclusion:*

"Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He'd had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn't put him in the cells; they hadn't sent his squad to the settlement; he'd swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he'd built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he'd smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he'd earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he'd bought that tobacco....

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.
Three thousand six hundred and fifty three days.
The three extra days were for leap years"

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## bouquin

_"Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy."_

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_"One has to take the world as it comes. If we're here, it's surely to make the most of life."_

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_"... and even if the dream doesn't come true it's rather thrilling to have dreamt it."_

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_"You know, often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."_

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_"In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy."_

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_"... you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable ..."_

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_"You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth."_

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_"We're not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don't believe in."_

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_"... self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son."_

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_"... if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled ..."_

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## bouquin

_"I think you might do something better with the time . . . than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."_

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_"Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"_

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_"You'll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road! I think it'll encourage me, you see."_

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## Patrick_Bateman

The Stranger has possibly one of the best opening lines and final lines in 20th century literature

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## EJMathews

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
"Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."

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## Patrick_Bateman

Also my signature is a pretty damn good quote (1984)

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## Scheherazade

_"Do you know why you are such a help?" she said. "It's because you have never grown old - because you've never allowed yourself to grow absolutely certain about anything in life." A smile half sad and half perplexed came on her father's heavy face.

"You consider that a strong point?" he asked.

"I do," she replied, "compared to being a bundle of creeds and prejudices."

"Oh, I've got prejudices enough."

"Yes," she said. "And so have I. But we're not even sure of them these days."_

~ _His Family_ by Ernest Poole.

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## bouquin

_'One mustn't make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it turns out that I'm not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it's not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it's not so bad.'_

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_'And fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.'_

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_'You and I speak different languages ... but the things we say don't change for all that.'_

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_Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps! He who has wondered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over the earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it. And without regret he leaves the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, with a light heart he gives himself into the hands of death, knowing that she alone can bring him peace._

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## fetish

“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”

ANNA KARENINA

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

Let it be admitted, then, that I was thinking of Natalia Haldins life in terms of her mothers character, a manner of thinking about a girl permissible for an old man, not too old yet to have become a stranger to pity. There was almost all her youth before her; a youth robbed arbitrarily of its natural lightness and joy, overshadowed by an un-European despotism; a terribly somber youth given over to the hazards of a furious strife between equally ferocious antagonisms. 

Joseph Conrad - "Under Western Eyes"


.

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## Fuzzy_duck

Every time I read this I cry, I actually cry...

Petronius: [in his dying letter to Nero] "To Nero, Emperor of Rome, Master of the World, Divine Pontiff. I know that my death will be a disappointment to you, since you wished to render me this service yourself. To be born in your reign is a miscalculation; but to die in it is a joy. I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive - the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero - murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects if you must; but with my last breath I beg you - do not mutilate the arts. Fare well but compose no more music. Brutalize the people but do not bore them, as you have bored to death your friend, the late Gaius Petronius."

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## marcolfo

... 
in the first place, at home, I spent most of my time reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by external sensations. And the only source of external sensation possible for me was reading. Reading was a great help, of course, it exited, delighted and tormented me. But at times it bored me terribly. .....

Notes from underground. 
Dostoyevsky

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## spookymulder93

> Every time I read this I cry, I actually cry...
> 
> Petronius: [in his dying letter to Nero] "To Nero, Emperor of Rome, Master of the World, Divine Pontiff. I know that my death will be a disappointment to you, since you wished to render me this service yourself. To be born in your reign is a miscalculation; but to die in it is a joy. I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive - the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero - murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects if you must; but with my last breath I beg you - do not mutilate the arts. Fare well but compose no more music. Brutalize the people but do not bore them, as you have bored to death your friend, the late Gaius Petronius."


That's very funny. Is the rest of the Satyricon that funny?

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## Fuzzy_duck

It's not Satyricon. It's Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz  :Tongue:

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## bouquin

_We submerge our truths and have our sunsets on untroubled waters._

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_The helpless are the cruelest lot of all: they shift their burdens so._

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_Do we dis_like _happiness? We manufacture such a portion of our own despair . . ._

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_It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without . . . that the one body you've wrapped your arms around . . . and the only skin you've ever known . . . is your own - and it's dry . . . and not warm._

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Ill fares the land, to hasteneing ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd, can never be supplied"


.

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## hack

from Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins


"At birth, we emerge from dream soup.
At death, we sink back into dream soup.
In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.
Life is a portage."

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## RaoulDuke

"That we were slaves I had known all my life - and nothing could done about it. True, we weren't bought and sold - but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves." - Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

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## bouquin

_I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people. And how they can't always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition... Then there were the nice people who weren't interesting, and you didn't want to know what they thought of anything... they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones ... who ended up with everything ..._

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_'It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That's how I knew it was good. I judge all art by its effect on my neck.'_

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_'I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.'_

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## Gregory Samsa

"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."
"Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it."
Game, my ***. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right  I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.

----------


## Aragorn Elessar

"Not all those who wander are lost."
- J.R.R. Tolkien

I don't remember which book.

----------


## Gregory Samsa

delete this

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## Gregory Samsa

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

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## iamnobody

Stranger fiends hide here, in human form, than reside in the valleys of hell. But goodness, kindness, and love arise in the heart of the beast as well. (don't remember where I read that)

----------


## Feddie

Here are some words from the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's _The Brothers Karamazov_ that I read months ago and still cannot get out of my head. They struck me as so profoundly true, beautiful and sad at the same time in their relevance to my own feelings especially.

"_There is a silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing ... But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound._

I had to stop reading when I came across this. It is so lovely in it's melancholy that it actually made me cry. It's the only time a book or words have ever made me feel so strongly. The wording from this great master of literature is truly exquisite.

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## keilj

"Every patriarchal society is either preparing for war, at war, or recovering from war."

George Carlin - _When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?_

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## RaoulDuke

"Outlaws, like lovers, poets and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon."

"Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the _nature_ of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We raise it a little bit when we fail."

- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

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## bouquin

_"Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't."
"Except when it does."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_. . . one could do nothing right without also doing something wrong, so wrong, in fact, that ... one might be better off to wait and do nothing - except that to do nothing was also to do something..._

----------


## bouquin

_For even day-dreams need an element of hope to give satisfaction to the dreamer._

----------


## Gregory Samsa

"You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell."

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"I can sum up in one sentence what my life here has been-physically, so far as the appetites are concerned, paralysis; socially, exile; ethically, theoretically, a feast, a peace of mind unapproached in all previous experience"

from "Zuni - Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"You must not touch one of them, nor utter a single word in Spanish or American, nor whistle. But you must behave very gravely, for it is _ak-ta-ni_ [fearful] in the presence of the gods. If you should happen to forget and say a Spanish word, hold out your left hand and then your right, one foot and then the other, and they will strike them very hard with a yucca wand." - "Zuni Selected writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing"



.

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## bouquin

_"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn't that a strange thing?  That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_It was a beautiful thing. The relief of irresponsibility. The less he knew, the happier he was. To know nothing at all would be heaven._

----------


## Gregory Samsa

_With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else._

----------


## RaoulDuke

_"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."_
- Picture of Dorian Gray.

----------


## bouquin

_Doubt could be preferable to sure knowledge if the difference between the two was a large sum of money._

--------------------------------------------------------
_"There are a lot of things that make you what you are ... But the most important thing is your mother's womb."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"An inside servant sees everything. A maid sees into the bed of the husband and wife, does she not? A cook sees into their stomachs. Servants are always there, watching, watching. They will talk to another servant. Servants know everything."_

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_We do need somebody else in this life ... we need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth... Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose._

----------


## bouquin

_Everything in nature is good: trees grow, rivers flow, birds sing, stars shine; but man in his torment twists and turns, rushes around, cuts down forests, overturns the earth, launches out to sea, travels, runs, kills animals, kills himself, perhaps, and weeps, and roars, and thinks about hell, as if God had given him a mind to conceive even more evils than those he endures!_

--------------------------------------------------------
_Oh, to travel, to travel, never stopping, and, in this immense waltz, to see everything appearing and vanishing away ..._

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Here now young one, get up! For shame that you should be lying here, still nesting, and the day already grown aged and warm!" 

(No matter either, if his own eyes were masty, his bodily consciousness of parasitical activity so acute as to cause his constant prosecution of vengeance on its perpetrators - all the same he would continue) :

"Up, up I say! Run to the river and wash your winkers in cold water; it will brighten your vision and lighten the footfalls of the itch makers, whom you only encourage to travel by lying in bed so long!"
Frank Hamilton Cushing "Zuni - Selected Writings"

.

----------


## grace86

From a Sherlock Holmes story called _A Case of Identity_

_"My dear fellow...life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence...Depend upon it, there is nothing as unnatural as the common place."_

----------


## Silas Thorne

'Giraffes do not wind people's hair three times around their throat and strangle them.'

'...I do not have to get inside your brain to know that when I see you rolling at my feet with your hair on fire emitting strange noises, you are clearly not happy.' 

from Terry Eagleton, 'How to Read a Poem', p 105, but wildly out of context.

----------


## weltanschauung

"materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather, it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which i myself am included in the picture constituted by me - it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bear witness to my 'material existence'. materialism means that the reality i see is never 'whole' - not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it." (s.zizek, the parallax view, pg17)

----------


## hazelk

"His hatred for his wife glittered in and sparked in every word he spoke to her.The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices."

From Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

----------


## bouquin

_"So I tell you that you better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without kindness."_

---------------------------------------------------------
_"You shouldn't be angry for hearing the truth, if you're lucky enough to find somebody to hear it from."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts._

-----------------------------------------------------------
_"There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few._

--------------------------------------------------------
_You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few._

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_"Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love - or what good is it?"_

----------


## Dark Muse

_Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent._


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


_I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering._

~The Adventures of Augie March-Saul Bellow

----------


## Snowqueen

_The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it._

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

----------


## bouquin

_He went on talking, his eyes fixed on a framed text hanging on the dirty white wall, 'Vengeance is Mine'.
'You take too long, Lord,' he told it. 'I hurry you up a bit.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.'_

----------


## Mariamosis

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

----------


## Dark Muse

> "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." - Herman Melville (Moby Dick)


OMG that is awsome! I laughed out loud when I saw that.

----------


## Crass the head

"I used to believe that love and happiness were synonymous. I was a fool. Love intensifies all emotions. Nothing is so painful o so sweet, so thrilling or so desperate... Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love thats essential. You are never so alive as when you love, never so alert, intuitive, attentive, never so smart or so compassionate."
— John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little

----------


## Gregory Samsa

"Precisely so, precisely so," he cried, and his green left eye, which was focused on Berlioz, sparkled. "That's the very place for him! As I told him that time at breakfast, 'As you please, professor, but you've contrived something totally absurd! True, it may be clever, but it's totally incomprehensible. People will laugh at you.'"
Berlioz's eyes popped. "At breakfast... with Kant? What kind of nonsense is this?" he thought.

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## Dark Muse

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

~Mobdy Dick, Herman Melville

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## KilgoreT

"I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously: for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed."

The Moon and Sixpence- W. Somerset Maughaum

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## Snowqueen

_The limits of human life are determind, one may not live beyond them._ 

War and Peace

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## Gregory Samsa

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.

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## bouquin

_"Life. It's a strange gift and I don't know how we're supposed to use it but I know it's the only gift we get and it's a good one."_

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## Dark Muse

Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why when we ponder--as sooner of later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade thier souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to beleive that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in thier vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.

Villa Incognito~Tom Robbins

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## scotta.clark

I really appreciate all the quotes, its really fun to read. I don't remember any quote but I know quoted by Shakespeare "Nothing is impossible it is you who make it so."

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## bouquin

_But where hope rises, fear must lurk behind ..._

--------------------------------------------------------
_'It is nonsense to talk about injuring no one but yourself; it is impossible to injure yourself ... without injuring hundreds, if not thousands, besides, in a greater or less degree, either by the evil you do or the good you leave undone.'_

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## Gregory Samsa

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

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## Venerable Bede

The love of battle is the food upon which we live - the dust of the melee is breath of our nostrils! We live not - we wish not to live - longer than while we are victorious and renowned.

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## iamnobody

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.-Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

----------


## Mariner

Doc got back to the beach just at early evening, coming up the back slope of the dunes and over, to a hazy view of bay and headlands, a pure sunset of the colors steel takes on as it heats to glowing, lights of airliners, some blinking and some steady, ascending silently from the airport in short clears curves before setting out to traverse the sky, sometimes finding brief conjunction with an early start, then moving on...He decided to stop in at the office, as he was letting himself in, the phone started ringing, quietly, as if to itself."

(Wow)

--Thomas Pynchon, "Inherent Vice"

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## Gregory Samsa

"It's all over, so let's not burden the telegraph system."

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## bouquin

_The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress!_

----------


## KatnissEverdeen

"It takes ten Times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart." 
-Mockingjay; Finnick Odair.

----------


## Pierre Menard

An interesting one from Camus:

"But too many people now scale the cross merely to be seen from a distance, even if they have to trample him who has been there so long in the process. Too many people have decided to dispense with generosity in order to practice charity. Oh, the injustice, the injustice that has been done him, it rends my heart."

Albert Camus, The Fall

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## Gregory Samsa

*'Sure, that's what I mean,' Doc Daneeka said. 'A little grease is what makes this world go round. One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'
Yossarian knew what he meant.
'That's not what I meant,' Doc Daneeka said, as Yossarian began scratching his back. 'I'm talking about co-operation. Favors. You do a favor for me, I'll do one for you. Get it?'
'Do one for me,' Yossarian requested.
'Not a chance,' Doc Daneeka answered.*

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## m2vihand

"I will work harder!"
"Napoleon is always right."
(George Orwell, Animal Farm)

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## bouquin

_'The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.'_

--------------------------------------------------------
_'If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. '_

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## ChicagoReader

"The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy."

Death of a Salesman

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Then stretched I forth my hand a little forward,
And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn;
And the trunk cried, 'Why dost thou mangle me?"
After it had become embrowned with blood,
It recommenced it's cry; "Why dost thou rend me?"

Dante Alighieri - "The Inferno"; Canto XIII, Longfellow translation

.

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## Fafnir

thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new professor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Paradise Lost, Book I

This is my first encounter with Milton and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I'm reading in preparation for a course I hope to take next semester.

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## bouquin

_The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told._

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_"You have to let other people be right ... It consoles them for not being anything else."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can't say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, all my health."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth ..."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"The things you repent were delicious once . . ."_

----------


## Dark Muse

Who is John Galt?

----------


## Dark Muse

"Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal-for a mind to respect and achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them-while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors-hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom-there terrible hopeless, draining, parlaying boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to? 

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

----------


## bouquin

_And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die._

----------


## Snowqueen

_I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more-at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous._

The Picture of Dorian Gray

----------


## Dark Muse

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire-until the day when men withdraw their vultures. 

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

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## bouquin

_Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you._

--------------------------------------------------------
_Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I'm not older than the rain. It's been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling._

--------------------------------------------------------
_It's strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving the directions._

--------------------------------------------------------
_"If you always drink vinegar, you don't know anything sweeter exists."_

----------


## Gilliatt Gurgle

"In Bol we had heard that a few papyrus boats were built large enough to carry forty tons or more, and Mussa claimed thast he had once helped to build a kaday big enough to transport eighty close packed cattle across the open lake. Another had navigated with two hundred men on board. They could be built in any size."
Thor Heyerdhal - The RA Expeditions

----------


## Dark Muse

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one the immediate purpose of the lie the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on. 

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

----------


## Ome

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. 
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." 

J.R.R. Tolkien

----------


## Ome

"You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied. 
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently. 
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!"

Bulgakov

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## Dark Muse

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man." 

Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

----------


## fb0252

i know full well the earthly view of man
The yonder view is blocked to mortal ken.
The fool who squints beyond with blinking eye,
Imagining his like above the sky.
Let him stand firm and gaze about alert.
To able man the world is not inert.
What need for him to seek eternities.
What he may seek, that he may seize.
When spirits haunt, let him not change his pace.
Find bliss and torment in the onward stride.
Aye, every moment stay unsatisfied.
--Goethe, Faust Part II, Act V

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## bouquin

_"'Man makes plans . . . And God laughs.'"_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"Because you and I, we know, . . . that the story is whatever we decide it is, and however nice and neat we make it, in the end a story is never going to make a damn bit of difference to the dead."_

--------------------------------------------------------
_I would rather fight to take a prize however doubtful than wait to see what scraps I may be fed_

--------------------------------------------------------
_"'Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.' Right? I mean, those are Jesus, words. The man could be fairly harsh when he needed to be. . . He was kick-***."_

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## Pierre Menard

"But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."

- Satan

----------


## Pensive

To drink is nothing, what's important is to get drunk

- For Whom The Bells Toll

----------


## bouquin

_We are not to judge of the feelings of others by what we might feel in their place. However dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome._

--------------------------------------------------------
_'I never learned Greek, and I don't find that I've ever missed it. I have had a Doctor's cap and gown without Greek; I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; I eat heartily without Greek; and, in short, as I don't know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.'_

----------


## bouquin

_It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company._

----------


## Kayaan

*The Hare with Amber Eyes* - Edmund de Waal

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of precious ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects ?

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## tonywalt

I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one. 
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

----------


## Gregory Samsa

"Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers." - Roberto Bolaño, 2666.

----------


## Snowqueen

_The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others 
indication of insanity they do not notice in themselves._

The Devil - Leo Tolstoy

----------


## Gregory Samsa

_It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight._

----------


## Chris 73

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'.

----------


## Austin Butler

My mother is a fish.

----------


## Dark Muse

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction -- every kind of evidence in the logician's list -- have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

~Far From the Madding Crowd -Thomas Hardy

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## Dark Muse

Water was a state of mind. If you think it your friend when you swim in the river or wash away the dirt, why call it your enemy when it comes from the heavens? From the cup of the gods themselves. 

The Russian Concubine ~ Kate Furnivall

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## Darcy88

"O, reason not the need [deed]! Our basest beggars 
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs, 
Man's life's as cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady; 
If only to go warm were gorgeous, 
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st, 
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need -- 
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need! 
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man [fellow], 
As full of grief as age, wretched in both! 
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts 
Against their father, fool me not so much 
To bear it tamely [lamely]. Touch me with noble anger, 
And let not women's weapons, water-drops, 
Stain my man's cheeks! No, you unnatural hags, 
I will have such revenges on you both, 
That all the world shall -- I will do such things -- 
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be 
The terrors of the earth! You think I'll weep 
No, I'll not weep: 
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart 
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, 
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!"

From Shakespeare's King Lear

----------


## Gregory Samsa

_In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer_ - Albert Camus.

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## Gregory Samsa

_"The life with you was lovely – and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink “v” in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering “l”. Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has disolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist…"_ - Vladimir Nabokov

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## irishpixieb

"Better to have no sense than misuse it as you do, Emma." Mr. Knightley

"I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to "Yes," she ought to say "No" directly." Emma

From "Emma" by Jane Austen

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## Wolffman

> Here is a thread to share the sections you like in the book you are reading at the moment.
> 
> I have been reading _The Name of the Rose_, which I find a little hard because it is full of religious references (Christianity), some of which I don't understand (practical) and some of which I don't care about (historical). However, it is a good book to make one consider and reconsider blind obedience to religion -or any teaching for that matter. 
> 
> Here are some quotes I really like:


Not so much a quote, but a small excerpt I love from Alasdair Gray's "Lanark":



_"I took Judy to a party. I got rather drunk and started kissing the host's daughter on the floor behind the sofa. She was drunk too. Then Judy found us and was furious. The trouble is I was enjoying myself so much I couldn't even pretend to be sorry."
He frowned, and said, "That was bad, wasn't it?"
"If Judy loves you, yes, of course it was bad."
McAlpin looked gravely at Thaw for a moment, then flung his head back and roared with laughter._

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## Patrick_Bateman

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion.

The Great Gatsby

Though the sun by clouds be covered,
In the soul a light can rise;
In our hearts can be discovered
What the sullen world denies.
--Chorus  Faust  von Goethe

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
--Nabokov  Lolita

Your king is in check,' said Woland. 
Very well, very well,' responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.

--Bulgakov  The Master and Margarita

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## Snowqueen

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. 
_War and Peace_

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingured about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
Frederick Douglass; _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave_

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## Pierre Menard

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. 

~ Yeats


If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? 

- McCarthy (Blood Meridian)

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## Snowqueen

"Spring, love, happiness!" this oak seemed to say. "Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my back or my sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes and your lies."

As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to look at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak, too, were flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid, misshapen, and grim as ever.

"Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right," thought Prince Andrew.

_War and Peace_ by Leo Tolstoy

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Our house stood within a few rods of Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition."

Frederick Douglass _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and American Slave_

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## fb0252

That ancient truth, we will recite it. Give way to force, for might is right.
And who would boldly offer strife, than risk your house, estate and life.

--Chorus Faust Part 2 Act V Goethe as translated by Walter Arndt.

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## hawthorns

Time Regained, Proust 

"If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the, contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through  between which so many days have ranged themselves  they stand like giants immersed in Time."

Villette, Bronte

"Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses, if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whirling in the very vortex of life. That void interval which passes for him so slowly that the very clocks seem at a stand, and the wingless hours plod by in the likeness of tired tramps prone to rest at milestones  that same interval, perhaps, teems with events, and pants with hurry for his friends.The hermit  if he be a sensible hermit  will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter. He will know that Destiny designed him to imitate, on occasion, the dormouse, and he will be conformable: make a tidy ball of himself, creep into a hole of lifes wall, and submit decently to the drift which blows in and soon blocks him up, preserving him in ice for the season.Let him say, It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is. And, perhaps, one day his snow-sepulchre will open, springs softness will return, the sun and south-wind will reach him; the budding of hedges, and carolling of birds, and singing of liberated streams, will call him to kindly resurrection.*Perhaps*this may be the case, perhaps not: the frost may get into his heart and never thaw more; when spring comes, a crow or a pie may pick out of the wall only his dormouse-bones. Well, even in that case, all will be right: it is to be supposed he knew from the first he was mortal, and must one day go the way of all flesh, As well soon as syne.

All great and precious things are lonely.*―*John Steinbeck,*East of Eden

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## Snowqueen

Young men read books before attending Helene's evenings, to have something to say in her salon, and secretaries of the embassy, and even ambassadors, confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that in a way Helene was a power. Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At these parties his feelings were like those of a conjuror who always expects his trick to be found out at any moment. But whether because stupidity was just what was needed to run such a salon.

_War and Peace_ by Leo Tolstoy

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## Chris1991

_Never forget who you are, for surely the world will not.Make it your strength.Then it can never be your weakness.Armor yourself in it,and it will never be used to hurt you_
~~Tyrion Lannister - A game of thrones by George R.R. Martin

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## begirl001

Least common denominator

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## ave d

According to Fleetfin's research, if you sun-dry the sexual organs of a male and female squid and bring them into contact at the rate of three hundred fifty feet per fifteen seconds or less (the average running speed of a third-year junior high school student), you'll create an explosion surpassing dynamite.

Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook (1991)

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## Snowqueen

_Rostov was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, which to his amazement had gained him the St. George's Cross and even given him a reputation for bravery, and there was something he could not at all understand. "So others are even more afraid than I am!" he thought. "So that's all there is in what is called heroism! And heroism! And did I do it for my country's sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George's Cross.... I can't make it out at all."_

_War and Peace_ - Leo Tolstoy

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## TylerDurden

"A strange metaphysical question arises: Whether, when the object of an impassioned love has herself faded into a shadow, the fiery passion itself canstill survive as an abstraction, still mourn over its wrongs, still clamour for redress."

"Even now thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers: but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders" - personal favorite

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Despite my Dutch education, a blue hill to me is as a friend, and a roaring torrent like the sound of a domestic song that hath soothed my infancy. I never felt the impulse so strongly as in this land of lakes and mountains, and nothing grieves me so much as that duty prevents your being with me in my numerous excursions among its recesses."

From Scott's _Guy Mannering_

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## Snowqueen

_On the Sunday afternoon she stood at her bedroom window, looking across at the oak-trees of the wood, in whose branches a twilight was tangled, below the bright sky of the afternoon. Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and dreaded._

_Sons and Lovers_ - D. H. Lawrence

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Zakhar Fyodorovich was used to doing business in the crazy city of Rostov-but not that sort of business. His usual reason for going there was machinery: all the latest machines turned up Rostov. You could take a good look at them, run a hand across them, and someone would explain how they worked in a way you could understand." 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn _August 1914_

edit
I meant to add this one as well from The Travels of Marco Polo:

(click on thumbnail)

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## bouquin

_"But as de old folks always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' what Ah'm liable tuh do yet."_

--------------------------------------------------------------
_It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood._ 

--------------------------------------------------------------
_"If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all."_

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## Emil Miller

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

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## cacian

> "Zakhar Fyodorovich was used to doing business in the crazy city of Rostov-but not that sort of business. His usual reason for going there was machinery: all the latest machines turned up Rostov. You could take a good look at them, run a hand across them, and someone would explain how they worked in a way you could understand." 
> Alexander Solzhenitsyn _August 1914_
> 
> edit
> I meant to add this one as well from The Travels of Marco Polo:
> 
> (click on thumbnail)


This one is interesting. Ulau shutting himself in the tower amongst his wealth.
Why on earth would he do such a thing?

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## cacian

from *The Day The Earth Stood Still*
''Barnhardt: Have you tested this theory? 
Klaatu: I find it works well enough to get me from one planet to another.''

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

> This one is interesting. Ulau shutting himself in the tower amongst his wealth.
> Why on earth would he do such a thing?


It wasnt Ulaù that was shut in the tower. In fact it was Ulaù that ordered the khalif be shut up in the tower filled with gold as punishment against the khalif for not employing his great wealth to form a greater defense against Ulaùs attack and subsequent capture of Baldach.

Another quote - of a quote:

From Anthony Cave Brown _Bodyguard of Lies Vol I_ includes this quote of British RAF Group Captain John Stagg speaking about Eisenhower who had just been appointed as the Supreme Commander of the Allied invasion of Europe:

With a broad smile, an athletic movement like a gymnastic instructor about to give his first lesson and in a trim, well tailored battledress and well ironed creases all in the right places he looked in the first class mental and physical condition. 
Eisenhowers grin, they began to say, was worth an army.

.

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## The Truth

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”

― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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## bouquin

_'As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, as I  can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure - or even intellectual treasure - and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say, treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety percent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.'_

----------------------------------------------------------------
_'There are nice things in the world - and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.'_

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## Gregory Samsa

_In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine._  - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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## Big Penny

"Blades don't need reloading."

Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

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## bouquin

_"We must not always talk in the market place of what happens to us in the forest."_

--------------------------------------------------------------------
_"Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there?"_

--------------------------------------------------------------------
_"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"_

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## Snowqueen

_He saw financiers whose immense wealth was based on robbery but who were welcome everywhere, in the noblest houses, and also men so respected that ordinary people raised their hats to them as they passed but whose scandalous speculation in state-controlled enterprises was perfectly familiar to all those who knew the shady things that take place behind the scenes._

Bel Ami - Guy de Maupassant

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## kev67

From 1984 by George Orwell.




> Unquestionably Syme would be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason to do so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say he was unorthodox. He believed in the principle of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which an ordinary party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Café, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Café, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to forsee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

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## bouquin

_We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it._

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## Dreamsqueen

"On a fine Morning." Thomas Hardt

Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam

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## Snowqueen

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Ive been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."



I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool  that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.


Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.


_The Great Gatsby_ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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## Emil Miller

It's pretty obvious that Evelyn Waugh was bitterly affected by having his world swept away by the Second World War and the deadening effect of its aftermath. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the short story Love Among the Ruins: an allegory on a dystopian future engendered by post-war socialism in Britain. Notwithstanding the satirical intent, there is more than a little truth in this passage about the trial of a pyromaniac called Miles Plastic.

At last the Bench summed up. He reminded the jury that it was a first principle of the New Law that no man could be held responsible for the consequences of his own acts. The jury must dismiss from their minds the consideration that much valuable property and many valuable lives had been lost and the cause of Personal Recreation gravely retarded. They had merely to decide whether in fact the prisoner had arranged inflammable material at various judiciously selected points in the Institution and had ignited them. If he had done so, and the evidence plainly indicated that he had, he contravened the Standing Orders of the Institution and was thereby liable to the appropriate penalties.
Thus directed, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty coupled with a recommendation of mercy towards the various bereaved persons who from time to time in the course of the hearing had been committed for contempt. The Bench reprimanded the jury for presumption and impertinence in the matter of the prisoners held in contempt, and sentenced Miles to residence during the State's pleasure at Mountjoy Castle( the ancestral seat of a maimed V.C. of the Second World War, who had been sent to a Home for the Handicapped when the place was converted in to a gaol)

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## hawthorns

"Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain."

Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

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## Snowqueen

Once I quarrelled with our late mamma: she stromed and would not listen to me....At last I said to her, "Of course you cannot understand me: we belong to different generations," I said. She was dreadfully offended but I thought to myself, ''It can't be helped. It is a bitter pill but she must swallow it."You see, now our time has come, and our seccessors say to us, You are not our generation: sawllow your pill." 

_Fathers and Sons_ by Ivan Turgenev

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## llall

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

The Quiet American, Graham Greene

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## Gregory Samsa

"I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka's The Castle

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## aaron stark

> "I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
> 
> ― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka's The Castle


Holy smokes. That's beautiful...

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## Gregory Samsa

“History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.” - Roberto Bolaño, 2666

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## Clovis

Though this might hardly be considered funny to many, I really busted a gut reading this.


'..a "horribly soft" male voice "whispering" a whole string of "nasty things" to her, wicked things, and the worst of it was that the fellow had said he lived in the same building and why, if she was so keen on intimacies, did she look for them so far away, he was willing and able to offer her every conceivable variety of intimacy...' - Heinrich Böll/The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

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## Babyguile

> History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness. - Roberto Bolaño, 2666


What on Earth?!

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## Snowqueen

''What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?''

_Hamlet_ by Shakespeare

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## Phangirl7

"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning."
First line of The Trial by Franz Kafka.

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

"Well, what can I tell you? I read certain books and write others...
I read thick ones and write thin ones."
"That's a bit vague"
"When things are too clear thay cease to be interesting"

Solzhenitsyn _August 1914-The Red Wheel_

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## Snowqueen

''Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. 
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; 
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.'' 


_Hamlet_ by Shakespeare 


"Now, you wait right here till I come back, for I want to eat barbecue with you. And dont you go off philandering with those other girls, because I'm mighty jealous, " came the incredible words from red lips with a dimple on each side; and briskly black lashes swept demurely over green eyes. "I won't, " he finally managed to breathe, never dreaming that she was thinking he looked like a calf waiting for the butcher. 

_Gone with the Wind_ by Margaret Mitchell

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## ksvane

"When summer comes to Nebraska, each farmhouse is a ship sailing a vast green ocean." -Stephen King. 
I really like that line although I have never been to Nebraska, let alone the US. But the house I grew up in was surrounded by fields, and King flawlessly manages to describe the sensation of how fertile fields look like lively green oceans when the wind blows.

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

_As I shovelled down the meal I could feel Perdito thrilling at each mouthful, impatient already for desert. Afterwords he'd want me to go back the treehouse. I'd sit on the roof reading my latest Silver Surfer magazine, and he'd luxuriate in the sensation of evening sunshine on the back of my neck, soaking up the Roman purple of the flowering clematis that scrambled through the branches of cedar_ 
Mark Bastable -_The Penny Falls_

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## Inky

"The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it." 

"Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart." 

- Snow Falling on Cedars. Can't say I love the book, but some lines really stick out to me.

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## Gilliatt Gurgle

_The peasant without land of his own lends a ready ear to false doctrine, and is susceptible to those who urge him to satisfy his desire for land by force. The solid peasant on land of his own is a barrier against all destructive movements, against any form of communism, which is why all the socialists are so desperately anxious not to see the peasant released from the slavery of the commune, not to let him build up his strength._ - Alexander Solzhenitsyn from _August 1914-The Red Wheel_

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## cafolini

Indeed with one exemption. There is a form of socialism where the peasant owns the land in an evolutionary way which is directly opposed to communism. Such is democracy and it will be globalized. Solzhenitsyn was correct 99 % of the time, but he misunderstood the meaning of Fabianism. Perhaps in this context there have been no countries that are in the ultimate analysis more sociaoistic than USA and UK.

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## Snowqueen

''The night was very quiet. It was always quiet except on moonlight nights. Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits .. On the moonlight nights it was different. The happy voices of children playing in open fields would be heard. As the Ibo say "When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk."



_Things Fall Apart_ by Chinua Achebe

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## Pensive

'I love you; I shall never love anybody else. Marry me or leave me; think what you like of me - I don't care a straw.' At the moment, however, speech or silence seemed immaterial and she merely clapped her hands together and looked at the distant woods with rust-like bloom on their brown and the green and blue landscape through the steam of her own breath. It seemed a mere toss up whether she said 'I love you' or 'I love the beech-trees' or only 'I love - I love'. - Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

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## Senserial

From one of my favourite books, "Lord of the Rings":

Where there's life there's hope, and need of vittles.

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## hannah_arendt

> From one of my favourite books, "Lord of the Rings":
> 
> “Where there's life there's hope, and need of vittles.”


It`s one of my favourites too. :Smile:

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## Sweetgirl

I really like this quote from "The Hunger Games" (the 1st book)

“Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!”
-Effie Trinket

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## thelastmelon

My favorite quote from my favorite novel:

He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
- _Wuthering Heights_, Emily Brontë.

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## hannah_arendt

> My favorite quote from my favorite novel:
> 
> “He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
> - _Wuthering Heights_, Emily Brontë.


It is my favourite too :Smile: 

I like also:

"you can transmute love, ignore it muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you"
E. M. Forster, "A room with a view"

"I`ll tell you what love is. It`s a blind devotion, unquestioning self-humililiation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the shilter"

Ch. Dickens, "Great Expectations"

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## Snowqueen

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. 

_Crime and Punishment_ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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## petermcelwee

"The simple law of the universe is that you create your own reality"

The Jetstream of Success by Julian Pencilliah

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## Marbles

"Remember, old friend, I'm not shooting you. It's the revolution that's shooting you".

__Colonel Aureliano Buendia to General Moncada, in One Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel Marquez.

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## Snowqueen

"Most of all," Hook was saying passionately, "I want their captain, Peter Pan. 'Twas he cut off my arm." He brandished the hook threateningly. "I've waited long to shake his hand with this. Oh, I'll tear him!" 
"And yet," said Smee, "I have often heard you say that hook was worth a score of hands, for combing the hair and other homely uses." 
"Ay," the captain answered. "if I was a mother I would pray to have my children born with this instead of that," and he cast a look of pride upon his iron hand and one of scorn upon the other.

_Peter Pan_ by J. M. Barrie

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