Your favourite literary quotes

[Philidor]

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." -Anatole France, The Red Lily

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean." -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

[joew771]

A few qotes by the greatest SF author ever, and probably my favorite author ever.

'Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.'

'Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.' lol

'I never learned from a man who agreed with me.'

'An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.'

-Robert Heinlein

[Ar*****]

Whatever happened to this thread? It was going strong with some good contributions. Here's one to rejuvenate it:

"Paris is but a dream, Gabriel is but a reverie (a charming one), Zazie the dream of a reverie (or of a nightmare) and all this story the dream of a dream and the reverie of reverie, scarcely more than the typewritten delirium of an idiotic novelist (oh! sorry)."

- Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro

[Philidor]

All by James Branch Cabell:

"There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth." - The Cream of the Jest

"You are now a famous champion, that has crowned with victory a righteous cause for which many stalwart knights and gallant gentlemen have made the supreme sacrifice, because they knew that in the end the right must conquer. Your success thus represents the working out of a great moral principle, and to explain the practical minutiae of these august processes is not always quite respectable." -Figures of Earth

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." -The Silver Stallion

"Nothing in the universe, is of any importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance.  For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams." -The Silver Stallion

[Ar*****]

Here's a few more :

"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thoughts, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so that in a sense, by the very act of brutish acceptance, we undo the work of ages, the history of gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from treeman to Browning, from caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find us unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but the miracle of it being readable."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

".......(somewhat as one suffering from dizziness speaks in nervous delusion of a weight on his head or something that has fallen upon him, etc,. a weight and a pressure that comes from something external but is actually the reverse reflection of the internal)..."

- Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death

The Kierkegaard parenthesis is the most illuminating stuff I've ever read : For example - Compare with Kirillov's ravings in The Possessed.

and

"As a madman deems himself God, we deem ourselves mortal."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

[workerbee]

"What if we awake one day, all of us, and find us unable to read?" -- Nabokov

That's a fascinating idea for a book.  I wonder if it's ever been explored.  The first thing I thought of when I read it was Jose Saramago's novel Blindness.

[Ar*****]

That's a fascinating idea for a book.  I wonder if it's ever been explored.  The first thing I thought of when I read it was Jose Saramago's novel Blindness.

No idea.... Don't think so. Maybe some movie and/or anime has done it....

Here's another :

"The forces of imagination, which in the long run, are the forces of good remain steadfastly on S...'s side, and the very bitterness of tortured love proves to be as intoxicating and bracing as would be its most ecstatic requital."

- VN, The Eye

and

"Things thought too long can no longer be thought..."

- WB Yeats, The Gyres

[joew771]

Whatever happened to this thread?

Not sure why you decided the thread was bad, and you are so wonderful. But I have this quote for you.

'The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.'

Samuel Butler

[Ar*****]

Whatever happened to this thread?

I meant to rejuvenate to this wonderful thread, joew771 and by the way, Dickinson's "Because I couldn't stop for Death..." as well as Poe's The Bells (that you posted upon) are some of my old favorites...

That said, here's a paraphrase  :

"Your grave and tombstone will be a resting place for the troubled conscience and a pillow for the soul."

- Last Chorus "Wir setzen uns mit Tranen nieder" from Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

[Ar*****]

I think pitting Tolstoy against Dostoevsky is one of the favorite pastimes of all Russian Lit. readers. Here's one of the best quotes settling their differences :

"... and of Tolstoy, who, however, seems to have been given to the world for the special purpose of being contrasted with Dostoevsky. Much has been said of the aristocratic nature of the former and the plebeian nature of the latter, of the naturalism of the one and the spiritualism of the other. Apart from the difference between their social position and education, the essential difference is that Tolstoy is a puritan and Dostoevsky a symbolist. That is to say that for Dostoevsky - all relative values were related to absolute values and received their significance, positive or negative, from the way they reflected the higher values. For Tolstoy - the absolute and the relative are two disconnected worlds, and the relative is in itself evil."

- D. S. Mirsky, History of Russian Literature

** Incidentally, this book is one of the best survey of Russian Literature till date.