Your favourite literary quotes

[Qu_Sol82]

“But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left Earth, 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.”
-- Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.
--Leonard Nimoy

“Like the lover, the friend expects no reward for his feelings. He does not wish the performance of any duty in return, he does not view the person he has chosen as his friend with any illusion, he sees his faults and accepts him with all their consequences. Such is the ideal. And without such an ideal, would there be any point to life? And if a friend fails, because he is not a true friend, is one allowed to attack his character and his weaknesses? What is the value of a friendship in which one person loves the other for his virtue, his loyalty, his steadfastness? What is the value of a love that expects loyalty? Isn’t it our duty to accept the faithless friend as we do the faithful one who sacrifices himself? Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship? That the more we give, the less we expect? And if a man gives someone his trust through all the years of his youth and stands ready to make sacrifices for him in manhood because of that blind, unconditional devotion, which is the highest thing anyone person can offer another, only then to witness the faithlessness and base behavior of his friend, is he permitted to rise up in protest and demand vengeance? And if he does rise up and demand vengeance, having been deceived and abandoned, what does that say about the validity of his friendship in the first place?"
--Sandor Marai, Embers

[s1lv3rPh4nt0m]

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” - J.R.R. Tolkein

im just a terrible person and i do these sorta things to everyone

[Ar*****]

I'm sorry but here comes old Monsieur Gustave :

"Deep within me is a radical, intimate, bitter and incessant boredom which prevents me from enjoying anything and which smothers my soul. It reappears at any excuse, just as the swollen corpses of drowned dogs pop to the surface, despite the stones that have been tied around their necks."

- Gustave Flaubert, Letters

I can feel workerbee, cringing at the proffered imagery.

[workerbee]

That's absolutely brilliant, although I hope we're not going to get into dueling Flauberts. There is so much to choose from.

"If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or you enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature."
-- Gustave Flaubert, Letters

[Ar*****]

Okay to change things a bit :

"His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling......
...His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

- James Joyce, The Dead

Talk about lyrical, eagle soaring flight....

[joew771]

Sorry, not so much a quote as an excerpt, but probably the best beginning of any book ever.

Show Content

Spoiler

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Howard Roark laughed.

He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen
explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water
seemed immovable, the stone--flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief
moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause
more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.

The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks
went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the
world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the
feet of the man on the cliff.

His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and
angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his
sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together, the curve of
his neck, and the weight of the blood in his hands. He felt the wind behind him,
in the hollow of his spine. The wind waved his hair against the sky. His hair
was neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind.

He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things
which now lay ahead.

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I'd cut off my foot to be able to write something that good. I've already cut off my left pinky finger. That didn't help.

[Ar*****]

Here's something from a good, serious and famous book of Parkinson disease or encephalitis lethargica as it is called throughout the world. The quote is from a patient's diary (contains something of a human element as someone would say) and shows the Will/Mind over matter as they say :

"In his last few days he (Robert O.; a patient) joked with the nurses, and he asked the rabbi to read him a psalm. A few hours before his death he said: "I was going to kill myself, in 1922 … I’m glad I didn’t … It’s been a good game, encephalitis and all."

- from Oliver Sacks' Awakenings


A Suggestion : Please, for those who are interested, Read the book and avoid the Movie. I can only modestly concur with W. H. Auden's statement, that this book is a masterpiece.

[AareOnaKakanfo]

It's not really a literary quote, but I just have to share it. Naguib Mahfouz, when asked what he thought about people who sought answers in Sufism, said:
"I wish them well. The real solution to their problem is in the National Bank."

[Ar*****]

Nice Mahfouz quote above, but here's something by Nabokov (again) from his novel Transparent Things (the one novel, whose nerve points sends shockwaves at my synapses) :

"Poor soul is right, you know. My wretched liver is as heavy as a rejected manuscript; they manage to keep the hideous hyena pain at bay by means of frequent injections but somehow or other it remains always present behind the wall of my flesh like the muffled thunder of a permanent avalanche which obliterates there, beyond me, all the structures of my imagination, all the landmarks of my conscious self...........

.....Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that book would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that book will not be written not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately."


- Baron R's letter, from VN's TT

[Ar*****]

Another from VN :

"The inspiration of genius adds a third ingredient: its the past and the present and the future (your book) that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire cycle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist."

- The Art of Literature and Commonsense

NB - The interesting part of this sentence is that Nabokov gives 'Future' a status of Time only to deny Time. For VN's opinions on the texture of Time check out 'The Texture of Time' (Part IV) from Ada which greatly expands Bergson's essay 'Duration and Simultaneity' from Bergson's Key Writings.