Your favourite literary quotes

[Philidor]

"Patriotism is the religion of hell." - James Branch Cabell: Jurgen

[Ar*****]

Here's two more :

"Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear."

- Hermann Melville, Moby Dick

"When I was *****er I ate some butterflies in Vermont to see if they were poisonous. I didn't see any difference between a Monarch butterfly and a Viceroy (example of mimicry). The taste of both was vile, but I had no ill effects. They tasted like almonds and perhaps a green cheese combination. I ate them raw. I held one in one hot little hand and one in the other. Will you eat some with me tomorrow for breakfast?"
 
- Nabokov, 1959 Interview

[Ar*****]

An immortal scene from a novel focussing on Henry James. Actually, it covers the complex family of the Jameses, from William to their sister Alice and their father Henry James Sr.

"In the gathering dusk it appeared as though a seal or some dark, rounded object from the deep had appeared on the surface of the water. Tito took the pole in both hands as if to defend himself. And then Henry saw what it was. Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted, their arms and bellies bloated with water. As they turned the boat, Henry noticed that a greyness had set in over Venice. Soon a mist would settle over the lagoon. Tito had already moved the gondola towards the buoyant material; Henry watched as he worked at it with the pole, pushing the ballooning dress under the surface and holding it there and then moving his attention to another dress which had partially resurfaced, pushing that under again, working with ferocious strength and determination. He did not cease pushing, prodding, sinking each dress and then moving to another."

- The Master, Colm Toibin

[DRACULA-]

"Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. Diveltaking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank
sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a *****er's there. Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? "

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, page 627

[contrail]

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." / "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." -Abraham Lincoln

"To be, or not to be, that is the question." -William Shakespeare

"Those who know how to think need no teachers." -Mahatma Gandhi

"Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." / "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -Winston Churchill

"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." -Mark Twain

"Silence is a true friend who never betrays." -Confucius

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -Albert Einstein

[Ar*****]

"Back now in the stern-sheets, my legs stretched out, my back well propped against the sack stuffed with grass I used as a cushion, I swallowed my calmative. The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on."

- Beckett, The End


And another, which I keep forgetting so let it stand for remembrance :

"You hear what we speak by the fleshly sense, and you do not want the syllables to stand where they are; rather you want them to fly away so that others may come and you may hear a whole sentence. So it is with all things that make up a whole by the succession of parts; such a whole would please us much more if all the parts could be perceived at once rather than in succession."

- Augustine, as quoted by Jorie Graham in her Regions of Unlikeness

[Ar*****]

"The right model for imitation is that chemist who, when he encountered, or thought he had encountered, a hitherto nameless form of matter, did not purloin for it the name of something else, but invented out of his own head a name which should be proper to it, and enriched the vocabulary of modern man with the useful word 'gas'. If we apply the word poetry to an object which does not resemble, either in form or content, anything which has heretofore been so called, not only are we maltreating and corrupting language, but we may be guilty of disrespect and blasphemy. Poetry may be too mean a name for the object in question: the object, being certainly something different, may possibly be something superior. When the Lord rained bread from heaven so that man did eat angels’ food, and the *****ren of Israel saw upon the face of the wilderness a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground, they did not call it quails: they rose to the occasion and said to one another, "it is manna."

-  Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry

[Ar*****]

"An uncle of mine, a canon with full prebend, liked to say that love of temporal glory was the perdition of souls, who should covet only eternal glory. To which another uncle, an officer in one of those old infantry regiments, would retort that love of glory was the most truly human thing there was in a man and, consequently, his most genuine attribute.
Let the reader decide between the military man and the canon. I'm going back to the poultice."

- Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

[lidlnelly]

"Am i bothered..."

~Catherine Tate~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV1zK8zR*****o

[Ar*****]

"Our generation was thought of as “New Critics” or “Formalists" - terms that have come in for a fair amount of *****. We were said to practice something called “close reading” - a rather absurd term, since what, if anything, would “far reading” be? It was popularly thought that “New Critics” believed that one needed nothing but “the words on the page” in order to construct a description or an interpretation of a passage of literature. Of course, the original “New Critics” - and any followers worthy of them - were very learned men: Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in the United States, and, in England, I. A. Richards and his pupil William Empson. They had learned, in short, whatever they thought they needed to know in order to approach the passage in question. Their fundamental choice, as critics, was a choice of attention: they chose to give more time to the intrinsic qualities of the work than to its contextual penumbra. They were far from declaring learning (historical, social, psychological) unnecessary to interpretation. They simply assumed that any thorough critic would not begin to write unless the necessary elements of learning had been gathered. They preferred to memorize the poem before teaching it or writing on it; Douglas Bush was famous for having memorized Paradise Lost, and Richards’ memory was legendary."

- Helen Vendler; The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar