Your favourite literary quotes

[workerbee]

". . . I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

     -- James Joyce, Ulysses

[Ar*****]

Speaking of Joyce, here's something by Beckett that closely resembles Joyce and Nabokov :

"Murphy’s purpose in going to sit at Neary’s feet was not to develop the Neary heart, which he thought would quickly prove fatal to a man of his temper, but simply to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at that time a Pytha*****an, called the Apmonia. For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, auscultated, percussed, radiographed and cardiographed, it was all that a heart should be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in his box."

- Sam Beckett, Murphy


N.B. - I think this conclusion can be generalized and stretched to include [most] of us.

[anmisto]

Well, I've been reading Cloud Atlas, these are taken from the book

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. -- Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’ that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

[Ar*****]

Allow me to quote what seemed to me one of the most memorable lines from that mammoth of a novel, Anna Karenina. Supposedly, it is one of workerbee's favourite novels.

"He [Vronsky] felt what a murderer must feel when he sees a body he has deprived of life. This body he had deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something horrible and loathsome in his memories of what had been paid for at this terrible price of shame. Shame at her spiritual nakedness was crushing her [Anna] and was being communicated to him. Despite the full horror of the murderer before the dead body, though, this body had to be cut to pieces and hidden, advantage had to be taken of what the murderer had gained by murder."

- Tolstoy; Anna Karenina; Chap. 11, Part II

[joew771]

A few quotes from what I think is one of the best books ever. Personally, I think it's the best book written in the past 25 years. But it's not easy to read. Not by a long shot. Easily the most difficult book I've ever read. Read it and see why.

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

“Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people……..”

heh. lol.

“If you won't share my life with me, maybe you'll share my death.”

“Seek midday nourishment. Visit memorial acclaimed war hero Colonel Sanders.”

“Maybe it's better just living the way you figure life is when you're a kid. Before you get too smart.”

And one last one to illustrate how awesome, but difficult this book is is this last quote.

“...individual, traditional method entrenched oligarchy so maintain own power: Fracture citizen isolated into different religion, different race, different family. Label as rich culture diversity. Cleave as unique until each citizen stand alone. Until each vote invested no value. Single citizen celebrated as special--in actual, remaining no power. Only when wedded to state purpose grants the citizen actual power. State mission and plan creates helpless individual as noble identity with grand reason for exist.”

Just read the f**king thing. Do it!

And for those of you who are reluctant. He's the guy who wrote 'fight club'. so that may mean something.

[workerbee]

"The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung." -- Walt Whitman, "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads"

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/16858828/

[workerbee]

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

-- Voltaire: Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, 28 Nov. 1770.

[Philidor]

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

[joew771]

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”

Palahniuk again. We should all fall to our knees and worship him, then get drunk and beat the shit out of him.

[Ar*****]

"I have often come across such phrases - probably recollections from more tender years of schooling - as "his style is simple" or "his style is clear and simple" or "his style is beautiful and simple". But remember that "simplicity" is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple."

- Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature