Your favourite literary quotes

[Ar*****]

A rather dark turn for this thread, but the book is ably written, is undeniably secular, avoids bitterness and a unique specimen of human experience.

"Now each of us is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as to pick up the last drops of soup, a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails, and then, from my bunk, on the top level, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his cap on his head, his torso swaying violently. Kuhn is thanking God that he was not chosen.

Kuhn is out of his mind. Does he not see, in the bunk next to him, Beppo the Greek, who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow, and knows it, and lies there staring at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Does Kuhn not know that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty—nothing at all in the power of man to do—can ever heal?

If I were God, I would spit Kuhn’s prayer out upon the ground."

- If This is a Man, (trans. Stuart Woolf) Primo Levi

[workerbee]

Two from the Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch:

“Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”
― Homo Faber (1957)

“We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.”
― I'm Not Stiller (1954)

[workerbee]

This is my favorite passage from Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-93 by Paul Bowles, the American author, translator and composer who made his home in Tangier, Morocco.  It is drawn from a mesmerizing account of his travel in the Sahara desert entitled "Baptism of Solitude":

"It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came."

It is this experience - of transformation - we should all probably seek out at some point in our lives.

[logderson]

My favourite quotes are the ones of Paulo Coelho, for instance "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it".

[malloc_free]

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

[workerbee]

"Heavy, God-infested, magnificently metaphysical, unafraid to court ridicule, and playing for the highest possible stakes—they don’t write like that anymore."

- from a profile by critic James Wood of Henrik Pontoppidan, winner of the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature, in the most recent issue of The New Yorker (21 Oct 2019)

[workerbee]

"[T]he the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..."

-- from On the Road by Jack Kerouac

[graatch]

Et le monde, entraînant pavois, glaive, échafaud,
Ses lois, ses mœurs, ses dieux, s'écoule sous le mot.

[titouan3514]

J'aime beaucoup William Shakespeare https://jardindescitations.com/auteurs/@...hakespeare

https://jardindescitations.com/collections

[RobertX]

J'aime aussi William Shakespeare.

Translation: I also love William Shakespeare.