Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

"There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

[covingtoncat73]

"paradise is a world where everything
is a sanctuary & nothing is a gun." ~ From “Summer, Somewhere” by Danez Smith

[covingtoncat73]

"When all the stories and the songs were Tiger’s, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they’d end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew."

~Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman

[BenG]

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

― The opening line of The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

[covingtoncat73]

"You mean...they killed her?" asked David.
"They ate her," said Brother Number One. "With porridge. That's what 'ran away and was never seen again' means these parts. It means 'eaten.'"
"Um, and what about 'happily ever after'?" asked David, a little uncertainly. "What does that mean?"
"Eaten quickly," said Brother Number One
~John Connolly, Book of Lost Things

[Gudy]

"When I was in my mother's womb nobody knew whether I was male or female. And if I strip away being a woman and all that is expected of me because I am a woman, then I am simply a living being who does not want to be a helpless piece of property, who wants to matter, to accomplish things. These are the needs of my deeper self. It is not that I wish to stop being a woman. [...] But I do not want to be a woman at the cost of leaving my deeper needs unfulfilled."
― Robert J. Shea, Shike

[pdurrant]

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

― Sir John Harington (1560-1612)

[covingtoncat73]

"And even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you?You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about-lovers, children-will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death comes and beckons you into his darkness."

~John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

[WT Sharpe]

Correct English is the slang of prigs.
― George Eliot, Middlemarch. The full quote is: "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."

[kennyc]

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

[kennyc]

"We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless."
- Primo Levi (born on this date 7/31/1919)

[BenG]

“If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder.
"I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

[John K]

I'm reading The Humans by Matt Haig. An alien visits earth and writes a first person account of the experience.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

and

A cat, I discovered, was very much like a dog. But smaller, and without the self-esteem issues.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by John K

I'm reading The Humans by Matt Haig. An alien visits earth and writes a first person account of the experience.

Great stuff! And now I'm a bit depressed...

[Apache]

Originally Posted by John K

I'm reading The Humans by Matt Haig. An alien visits earth and writes a first person account of the experience.


and

Originally Posted by orlok

Great stuff! And now I'm a bit depressed...

I have this in my TBR and am bumping it to the top. thank you,
Apache