Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, it's just possible that you haven't grasped the situation.
— Jean Kerr, Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957)

[ccowie]

I'm reading Testament of Youth for the book club and this sentence really caused me to stop and think. The author has been a volunteer nurse through WW1 and has lost 4 significant people who were close to her, the first being her fiance. The war ends but she's not able to muster what it takes to really celebrate and looking back she writes:

"To-day, as we look back, 1919 seems a horrid year, dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace."

[WT Sharpe]

Came on this in my reading today and thought I'd share. From Alan Hutcheson's new novel, The Baer Boys:

I felt for the kids who weren’t going to be cast, especially the ones who had done a nice job at the audition but just didn’t fit any particular role. But that’s the way life works, isn’t it? More often than we like to admit it’s not how good you are, it’s whether you’re right for the part.

[covingtoncat73]

“The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by ccowie

I'm reading Testament of Youth for the book club and this sentence really caused me to stop and think. The author has been a volunteer nurse through WW1 and has lost 4 significant people who were close to her, the first being her fiance. The war ends but she's not able to muster what it takes to really celebrate and looking back she writes:

"To-day, as we look back, 1919 seems a horrid year, dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace."

The sense of bereavement at the end of the war must have been overwhelming for so many people.

"I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before … One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war." - Cynthia Asquith's diary, October 7, 1918

Cynthia Asquith lost two brothers and many friends during the war. Earlier in her diary, she wrote "Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people?"

[AlexBell]

It is a great truth, that you cannot extinguish violence by violence. You may put it down for a time; but while you are crowing over your imaginary success, see if it does not return with seven devils worse than its former self!

Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell

[astrangerhere]

“..the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and [that] thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past”

Gabriel García Márquez | Love in the Time of Cholera

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by ccowie

I'm reading Testament of Youth for the book club and this sentence really caused me to stop and think. The author has been a volunteer nurse through WW1 and has lost 4 significant people who were close to her, the first being her fiance. The war ends but she's not able to muster what it takes to really celebrate and looking back she writes:

"To-day, as we look back, 1919 seems a horrid year, dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace."

I had to read Brittain's book when I was in college, and I am still moved by it. Her story was just so interesting to me - all politics aside. It was a book I enjoyed going back to long after my college days and really enjoying it.

[bfisher]

'And so they've killed our Ferdinand,' said the charwoman to Mr Švejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs — ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged.
Apart from this occupation he suffered from rheumatism and was at this very moment rubbing his knees with Elliman's embrocation.
'Which Ferdinand, Mrs Müller?' he asked, going on with the massaging. 'I know two Ferdinands. One is a messenger at Průša's, the chemist's, and once by mistake he drank a bottle of hair oil there. And the other is Ferdinand Kokoška who collects dog manure. Neither of them is any loss.'
'Oh no, sir, it's his Imperial highness, the Archduke Ferdinand, from Konopiště, the fat churchy one.'

"The Good Soldier Švejk" by Jaroslav Hašek

[bfisher]

'I was born in 1954 in Edinburgh. Winston Churchill was prime minister, there was still rationing, we were the first generation that would grow up with television, pop music, central heating and a National Health Service. As a child, every old man I knew had fought in the First World War and every young man in the second.

War still hung like the smell of a damp, grim nostalgia over everything. We played Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the playground and you could, as Kingsley Amis pointed out, walk into any pub in the country and ask with perfect confidence if the major had been in.'

A.A.Gill, "Life at 60", The Sunday Times, June 29, 2014

[Billi]

“I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.”

― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

[ccowie]

Just finished the brilliant Crimes Against My Brother by David Adams Richards. No one writes about betrayal like Richards. This quote late in the book hit me in the stomach:

It is dangerous not to think of your friends as your greatest enemies. It is dangerous not to think that those who have conformed in their views all their lives will not conform when thinking of you, and not want you to enliven their boredom or affirm their belief in how they were told the world works by revelling in your destruction.

[bfisher]

"The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind.

This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye, had become expert at making rats suffer for science."

NPR News, "The Secret History Behind The Science Of Stress",July 7,2014


As Selye wrote in his biography, The Stress of My Life (one of 39 books he authored to promote the concept of stress), "Stress will have been my cathedral and I shall polish and perfect it. ... I know my child will outlive me."

[WT Sharpe]

....."Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars."
..........— Inspector Ratcliffe, a fictional character created by G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) English writer, critic, Christian apologist, and much more. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), Chapter XI: "The Criminals Chase the Police."

[WT Sharpe]

.....Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an ailment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet.
..........— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 3rd President of the United States. From a letter to Dr. Vine Utley dated March 21, 1819.