Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[astrangerhere]

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

- Erasmus

[KenMagee]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.- Erasmus

I wonder what Erasmus would have thought of Kindles.

[covingtoncat73]

"We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love." ~The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

[covingtoncat73]

"That's why I have to make these paintings great, to change the world before it's completely f***ed." ~Alan Moore, Jerusalem

[BenG]

Experiment 472 was a failure. The worst sort of failure. The sort of failure that comes in a compact little bundle and hides in the dark corners of one’s laboratory, patiently awaiting an opportunity to leap out and sever any major blood vessels it might find in one’s neck. The sort of failure that seven crushing blows from a retort stand barely slows down. The sort of failure that is chased out onto the attic landing, whips between the banister railings, plummets three stories down the stairwell and yet need pause only a moment to recover its wits before darting off again.
― the opening lines to Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day by Jonathan L. Howard, the short story that first introduced the necromancer of some little infamy to the world.

[astrangerhere]

“She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface...”

- Ron Rash | Something Rich and Strange

[covingtoncat73]

"Wherever did these jumped up monkeys get all their ideas from? ~Alan Moore, Jerusalem

[kennyc]

Ha! "Jumped up monkeys!" Ha!

[kennyc]

"With the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do."
- Arthur Miller

[kennyc]

"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out."
- Clive James

[BenG]

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”

and

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other’s arms, holding love, asleep.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

[covingtoncat73]

"By God! if women hadde written stories,
As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than all the mark of Adam may redresse." ~Chaucer, Wife of Bath's Tale

“It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

[AlexBell]

'What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result ... This falsity around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his last days.'

From The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

[kennyc]

"Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call."
- Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Thank you Sylvia Plath on this your birthday!