Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

"America is that away, Mr. Lincoln," laughed Davis, pointing north. "You're in Mississippi now."~from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"

[covingtoncat73]

"F*** reality, baby. Let's go save the universe." ~From The Magician King by Lev Grossman

[gmw]

Dickens's gift is how spontaneously he can render a situation both sympathetic and hilarious - and charged with his fierce indignation, with what Johnson calls his "furious exposure of social evils." Yet Dickens's greatest risk-taking, as a writer, has little to do with his social morality. What he is most unafraid of is sentimentality - of anger, of passion, of emotionally and psychologically revealing himself; he is not self-protective; he is never careful. In the present, post-modernist praise of the craft of writing - of the subtle, of the exquisite - we may have refined the very heart out of the novel. Dickens would have had more fun with today's literary elitists and minimalists than he had with Mr Pumblechook and Mrs Jellyby. He was the king of the novel in that century which produced models of the form.

-- John Irving, essay "The King of the Novel" (1986), from the collection Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1993).

[covingtoncat73]

Lady Presenter: Well, that's the end of the film. Now, here's the meaning of life. [Receives an envelope]

Lady Presenter: Thank you, Brigitte. [Opens envelope, reads what's inside]

Lady Presenter: M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. And, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their f***ing arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment? Bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats. Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight.

~From Monty Python's Meaning of Life

[kennyc]

A few recently added to my quotes file:


Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
- Saul Bellow 6/10/1915.

I never change, I simply become more myself.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
- Allen Ginsberg

We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
- Robert Fulghum

[astrangerhere]

“Sometimes we all need a lesson in keeping quiet. Hard as it is, sometimes we need to hold back.”

-Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman

[kennyc]

Something I ran across from Carl Sagan:

"Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it’s not just puberty – the interest in science that is there in the first grade is beaten out of them by twelfth grade. And I think part of it is that there are adults who are nervous about being asked penetrating question by young people, and so they give offputting answers. “Why is the moon round?” “Well, what did you expect it to be, square?” Instead of encouraging the child – it’s a deep question, why is the moon round? It can get to the nature of gravitation, central forces, the strength of materials, there’s so much in there if you wanted to pursue it. And likewise all those other wonderful questions that kids ask – why do we have toes, what’s the birthday of the world, how deep could you dig a hole, and so on. Every one of those is an aperture to exciting children with their natural aptitude of interest in science, exciting that and encouraging them not necessarily to be professional scientists, but to be citizens who have a responsible role in dealing with science. We have a society based on science and technology, and at the same time we’ve arranged things so that almost nobody understands science and technology. That’ s a prescription or disaster as clear as anything."

-Carl Sagan

[kennyc]

"Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."

- Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird

[covingtoncat73]

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." ~T.S. Elliot

“Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.”
– Grant Morrison

[astrangerhere]

“You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”

- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

[kennyc]

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.
- Irving Stone born 7/14/1903.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

“You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”

- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Just went back to reading this yesterday.

[linelle]

"The things that matter don't necessarily make sense." Russell Hoban, TURTLE DIARY.

[SuburbanSteve]

“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.” -Roland Deschain
From The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

[Angst]

We buy things we don't need,
With money we don't have,
To impress people we don't like.

--Fight Club (movie)