Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[astrangerhere]

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

- Victor Hugo

[poohbear_nc]

"Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right."

--Isaac Asimov

[WT Sharpe]

.....The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, particular to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people—not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets—we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is lonliness.
..........— Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American novelist. Contribution, "The Anatomy of Loneliness," The American Mercury Reader edited by Lawrence E. Spivak, Charles Angoff (October 1941).

[poohbear_nc]

Wonderful quote Tom ... and I love this word:

manswarm

- it's so just right!

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Wonderful quote Tom ... and I love this word: - it's so just right!

That was an interesting word, though my spell-checker didn't at all like it.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

That was an interesting word, though my spell-checker didn't at all like it.

Rather like Elizabeth Bishop's man-moth?

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

"Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right."

--Isaac Asimov

Love that one, PB. According to the ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICIA, this motto was adopted from one of Salvor Hardin's epigrams (Foundation, Part IV, "The Traders").

[TenaciousBadger]

There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.
It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.

--Carolyn Forché

[TrashcanMan]

Apologies if its been posted already but i absolutely love Stephen Crane:



"Think as I think," said a man,
"Or you are abominably wicked;
You are a toad."

And after I had thought of it,
I said, "I will, then, be a toad."




and from the Pirates of Penzance:


“Oh dry the glistening tear that dews that marshal cheek.
Thy loving children here in them thy comfort seek.
With sympathetic care, their arms around thee creep.
For oh they cannot bear to see their father weep.”

[TrashcanMan]

Stephen Crane :

To the maiden
The sea was blue meadow,
Alive with little froth-people
Singing.

To the sailor, wrecked,
The sea was dead grey walls
Superlative in vacancy,
Upon which nevertheless at fateful time
Was written
The grim hatred of nature.

[covingtoncat73]

Stephen Crane

In the Desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

[orlok]

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

- Robertson Davies

[covingtoncat73]

Li Po (701 762 CE): Drinking Alone by Moonlight

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky. (1)

[TenaciousBadger]

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”

—Jonathan Safran Foer from Everything Is Illuminated (I think)

[Steve Anderson]

"What lousy company we keep to earn our living."

— from the comically pompous worldview of Gerald Samper in Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson.

Luckily, it doesn't apply in my case — probably something like the opposite — but I thought it was funny and sadly too true for many out there.