Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[astrangerhere]

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

Haruki Murakami | Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Haruki Murakami | Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

That book is next on my list to read. Here is a quote from my current read...

"A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”
~David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks.

[covingtoncat73]

“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

[bfisher]

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

In Memory of W.B.Yeats -W.H.Auden

[Dazrin]

"They’ve got to see there are brighter literary worlds than Twilight. Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex." - Stephen King talking about pushing kids to read, interview published at The Atlantic

I haven't read Twilight, but the quote works just as well without the first sentence.

Full quote:

Spoiler:

Lahey: English teachers tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to literacy: Those who believe we should let students read anything they want so they will be more likely to engage with books, and those who believe teachers should push kids to read more challenging texts in order to expose them to new vocabulary, genres, and ideas. Where would you pitch your tent?

King: You don’t want to leave them in despair, which is why it’s such a horrible idea to try teaching Moby-Dick or Dubliners to high school juniors. Even the bright ones lose heart. But it’s good to make them reach a little. They’ve got to see there are brighter literary worlds than Twilight. Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex.

[WT Sharpe]

Here are three quotes from Anacharsis, a Scythian philosopher who flourished around 600 BCE. These are all taken from The Great Thoughts by George Seldes (Introduction and new compilation by David Laskin).

.....Written laws are like spiders’ webs, and will like them only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful easily break through them.
..........— Anacharsis, quoted in Plutarch, The Lives of The Noble Grecians and Romans, "Solon."

The next one reminded me very much of the tenor of much of the book I'm currently reading, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck:

.....The market-place is a place set aside where men may deceive and overreach each other.
..........— Anacharsis, quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, Libro de la vita de philosophi et delle loro elegantissime sentencie (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers).

And the last reminds me of Walt Kelly's "Pogo." Those who are old enough will know why.

.....What is man’s chief enemy? Each man is his own.
..........— Anacharsis, quoted in Stobaeus, Florilegium, II, 43

Spoiler:

[gmw]

And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements.
-- Ted Chiang, "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling", 2013.

What the hell, here's another (yes, I enjoyed this short story very much ):

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments
-- Ted Chiang, "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling", 2013.

[Chiron scriba]

Hi all,
I just run into a wealth of Oscar Wilde quotes here, and not to share them would be really mean

[pilotbob]

A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.

-- Bill Cosby

[Barty]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

That book is next on my list to read. Here is a quote from my current read...

"A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”
~David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks.

You know what else messes with your head? Working a thankless minimum job. Get over yourself, writer.

Sorry, but I don't like hearing writers mythologizing writing. It comes off as either outright bragging or humblebragging.

[astrangerhere]

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”

Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall

[Chiron scriba]

"Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made"

Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain)

[WT Sharpe]

.....Laws which can be broken without any wrong to one's neighbor are counted but a laughing stock; and so far from such laws restraining the appetites and lusts of mankind, they rather strengthen them. Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata ("We always resist prohibitions, and yearn for what is denied us.")
..........— Baruch Spinoza (1623-1677), Dutch philosopher. Tractatus Politicus, ch. 10.

[bfisher]

"No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down"
Robert Frost in a thank-you note to Lionel Trilling, after Trilling had called him a "terrifying poet" at Frost's 85th birthday party

[bfisher]

"Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas"
D.H. Lawrence - Bavarian Gentians