Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

"If courage comes dressed in red robes and bare feet
I will never be fearful again"
- Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Age of Miracles

[covingtoncat73]

“Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to...inevitabilities.”
― Brian Friel, Translations

[kennyc]

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
- Leonard Cohen

"There is a crack, a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
- Leonard Cohen

"There is a crack, a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen

Yes!

"poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity"
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

[kennyc]

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick
(Born on this date 1932)

[kennyc]

“...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

[kennyc]

“It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick
(Born on this date 1932)

[covingtoncat73]

Best. Subtle. Put-down. Ever.

"'What a woman—oh, what a woman!' cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. 'Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?'

'From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,' said Holmes coldly."

~A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan Doyle

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Best. Subtle. Put-down. Ever.

"'What a woman—oh, what a woman!' cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. 'Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?'

'From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,' said Holmes coldly."

~A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan Doyle

[covingtoncat73]

"There is nothing more to be said or to be done to-night, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellow-men.” ~The Five Orange Pips, Arthur Conan Doyle

/thoroughly enjoying my Sherlock re-read/listen (narrated by Stephen Fry!)

[astrangerhere]

“She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.”

Virginia Woolf | Night and Day

[BenG]

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by BenG

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

I love that story, that quote/opening in particular. Steinbeck was a poet.

[AlexBell]

CHORUS
As for what’s to come—you’ll know that
when it comes. So let it be.
To know would be to grieve ahead of time.
It’s clear whatever is to happen
will happen, like tomorrow’s dawn.

from Agamemnon, part of The Oresteia by Aeschylus.

Modern translation by Ian Johnston