Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (89 years old today 4/28)

[covingtoncat73]

"You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path." Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss, pp.xxv-xxvi

[pdurrant]

'Assessing the security of software via the question "can we find any security flaws in it?" is like assessing the structure of a bridge by asking the question "has it collapsed yet?" '

-- Colin Percival

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (89 years old today 4/28)

I saw where you posted that on Goodreads. I was going to repost it here if you hadn't. That's a great find.

[kennyc]

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way ..."
- Charles Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities" First installment published today 4/30/1859

[covingtoncat73]

One of the best first lines in literature, to be sure, Kenny, and my favorite Dickens (what can I say? It also has a great closing). Here is another good first line...

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up." —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

[WT Sharpe]

.....It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four, besides being very amusing.
..........— Samuel Butler (1835–1902), British author. Written in a letter dated Nov. 21, 1884 to Eliza Mary Ann Savage (1836-1885).

Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle

[covingtoncat73]

"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."
—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

[WT Sharpe]

.....Two nights ago I showed up to teach my class with a raw chest and a raging sore throat, the kind that feels like cancer of the trachea. I happen to have two doctors in this class, and one of them tried to assure me that it probably wasn’t tracheal cancer, that in fact the viral cloud of mid-autumn had descended and many people were having similar symptoms. The other doctor recommended drinking really, really hot water. “Hot water?” I said. “Hot water? I should be home hooked up to an epidural, drinking codeine cough syrup, and you’re prescribing hot water?” Then I threatened to lower his grade. (Of course, this is not a graded workshop, so my students tend to roll their eyes when I threaten them.) At the break, that doctor brought me a cup of boiling water, as though for tea but without the tea bag, and I drank it. My throat and chest stopped aching about twenty seconds later.
.....I hate that.
..........— Anne Lamott (1954-), American novelist and non-fiction writer. Bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life.

[kennyc]

Reality trumps theory every time.
- Carlos Wu (Larry Niven - Betrayer of Worlds)

[covingtoncat73]

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

[FacebookVirus]

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[AlexBell]

'from what we see every day we may be sure that many women have loved, not the man himself they have married, but an ideal which he personates very indifferently indeed to all eyes but theirs.'

Holmes Lee (Harriet Parr) from The Wreck of the Golden Mary, 1856

[kennyc]

'Books are the mirrors of the soul.'
- Virginia Woolf

[kennyc]

We Real Cool

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.”

― Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
Gwendolyn Brooks on 5/5/1950 was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize