Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by gmw

Curious quote. Reminds me of something a solicitor told us when we were doing our wills: "You're a long time looking at the lid."

Great solicitor quote! Here is a quote about inheritance from Hemingway for you:

“I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

[covingtoncat73]

“Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.”
― Molière (born this day, January 15, 1622)

[WT Sharpe]

One can only wonder why he never married.

Man should be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.

— Friedrich Nietzsche (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900); German philosopher, poet, and musician. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), "On Little Old and Young Women".

[doubleshuffle]

How about a great descriptive passage?

The last sunset of the year had been stormy; the whole sky, as I saw it from the Pincio, blazed like a conflagration; fire caught the farthest roofs of Rome, and seemed to sear the edges and outskirts of the city, like a great flame coming down from heaven. This flame burnt with an unslackening ardency long after the sun had gone down below the horizon; then the darkness began to creep about it, and it grew sombre, drooping into purple, withering into brown, dwindling into a dull violet, and from that wandering into a fainter and fainter greyness, until the roofs, jutting like abrupt shadows into the night, seemed to go up like smoke all round the city, as if the great fire were smouldering out.

Arthur Symons.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

How about a great descriptive passage?

The last sunset of the year had been stormy; the whole sky, as I saw it from the Pincio, blazed like a conflagration; fire caught the farthest roofs of Rome, and seemed to sear the edges and outskirts of the city, like a great flame coming down from heaven. This flame burnt with an unslackening ardency long after the sun had gone down below the horizon; then the darkness began to creep about it, and it grew sombre, drooping into purple, withering into brown, dwindling into a dull violet, and from that wandering into a fainter and fainter greyness, until the roofs, jutting like abrupt shadows into the night, seemed to go up like smoke all round the city, as if the great fire were smouldering out.

Arthur Symons.

Lovely. Here is Lafcadio Hearn describing the Gulf.

"The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles, — a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God; — it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo, — the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe, — something vital, something holy, something pantheistic: and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the Πνεύμα (Pneuma) indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm, — save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes, — to drift into delicious oblivion of facts, — to forget the past, the present, the substantial, — to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away forever...."

Lafcadio Hearn.
Chita: A Memory of Last Island.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Lovely. Here is Lafcadio Hearn describing the Gulf.

...

Lovely Lafcadio Hearn quote

[issybird]

"And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? But alas! it is not these things that are necessary - it is only Homer."

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains

[bfisher]

Great Stevenson quote, and it really does show the 19th century mindset in its full vigour. I've been meaning to read that for years; must move it up in the queue.

[kennyc]

"Water in a vase, chewing away at the stems of roses. Rust colonizing the tumblers in a lock. Sugar eating at the dentin of teeth, a river eroding its banks. Alma could think of a thousand metaphors, and all of them were inadequate."
- Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

[WT Sharpe]

Here's a great definition guaranteed to make the heads of grammar nerds spin uncontrollably:

LITERALLY adv. Figuratively, as: "The pond was literally full of fish"; "The ground was literally alive with snakes," etc.
— Ambrose Bierce (1842-disappeared in Mexico 1914), American writer. San Francisco Examiner, 4 Sept. 1887.

[covingtoncat73]

"There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing but doubt everything." Lord Byron

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

"There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing but doubt everything." Lord Byron

[BenG]

“Usually the knights would build their castles above a road, just as inns are now built beside the road, the better to plunder the people going past, though admittedly in different ways.”

and

“Hard by the church stood the public house; so often the two are closely conjoined, honorably sharing both joys and sorrows.”

― Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider (1842)

[doubleshuffle]

I candidly allow, - and, upon my word! without a thought of satirical allusion - that to recite one's own poetry is the greatest liberty one could take with another person's ear, - except pulling it.

George Darley.

[covingtoncat73]

“I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.” ― Simone de Beauvoir