Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"This Is Not a Novel To Be Tossed Aside Lightly. It Should Be Thrown with Great Force."
– Dorothy Parker

[AlexBell]

'No, pull yourself together, boy, and compose, compose, compose! Make music, instead of talking about it...

Absolute music, I say it once again, exists solely to express emotion. All else is sawdust in its maw.'

Attributed to Richard Wagner, in The Young Cosima by Henry Handel Richardson

[WT Sharpe]

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied—not even I. On the other hand, I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.
~ Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913* – April 16, 1994); U.S. novelist, literary critic, and scholar. Invisible Man (1952).

* There is some doubt attached to this date.

[covingtoncat73]

"Despite the demands of recent weeks — the masquerading, the rallies, the constant politicking — he didn’t feel weary. All he’d promised his followers and himself had come true. It was as if his performance as a Prophet had lent him prophetic powers. He’d found the Weave, as he’d said he would, and claimed it from its guardians; he’d led his crusaders into the very heart of the Fugue, silencing with almost supernatural speed any and all who’d defied him."

~Clive Barker, Weaveworld

[covingtoncat73]

"When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers.

'After all that digging,' said the eldest of the girls, 'I just hope he grows.'

'He will,' said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. 'They always do.'"

Clive Barker, Weaveworld

[covingtoncat73]

“It’s all the same story.”

"What story?” Cal said.

"We live it and they live it,” she said, looking at de Bono. “It’s about being born, and being afraid of dying, and how love saves us.”

~Weaveworld, Clive Barker

[kennyc]

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
- Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner)

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
- Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner)

Reminds me. I need to buy a lotto ticket.

[AlexBell]

'You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back.'

by Horace, quote in Latin attributed to Hans von Bülow in The Young Cosima by Henry Handel Richardson

[covingtoncat73]

“She’s got powers,” said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. “Most women have, of course.”


― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

[covingtoncat73]

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

[astrangerhere]

“Because,” said Thor, “when something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki’s fault. It saves a lot of time.”

Neil Gaiman | Norse Mythology

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Neil Gaiman | Norse Mythology

Fun book. Thor was portrayed in a considerably different light there than in the early Thor Marvel comics.

I recently read Vote Loki #1, a graphic novel in which Loki runs for President of the United States ("Who better to run the Country than the God of Lies?"). I have no idea where they got the inspiration for that one, but Loki appears in that one to be more like Gaiman portrayed him in his retelling of the Norse myths than he was generally portrayed in the Marvel comics of the 60s.

[AlexBell]

'Free will? There's no such thing: not for the artist. Of all living mortals he's the most unfree; stands powerless in face of his own powers. In other words they possess him, not he them. And are capable of hounding him on against his will, he with as little strength to resist them as a dry straw the wind...
Art? Let no one talk to me of art. There are times when I'm inclined to see it as a kind of bane: a curse laid on those unfortunates who are doomed to practise it. Quite certainly a species of madness. And none so mad as I!'

Attributed to Richard Wagner in The Young Cosima by Henry Handel Richardson.

[kennyc]

"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard."
- Penelope Lively, from "Moon Tiger"