Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

"With fools, there is no companionship. Rather than to live with men who are selfish, vain, quarrelsome, and obstinate, let a man walk alone."
- Buddha

[astrangerhere]

“Their bodies were different as were the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.”

Sherwood Anderson | Winesburg, Ohio

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Sherwood Anderson | Winesburg, Ohio

I love that book!
particularly 'Hands'

[AlexBell]

'After extinguishing his candle he stared for a long time about him and feel into cheerless reflection; he experienced that feeling which every man knows whose lot it is to pass the night in a place long uninhabited; it seemed to him that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could not be accustomed to the new inhabitant, the very walls of the house seemed amazed.'

from A House of Gentlefolk by Ian Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"With fools, there is no companionship. Rather than to live with men who are selfish, vain, quarrelsome, and obstinate, let a man walk alone."
- Buddha

[kennyc]

“If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
- William Faulkner

Happy Birthday! Born on this day 1897

[astrangerhere]

“There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”

Michael Cunningham | The Hours

Re-reading this on my little "forced vacation" and remembering how much I love it.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by kennyc

“If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
- William Faulkner

Happy Birthday! Born on this day 1897

[kennyc]

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road (published on this day in 2006)

...I'll leave you with that. If you haven't read The Road, please do! it's a masterpiece, a classic!

[AlexBell]

'If man did not deceive himself, he could not live on earth.'

by A House of Gentlefolk by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett

[bfisher]

Thank you, issybird, for reminding me of this song, a great fit for the time it was written, and even more relevant now.

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
...
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson
Jolting Joe has left and gone away"
- Paul Simon, "Mrs. Robinson"

[BenG]

Whenever I’m about to do something, I think, “Would an idiot do this thing?” And if they would, I do not do that thing.
— Dwight Shrute, The Office

[covingtoncat73]

Thank Heaven! The crisis /The danger is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last /, and the fever called ''Living'' is conquered at last.
Edgar Allan Poe

[BenG]

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?

Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

— W.B. Yeats

[astrangerhere]

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | Frankenstein