Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

“Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once?”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

[astrangerhere]

“If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination.”

- Rivka Galchen | Atmospheric Disturbances

[WT Sharpe]

"It’s my décolletage—when gentlemen stare at my bosom, they don’t hear a word I say. I strongly believe that if trees sprouted breasts tomorrow, they would soon be wearing wedding rings."
~ From A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

[AlexBell]

... Deronda set himself against authorship - a vocation which is understood to turn foolish thinking into funds.

from Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot.

[covingtoncat73]

"You mean...they killed her?" asked David.
"They ate her," said Brother Number One. "With porridge. That's what 'ran away and was never seen again' means these parts. It means 'eaten.'"
"Um, and what about 'happily ever after'?" asked David, a little uncertainly. "What does that mean?"
"Eaten quickly," said Brother Number One
~John Connolly, Book of Lost Things

[covingtoncat73]

"Yet, in fact, modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarized in a singlephrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power." ~Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

[BenG]

That money talks
I won’t deny.
I heard it once.
It said, ‘Goodbye.’

― Richard Armour

[covingtoncat73]

"The living need light, the dead need music." ~Title of a short film about Vietnamese funeral traditions.

[BenG]

But thanks be to the beautiful flower [the white pond lily] for growing at any rate. It is a marvel whence it derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting as it does from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and from which the yellow lily likewise draws its unclean life and noisome odor. So it is with many people in this world; the same soil and circumstances may produce the good and beautiful, and the wicked and ugly. Some have the faculty of assimilating to themselves only what is evil, and so they become as noisome as the yellow water-lily. Some assimilate none but good influences, and their emblem is the fragrant and spotless pond-lily, whose very breath is a blessing to all the region round about.
― From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for August 6th, 1842. From Passages from The American Note-Books.

http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/mirr...h/pfanb01.html

[Apache]

I am all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Lets start with typewriters.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Apache

[astrangerhere]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Kate Atkinson | Life After Life

[covingtoncat73]

"I'm going to Creolize it." ~The redoubtable Ms. Leah Chase on the New Orleans episode of No Passport Required

[Deskisamess]

“This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”


Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin

[bfisher]

V.S. Naipaul has died.

“the only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves”
― V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State

[bfisher]

"The trees I’ve planted here have prospered: they are still so small that I overshadow them when I step between them and the sun. One day, repaying me that shade, they will protect my old age as I protect their youth.
...
I am attached to my trees; I have addressed elegies, sonnets, and odes to them. There is not one of them that I have not tended with my own hands, that I have not rescued from root-beetles, from caterpillars glued to its leaves; I know them all by name as if they were my children: they are my family, I have no other, and I hope to die among them."
- François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (trans A.S. Kline)