Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

From Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -

"I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me. Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice that I read in books or heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils; at least they were remote and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood."

[covingtoncat73]

“The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

[covingtoncat73]

"If somebody asked why you weren't seeking work, you could explain that you were already employed as an archaic mental."

-Alan Moore, Jerusalem

[gmw]

Should we be more grateful for the changes that have come to Australia in the decades since?

The Australia of my youth also had many vices. To cite just three:

• Banks, by and large, wouldn’t lend money to women – not unless they had a male guarantor.

• Life was difficult if you were different in any way.

• If you were a child, no one would take your side.

Of course, most talkback radio tends in the opposite direction: it’s all about using a fondly imagined past as a stick with which to beat the present.

-- Richard Glover, The Land Before Avocado (2018)

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by gmw

-- Richard Glover, The Land Before Avocado (2018)

Spot on!

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Spot on!

This is true in the US as well!

[Apache]

I think it is part of being human and is true every where.
Apache

[gmw]

This is only partly a book about Australia in the ’60s and ’70; it’s really an argument about the possibility of progress; about how quickly we can change; and how things that now seem laughable or downright objectionable were considered normal just a moment ago. Most of all, it’s an invitation to dream of further change.

-- Richard Glover, The Land Before Avocado (2018)

[covingtoncat73]

'O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace." ~Shakespeare, Beatrice, Much Ado, Act 4, Scene 1

[covingtoncat73]

From Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. Happy Thanksgiving, and good luck tomorrow to my fellow USAians...

"One by one that night Loki insulted the gods and the goddesses. He told the gods that they were cowards, told the goddesses that they were gullible and unchaste. Each insult was woven with just enough truth to make it wound. He told them that they were fools, reminded them of things they thought were safely forgotten. He sneered and jeered and raised old scandals, and would not stop making everyone there miserable until Thor arrived at the feast."

[mrgrtt123]

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

[covingtoncat73]

From "The Goblin Emperor" by Katherine Addison -

"An emperor who breaks laws is a mad dog and a danger, but an emperor who will never break a rule is nearly as bad, for he will never be able to recognize when a law must be changed.”

[BenG]

“How do you know....you're God?"
"When I pray to him I find I am talking to myself.”
― Peter Barnes, The Ruling Class

[BenG]

“Julia did very well,' said Selena, 'not to fall into the lagoon. How beastly of that woman to suggest she'd had too much to drink.'
'Most uncharitable,' said Ragwort. 'Julia, as we all know, needs no assistance from alcohol to make her trip over things.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

[covingtoncat73]

From "The Goblin Emperor" by Katherine Addison -

"...it is no wonder that Curnar was executed in the reign of Your Serenity’s grandfather. We find his writings full of deliberate mysticization and empty rhetoric..."

"We might still be there, Serenity, in an airmen’s bar called the Cloud Horses, watching men drink cheap metheglin and listening to bad philosophy—and of all the ways we have envisaged spending the rest of our life, it is not the worst—"