Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

He tucked a pillow beneath his chin. "I've posted notices asking that everyone conserve lavatory paper, but it's done no good at all. The Americans are particularly wasteful." He tugged the pillow slip up over the pillow. "I do feel rather sorry for them, though. Helen came down with it last night, you know, and they haven't any alternates."

― Connie Willis, The Doomsday Book, 1992

[covingtoncat73]

From "The Pursuit of William Abbey" by Claire North -

"“They say I’m cursed.”

“Do you believe them?”

“Yes. I do.”

To my surprise, he smiled, and patted me on the back. “You are absolutely correct, Dr Abbey. It is marvellous.”

He sprang back to his feet as if propelled by a catapult, slung his jacket over one arm and his shoes round his neck, and gave his fiercest battle cry: “Now we drink iced beverages and celebrate."

[gmw]

‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny.

‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’

‘That’s true.’

‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’

‘The sunsets were redder.’

‘There were more old people. The world was full of them,’ said the wizard.

‘Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really. I mean, you’d expect it to be the other way round.’

-- Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites, (1987)

[covingtoncat73]

From "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" by Claire North

"Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. 'I remember thinking,' she would say, 'how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened next.”'But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, 'You’re not missing anything.'"

[covingtoncat73]

From "The Stone of Farewell: Book Two of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" by Tad Williams -

"Whole nations seemingly on the march , topsy-turvy weather, mad men ruling and dire legends come to life—"

[BenG]

“Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names....

“Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial; the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal.”
― "The Flame is Green" by R. A. Lafferty

[covingtoncat73]

From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari -

"ABOUT 13.5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.

About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.

About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.

About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different."

[gmw]

This is all what you have to do, you walk along the Streets at Night, shouting, It’s Twelve O’clock and All’s Well. I said, What if it is not all well, and he said, You bloody well find another street.

It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.

‘Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. [...]

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

-- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, (1989)

[gmw]

Freja had insisted on calling her mother ‘Clementine’ since she was three years old and discovered a fruit by the same name. Both fruit and mother were deliciously sweet and zesty. ‘Mummy’ suddenly seemed a dull and inadequate word.

‘Good heavens!’ cried Tobias, throwing his hands in the air. His face was filled with horror. ‘Of course you’re not normal! What a ghastly thing to contemplate.’

-- Katrina Nannestad, The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Rome, (2017)

[covingtoncat73]

"This is the place where death delights to help the living." translated from the Latin inscription on wall of old Viennese morgue.

[gmw]

It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.

Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t.

This forced me to realize that, while I wanted to be fiercely myself, I also wanted someone around to see me do it.

“One tap for yes, two taps for no. Can you understand me?”

Two taps.

-- Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (2018)

The sequel had some good thoughts, so...

The book seemed to know what I should do—well, isn’t that what we all want to know? Free will is stressful.

We build narratives of genius and exceptionality among the people who have power, and they are often exceptional, but no more exceptional than hundreds of thousands of others. In your system, power concentrates naturally. And so the thing that is most exceptional about a powerful person is almost always their power.

-- Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (2020)

[Uncle Robin]

I'm currently reading my first "Miss Molly" story. Others have commented on Orczy's anti-Semitism in the Pimpernel stories, this line from The Frewin Miniatures brought those comments back to mind:

her husband, who, in common with certain English families of Jewish extraction, had an extraordinary hardness of character where the integrity of his own business fame was concerned

[Uncle Robin]

Round the curve of the river from the Fort is the Taj Mahal. For all its massive marble beauty, for all the relief its cold floor and dark interior afford on a scorching day, it is a melancholy place, forty million rupees and who knows how many lives’ worth of autocratic mourning. The Emperor Shah Jahan loved Mumtaz-i-Mahal. Now the pain of his loss rises up at the edge of town, clothed in the work of countless hands, surrounded by a formal garden still used as a meeting place by steam-age lovers. Despite all this effort love still refuses to conquer, and the trysting couples have a subdued, pensive look about them.

From The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru, this passage REALLY reminded me of Sahir Ludhianvi's awesome nazm "Taj Mahal", a very good translation of which can be found here: TAJ MAHAL

[Uncle Robin]

One upside to buying a new omnibus copy of the Guide was finally getting around to reading Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, wherein lies this little gem:

They claimed it was for the sake of their grand-parents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparents’ grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandparents.

[j.p.s]

"Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.”

16 year old African-American girl in a (winning) single sentence essay submitted as an entry in a spring 1944 Columbus, Ohio public school district essay contest with the topic "What to do with Hitler after the War?”.

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, page 164ish, at the end of the last chapter in Part Three.

“What to do with Hitler”: Louis Adamic, A Nation of Nations (New York: Harper, 1945), p. 201.