Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by orlok

You remembered . Which version are you reading - I understand the recent re-releases have been altered to make them more PC, and lose some of the charm?

I did remember what you said about the translations, also, and that the originals were better. But I prefer reading ebooks and when I saw this one at a nice price I decided to go for it, translation be damned. I'm certainly enjoying it as it is, but with your comment in mind I'd already checked out the availability of other books in the series through ILL and now that I'm hooked, I'll give them a try.

[AlexBell]

'Though they were really badly off, they were singularly, I may say, cultivated people.... Their father had been a learned man, an author; he died, of course, in poverty, but he had managed before he died to give his children an excellent education; he left a lot of books too.'

from A Sportsman's Sketches by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Constance Garnett

[bfisher]

"The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;"
- T.S.Eliot, Choruses From The Rock

[WT Sharpe]

"There’s one thing we definitely remember happening in 2017: the 'fidget spinner' fad. This was huge, and for a good reason: It was extremely stupid. In terms of mental stimulation, fidget-spinning makes nose-picking look like three-dimensional chess. You mindlessly spin the thing around and around, accomplishing nothing. It’s an idiotic, brain-cell-destroying waste of time.
So it was the perfect fad for 2017."
~ Dave Barry, "Dave Barry’s 2017 Year in Review: Did that really happen?"

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

"There’s one thing we definitely remember happening in 2017: the 'fidget spinner' fad. This was huge, and for a good reason: It was extremely stupid. In terms of mental stimulation, fidget-spinning makes nose-picking look like three-dimensional chess. You mindlessly spin the thing around and around, accomplishing nothing. It’s an idiotic, brain-cell-destroying waste of time.
So it was the perfect fad for 2017."
~ Dave Barry, "Dave Barry’s 2017 Year in Review: Did that really happen?"

A great summation of 2017

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by bfisher

A great summation of 2017

The best thing about 2017 is that it is almost over...

[astrangerhere]

Strange people. The kind that leave the merest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.

- Patrick Modiano | Missing Person

[BenG]

Whoever mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker...

― Proverbs 17:5, New International Version (NIV)

[BenG]

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

[bfisher]

"I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination."

Ursula K Le Guin, "The Operating Instructions" from Words Are My Matter

[WT Sharpe]

Kitty clasped her hands and looked at him with anguish.

“Well?”

“Supposing there is no life everlasting? Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They’ve given up all for nothing. They’ve been cheated. They’re dupes.”

Waddington reflected for a little while. “I wonder. I wonder if it matters that what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

Kitty sighed. What he said seemed hard. She wanted more.

~ William Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil (1925)

[bfisher]

"They tended to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end. They tended to avoid dwelling on just what that end might imply."
- Joan Didion, Where I Was From

[BenG]

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners.”
― Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[gmw]

‘A steam engine toy,’ Mori said. ‘It’s an old design. The Ancient Greeks had them.’
‘The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn’t they have trains?’
Mori twitched his shoulder. ‘They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.

Although one could still do proper science with a magnet and some iron filings, it felt professional to have made something that looked like a mutated windmill. Science had to have some mystery, otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.

-- Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015)

(Need I mention that I am enjoying this book? )

[BenG]

“The person, be it gentlemen or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey