Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[AlexBell]

The disasters that follow the hateful offence against Christianity, which men call war, were severely felt in England during the peace that ensued on the overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo. With rare exceptions, distress prevailed among all classes of the community. The starving nation was ripe and ready for a revolutionary rising against its rulers, who had shed the people's blood and wasted the people's substance in a war which had yielded to the popular interests absolutely nothing in return.

Wilkie Collins, Little Novels, 1877

[covingtoncat73]

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

[covingtoncat73]

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Stephen Fry

[astrangerhere]

“We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”

Anthony Marra | A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

[covingtoncat73]

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. ” — Franz Kafka

[Angst]

Hey, just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
-- Homer Simpson

[AlexBell]

In After Dark by Wilkie Collins the wife of a travelling portrait painter who has severe visual impairment is encouraging him to tell her stories which she will write down into a book they can sell to provide some income for them.

'Who is to do the eloquent descriptions and the striking reflections, and all that part of it?' said William, perplexedly shaking his head.

'Nobody! I replied. The eloquent descriptions and the striking reflections are just the parts of a storybook that people never read. Whatever we do, let us not, if we can possibly help it, write so much as a single sentence that can be conveniently skipped.'

[covingtoncat73]

“I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?"
"Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers."
"Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books."
"You're fantastic."
"I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

[covingtoncat73]

“The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?"
"Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers."
"Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books."
"You're fantastic."
"I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Sounds like you're enjoying your read

You're making me want to (re)read this book. I'm pretty sure I did, in translation, a very long time ago, but I have absolutely no recollection of it except for a vague sensation of disappointment.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Sounds like you're enjoying your read

You're making me want to (re)read this book. I'm pretty sure I did, in translation, a very long time ago, but I have absolutely no recollection of it except for a vague sensation of disappointment.

Ha! Yes. There is actually a petition to make it the state book right now. I think it probably helps to be a ninth generation New Orleanian. Also, I had a great-grandmother I actually knew (because she lived to be almost 100) that was very much like the mother in the book, I'm afraid.

[BenG]

“Why is it that we honor the Great Thieves of Whitehall for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, 'tis because of the Scale of the Crime.... Let Antony lose the world for Cleopatra, to be sure,―not Dick his Day's Wages, at the Tavern.”

― Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon

[AlexBell]

And I listened and marvelled. I began to understand that the same word meant one thing in one man's mouth, and in another man's mouth another thing.

Stanley J. Weyman, The Red Cockade

[gmw]

"I'm sure we can all pull together, sir."
Lord Vetinari raised his eyebrows. "Oh, I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions."

-- Terry Pratchett "The Truth" 2000

[Angst]

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

—Robert Louis Stevenson