Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

"Despite what you think you know, most people don’t want to fight, especially when evenly matched. A mob will tear an individual to pieces and a man with a gun and a noble cause is happy to kill ever so many women and children, but risking a fair fight—not so easy." ~Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

[covingtoncat73]

"One thing even the Black Death could not extinguish was Venetian self-esteem."

~The Great Mortality, John Kelly

Whenever I think of my favourite lines from HHGTTG, this one is right near the top - understated but so evocative, for me a reminder that he really could write

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t."

[badgoodDeb]

An oldie but goodie:
"Please Excuse Typing"
If you have ever, like me,
Missed the "r" and hit the "t,"
Addressing some fat blister
As "Mt." instead of "Mr.,"
I trust you left it unamended?
Splendid.

-J.B.Boothroyd, Punch, 1948

[gmw]

I interpret these opening sentences of the book as Amelia Peabody's answer to Elizabeth Bennett:

I NEVER meant to marry. In my opinion, a woman born in the last half of the nineteenth century of the Christian era suffered from enough disadvantages without wilfully embracing another.

-- Barbara Mertz writing as Elizabeth Peters, The Mummy Case (1985)

[gmw]

Life isn’t just one thing. As you get older, especially—and I don’t mean old as I am now—nothing just has one story, one truth. If I said I’d never been happier than I was when the kids were young, I wouldn’t be lying. But if I told you that I hated them, and thought of this house as a prison, that would be close to the truth as well.

-- Ian R. MacLeod, Song of Time (2008)

‘I could never make up my mind,’ he wrote, ‘whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story.

Leonard Woolf, quoted in The British in India by David Gilmour

I posted this because I found it an astonishing endorsement of Kipling's work, and made sense of my reaction when I first read Kim: "this is my Dad's India!"

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. It is simply self-love.

Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness

[BenG]

“You can see your own self what happened,” I said. “Woman, I got old. You’ll see what it’s like, when you get there. All the people who believed in me died, and then the ones who humored me died, and now even the ones who feel obligated to sort of tolerate me are starting to go."

― Andy Duncan, Close Encounters from An Agent of Utopia, New and Selected Stories

New Zealand, that land of sheep and Sunday afternoons

Alan Bennett The Uncommon Reader

If cats looked like frogs we'd realise what nasty cruel little bastards they are

Terry Pratchett Lords and Ladies
cf https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill

[bfisher]

"Let me ask you this, Mr. Ai: do you know, by your own experience, what patriotism is?”

“No,” I said, shaken by the force of that intense personality suddenly turning itself wholly upon me. “I don’t think I do. If by patriotism you don’t mean the love of one’s homeland, for that I do know.”

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

(Posted as an example of how a typo can make an excerpt VERY "notable")

For a building that is staunchly believed to be Shah Jahan’s monument to love, it is surprising that the padshah then moves so far away from the city where the Taj Mahal is built, and that he almost never returns to visit it. There is only one recorded visit, in 1954, before Shah Jahan is brought back to Agra under duress as a prisoner.

Daughters of the Sun: Empresses Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire - Ira Mukhoty

[astrangerhere]

“I never get tired of them old stars, Thee. I miss 'em up in Washington and Oregon where it's misty. Like 'em best down in Mother Mexico, where they have everything their own way. I'm not for any country where the stars are dim.”

― Willa Cather | The Song of the Lark

‘That’s one school of thought,’ I said, ‘though not a very well-attended school.’

Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and the King of Clubs, by Ben Schott