Your favourite literary quotes

[workerbee]

Share your favourite literary quotations here, and don't forget to include the author and title of the book you're quoting from.  Here are a couple of mine:


For the serious-minded

"No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured, and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction."
    -- John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

For the not-so-serious-minded

"This is just the book to give your sister -- if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."
    -- Blurb by Dylan Thomas on the front dustwrapper of the 1966 first American edition of Flann O’Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds

[Arzoo]

Let's see, frankly there are so many - but I'll start with my favorite author :

"Time without consciousness - lower animal world; time with consciousness - man; consciousness without time - some still higher state."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

And to add an extra helping (a quotation of a made-up quotation) :

"Monsieur seems to prefer the lady's maids to the ladies. But of course, Madam, the maids are fresher."
 
- Pushkin, Queen of Spades


And if that's not enough, something to aid digestion :

"From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to proceeding at a dizzy rate. We're dancing not at the edge of a volcano but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon the society will go plummeting down and drown in the nineteen centuries of shit. There will be a lot of shouting."

- Gustave Flaubert, Letters

[workerbee]

Arzoo's mention of Nabokov motivated me to visit that author's Letters to Vera (2014), which includes this romantic little gem to his soon-to-be wife:

"I can’t imagine life without you . . . You came into my life – not as one comes to visit . . . but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps."

[Arzoo]

Arzoo's mention of Nabokov motivated me to visit that author's Letters to Vera (2014), which includes this romantic little gem to his soon-to-be wife:

"I can’t imagine life without you . . . You came into my life – not as one comes to visit . . . but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps."

Man - you had to mention Nabokov's wife! I fed someone for the past six months a routine dose of Nabokov - Flaubert - Thurber - and what not! only to be rejected this Friday pretty thoroughly. She attempted to console me with this mantra :

"Renunciation is the choosing against itself; to justify itself unto itself."

- Emily Dickinson, Poem 782 (1863)

I understand now why Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas has missing rather conspicuously, an entry for 'Irony'.

[workerbee]

Sorry to hear that, friend.

"Why is the measure of love loss?"
   -- Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (1992)

[workerbee]

"Better to go to hell with wise men than to paradise with fools."
   -- Rebbe Naphtali of Ropshitz (1760-1827), quoted in Elie Wiesel, Four Hasidic Masters

[Arzoo]

Another little gem courtesy of Nabokov :

"Let us be thankful for the web and ignore the spider."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

and something from Eliot :

"[I] have known all my evenings, mornings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"

- T S Eliot,The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

[Picklock]

" Copyright © (insert homo sapiens year numbering here)by Will Igetrich Bysellingknowldgewizer.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Shitty company asking for their products to be pirated Press
666 MoneyPenny Avenue
Greed City, SH 455
www.moneyisdabest.com "

[joew771]

I don't want to say the author of these quotes, because the author is  frequently judged, frequently without any of their writings even having been read by the judger. Even though they wrote one of the most important and influential books in history. So take these as they are, without prejudgement.  If you want to know the author, google one of them.

'The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.'

'The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.'

'To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality'

'It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.'

'Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.'

And possibly the author's most important quote, and the mantra that the author lives by, and the mantra that we should all probably live by.

'I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.'

---

" Copyright © (insert homo sapiens year numbering here)by Will Igetrich Bysellingknowldgewizer.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Shitty company asking for their products to be pirated Press
666 MoneyPenny Avenue
Greed City, SH 455
www.moneyisdabest.com "

A quote from Picklock.

'What's going on? My brain sort of hurts.'

[Arzoo]

The next quote is a bit long but an important one. It is by one of the most capable people I know and is a nice rebuttal to many pseudo academics.

"Thinking is believed to occur by way of proposed hypotheses, suggested evidence, and rational conclusions. Other mental processes—those of meditation, intuition, belief — are usually not granted the honorific name of thinking. Yet it is evident that many complex, and sometimes profound, operations of the mind must precede our final arranging of an argument, finding a path of explanation, or staging a deduction."

- Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking