Your favourite literary quotes

[Arzoo]

Moby Dick is an awesome book. My favourite chapter is the one depicting the marine marathon, namely The Great Armanda (Chap 87? or 90?). However, going by fiction of facts (think: fictional universe) created in the book - it is largely uneven. I didn't read much into the philosophy and ideology and anything in that vein (indeed, if we think about it: whales were unashamedly massacred during those times which makes for an ironic reflection now that those fierce, massive sperm whales went almost extinct in the South Pacific) but as an exercise in style, it is unmatched in many ways. I don't think anything like that was produced in the 1850s or perhaps in the entire 19th Century. It is amazing how Melville could pull off a novel of nothing but just about whaling.

A decade earlier Flaubert had dreamt of writing :

"What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible."

Different people (like Melville) would step up to it. Flaubert, himself would accomplish it (by wielding an inhuman encyclopedic reading) with his Bouvard and Pecuchet (1880?). As for beautiful writing, I find Melville's writing epic, memorable and immortal. From Bartleby to The Enchanted Isles, his geni (Russian for genius) is raw. I for one, will never forget the "rotund and orbicular" conclusion of The Lightning Rod-Man (where the narrator gets rid of the man selling lightning rods).

[Arzoo]

Here's a little girl's (the 1st heroine of the novel) philosophy of life:

"An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.”

- Nabokov, Ada

[Arzoo]

"Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting. While we are laughing, the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of Events. While we are laughing it sprouts, it grows and suddenly bears a Poison fruit which we must pluck."

- Keats, Selected Letters

[Arzoo]

"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power."

- Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry (The Nobel Address)

[Arzoo]

The following quote is not as eye-catching, but to a reader after finishing the book and holding in his mind the disparate threads, a sly description here, an out-of-place theme there, is a revelatory finish, i.e. finishing it on all several levels. 

First the extract:

"Now he knew what it was that he wanted to tell Istanbul and write on its walls. It was both his public and his private view; it was what his heart intended as much as what his words had always meant to say."

Now the epigraphs to put in context:

1) "The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying “This is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society."

2) "The gulf between the private and public views of our countrymen is evidence of the power of the state."

- A Strangeness in My Mind, Orhan Pamuk

The first epigraph is from our good old Rousseau, while the second is an invented one; from a protagonist of one of Pamuk's own novels. And of course, the title of the novel is from Wordsworth, Book III of his rather voluble The Prelude.

[workerbee]

Before his life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1924, and filled with what Philip Roth called “insatiable longings for solitude and spiritual purity,” Franz Kafka dreamed about a new life in Palestine.  He imagined himself doing manual labor on a collective farm, surviving on bread, water, and dates, and even wrote a manifesto for such a place, “A Workforce Without Property”**, outlining a workday of no more than six hours, belongings limited to some books and clothes, and the complete absence of lawyers and courts, as personal relationships would be based on trust alone.

In one of my favorite passages from her most recent novel, Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss imagines Kafka arriving as a refugee in Palestine, and living in contented obscurity as a gardener on a kibbutz:

“At his own request, Kafka was transferred to a kibbutz in the north, close to the Sea of Galilee.  There he was given a simple house on the edge of the lemon groves and took up work, also at his request, under the head gardener.  The life of the kibbutz suited him.  Though at first his reticence and penchant for solitude was frowned upon, in time he gained a reputation as a skilled gardener who put in long hours among the plants, and after he found a way to treat the diseased ancient sycamore tree, in whose deep shade the kibbutz members often congregated, his value was secured and he was left in peace to do as he pleased.  He was beloved among the children for the little dolls and balsa-wood airplanes he used to make for them, and for his mischievous sense of humor.  Because Kafka loved to swim, at least once a week he bathed in the Galilee, where he would swim so far out that to those on the shore he became nothing more than a tiny black dot.”

Sounds pretty close to heaven to me.

** Translated in Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? 99 Finds (New Directions, 2016)

[Arzoo]

Nice quote by WB above; and I would have frankly preferred to quote something from Sebald's Vertigo that could have matched it; but I cannot seem to recall the purple passage. So, we shall have to settle with similarities between Pamuk and Nabokov. There's nothing grand in Literature about Telepathy; seeing it is by and by a reworking of same old themes like Love and Death or as an ancient poem puts its: "Strong as Death is Love". But, I digress.

Here's the Nabokov one:

"It was hard to say, though, if Lik possessed genuine theatrical talent or was a man of many indistinct callings who had chosen one of them at random but could just as well have been a painter, jeweler, or ratcatcher. Such a person resembles a room with a number of different doors, among which there is perhaps one that does lead straight into some great garden, into the moonlit depths of a marvelous human night, where the soul discovers the treasure intended for it alone."

- VN, Lik

and Pamuk says

"Suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room."

- OP, My Name is Red

Oh yeah, thanks for pointing out the fascinating Pamuk - A Strange Mind BBC documentary.

[workerbee]

From Arabian Sands (1959), Wilfred Thesiger's famous account of his travels into the Rub' al-Khali (Empty Quarter) in the Arabian Peninsula between 1945 and 1950:

"A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die.  In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years.  It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease….  No man can live this life and emerge unchanged.  He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature.  For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match."

"In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.  I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there.  I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which derives from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn."

"I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended.  Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again.  But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me.  I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed.  Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world.  This I do not believe.  I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and light-hearted gallantry.  Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority."

[workerbee]

From Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence's legendary account of his participation in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in 1916-18:

"We were fond together, because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace."

[forastero]

I heard someone talking about Moby Dick:


"...turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant--the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor."

(Chapter 35 - The Mast-Head)


Herman Melville