Your favourite literary quotes

[Philidor]

All from that great US radio and vaudeville humorist, Fred Allen:

"You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart."

"It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips."

"Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you."

"The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference."

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me."

[joew771]

From David Foster Wallace. One of the greatest artists of the last century. Unfortunately he killed himself, but he left us some amazing literary works.

'You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.'


'Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"
"I give."
"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.'

'Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.'

'Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.'

'If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish'

He has so many more, and this post was made to make more people aware of him and his extreme lost talent. He is another that is very difficult to read sometimes, but it's very much worth it. Go read 'Infinite Jest' if you can. And yes, that's a challenge, because it is very difficult, but it also has some chapters that are the most amazing set of words that I've ever come across. The chapter about the guy trying to buy pot is probably the best thing I've ever read in my life. Beats Stephen King and Shakespeare if you ask me

[Arzoo]

All from a great, but exquisitely delicate short story :

"See more glass," said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. "Did you see more glass?"

"Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle, she was soon out of the area reserved for guests of the hotel."

"Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire."

- J D Salinger; A Perfect Day for Bananafish

I'm afraid that this story will break into a thousand pieces if I quote any more.

[Arzoo]

"A mere string of figures will disclose the identity of the stringer as neatly as tame ciphers yielded their treasure to Poe. The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself."

- VN, Nikolai Gogol

[joew771]

'Fushing feef!' - Stephen King.

One my favorite quotes ever.

[Arzoo]

I had long forgotten the second quote; so I refrained from posting them. Finally, I re-discovered it. I think both of them go well together.

For the not-so-serious-minded :

"And I recited the pretty quietest Pater, Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee. Etc. The middle and the end are very pretty."

- Beckett; Molloy

"Apemantus :
Immortal gods, I crave no pelf.
I pray for no man but myself.
Grant that I may never prove so fond
To trust man on his oath or bond,
Or a harlot for her weeping,
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping,
Or a keeper with my freedom,
Or my friends if I should need 'em.
Amen."

- Shakespeare; Timon of Athens

[Arzoo]

It's been a while, so I thought I rekindled this old stuff :

"Is there even a glimmer of one's identity beyond the grave, or does it all end in ideal darkness?"

"You want to know whether Gospodin Sineusov will forever reside within the snugness of Gospodin Sineusov, otherwise Moustache-Bleue, or whether everything will abruptly vanish. There are two ideas here, aren’t there? Round-the-clock lighting and the black inane. Actually, despite the difference in metaphysical color, they greatly resemble each other. And they move in parallel. They even move at considerable speed. Hey, hey, look through your turf glasses, they’re racing each other, and you would very much like to know which will arrive first at the post of truth, but in asking me to give you a yes or no for either one or the other, you want me to catch one of them at full speed by the neck—and those devils have awfully slippery necks—but even if I were to grab one of them for you, I would merely interrupt the competition, or the winner would be the other, the one I did not snatch, an utterly meaningless result in as much as no rivalry would any longer exist. If you ask, however, which of the two runs faster, I shall retort with another question: what runs faster, strong desire or strong fear?"

- Nabokov, Ultima Thule

"Some people say, How can you live without knowing? I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know."

- Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It all

[RobertX]

"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind"
- Proverbs 11:29, The King James Version of the Holy Bible

[dodau]

"What if we awake one day, all of us, and find us unable to read?" -- Nabokov

That's a fascinating idea for a book.  I wonder if it's ever been explored.  The first thing I thought of when I read it was Jose Saramago's novel Blindness.

There is a Twilight Zone episode from the 80's in which the meaning of words changes almost overnight except for one man,  So to him everyone is speaking another language and everything written is unreadable to him.  For example the word for  the mid day meal becomes dinosaur and lunch is a colour.

[Arzoo]

"If only it were possible to juicily belch up the life one's lived, chew it anew and gulp in down, and then once more roll it with a flat, ox-like tongue, to squeeze from from its eternal dregs the former sweetness of crisp grass, drunk with the morning dew and bitterness of lilac leaves!"

- VN,Tragedy of Mister Morn