Your favourite literary quotes

[workerbee]

"For everything hidden must be revealed, each secret longs to be disclosed, each love yearns to be betrayed, everything sacred must be desecrated."

    -- Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Mirror" (included in Gimpel the Fool & Other Stories)

[Qu_Sol82]

"I want first of all...to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact --to borrow from the language of the saints --to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible...By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and inward man be one.""

--Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Gift From The Sea

[joew771]

“Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy

[Arzoo]

An Old Tune :

"If I, an American writer, decide to write a novel about, say, a happy atheist, an independent Bostonian, who marries a beautiful Negro girl, also an atheist, has lots of children, cute little agnostics, and lives a good, useful and gentle life to the age of 106, when he blissfully dies in his sleep — it is quite possible that despite your brilliant talent, Mr. N... , we feel (in such cases we don't think, we feel) that no American publisher could risk bringing out such a book simply because no bookseller would want to handle it."

- Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

[joew771]

'Final now all opertive converged destroy this agent, that now cat sister delve hand into own luggage purse, extract infamous killer attack phallus.'

- Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy

Again.

One of the best books ever.

[Arzoo]

Midway through the book, came across a comment which was funny as hell. 

"Long ago, A. C. Bradley observed that, if the heroes of Hamlet and Othello change places, each play ends very quickly. Hamlet would see through Iago in the first five minutes and be parodying him in the next. Othello, receiving clear instructions like ‘Kill that usurper’ from a ghost, would simply have gone to work."

- Nuttall, A New Mimesis

[e-pyrite]

"How dare we think that we are the only intelligence in the Universe."

 Quote made by the English author, H.G. Wells, shortly after the initial Radio Show broadcast of his novel, "War of the Worlds".
The novel's first appearance in hardcover was in 1898 and prior to that it was first serialized in 1897 by Pearson's Magazine in the
UK and by Cosmopolitan magazine in the US.

This "Radio Show" ( yes, before TV was invented ) scared the crap out of the listeners in the UK.
Seriously, folks thought it was a real "Martian Invasion" as the attack, according to the story, starts in the commons of Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking.


* You can read/copy the book for free here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm

<< snip! >>

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[thewildcat]

From 'The Picture Of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

[Arzoo]

An extract from a long monologue. I'm distilling the more juicy bits. It's an extended monologue not really as disparate as the dots may suggest. The story that is narrated is of a man crawling on all fours (A familiar Beckett trope) to the narrator in a rather uninhabited place asking for bread or as he puts it "bread for his brat" :
 
"It was an extra-ordinarily bitter day, I remember, zero by the thermometer. But considering it was Christmas Eve there was nothing . . . extra-ordinary about that.

.....It was a glorious bright day, I remember, fifty by the heliometer, but already the sun was sinking down into the . . . down among the dead.

.....It was a howling wild day, I remember, a hundred by the anenometer. The wind was tearing up the dead pines and sweeping them . . . away.

.....It was an exceedingly dry day, I remember, zero by the hygrometer. Ideal weather, for my lumbago."

- Beckett, Endgame

All of the different narrative voices is seamlessly integrated in Hamm's monologue. Interestingly, every one of them can serve as a good opening to any story. This was my first Beckett play (back in 2012) and haven't still given up on him.

[joew771]

My favourite book is Moby Dick.

My fave quotes from it are...

'Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!'

And what is probalby the best few lines ever written in the english language...

'The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; - Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. '

I would cut off my arms to be able to write anything that good. And I defy anyone to show a better example of writing anywhere any time.