Booked Quotes (page 128)
And how about the "Daily Odes to the Benefactor"? Who can read them without bowing his head reverently before the selfless labor of this Number of Numbers? Or the terrible blood-red beauty of the "Flowers of Judicial Verdicts"? Or the immortal tragedy, "Lat for Work"? Or the bedside book of "Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene"?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Cardinal was bent over his writing desk, the room unchanged save for the light of what appeared a small antique oil lamp. And there were illuminated letters in the book before him, tiny figures fitted into the capitals, the whole gleaming as he let his hand, quivering, turn the page."Ah, think of it," he said, smiling as he saw Tonio, "written language the possession of those who took such pains to preserve it. I am forever entranced with the forms in which knowledge is given us, not by...
Anne Rice
I dreamed about the crow again last night. The one with three eyes. He flew into my bedchamber and told me to come with him, so I did. We went down to the crypts. Father was there, and we talked. He was sad.' - Bran Stark telling his dream to Maester Luwin. From the Book of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin
What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
Voltaire
...and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art.
Marcel Proust