More Time Quotes (page 58)
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If only you and I (or you or I) doesn't go and die before we have a chance to meet! And yet, if we did no doubt there would be some good and loving reason for it. I am (except in bad moods) more convinced of that all the time. We shall meet and be happy together if it is good for us: otherwise not (e. g. I might after all be disappointed in a hope I sometimes cherish that you would find me a little less aggressive and dictatorial and arrogant than I have often been in the old days. But who...
C. S. Lewis
I have always preferred the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference. But just because my own passions are not of that sort which burst out with violence to devastate and kill, the common mind is not aware of their existence. Nevertheless, I am greatly moved by them at times, and it has more than once been my fate to lose my sleep for the sake of a few pages written by some forgotten monk or printed by some humble apprentice of Peter Schffer. And if these fierce enthusiasms are...
Anatole France
Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will...
Milan Kundera
Why do you read then?'
Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. ...
W. Somerset Maugham
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name. A polite public will no more bear to read an authentic description of vice than a truly-refined English or American female will permit the word 'breeches' to be pronounced in her chaste hearing. And yet, madam, both are walking the world before our faces every day without much shocking us. If you were to blush every time they went by, what complexions you would have!
William Makepeace Thackeray
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
Thomas Pynchon
A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact thjat in times of stress "educated" people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their "education" is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander.
George Orwell
The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with...
David Foster Wallace
My dear Gaultier,’ said Lymond. ‘It will send the Shadow of God into transports. I suppose I’ve seen objects more grisly before, but it doesn’t spring to mind where.… Twenty-four-carat gold, Jerott. Look. And studded with rubies like fish-roes.’
‘Yes. I think he’ll be pleased,’ said Georges Gaultier. For the first time satisfaction, animation and even cheerfulness rang in his voice. ‘Sickening, isn’t it?
Dorothy Dunnett