Only Quotes (page 323)
To whom I owe the leaping delight. That quickens my senses in our wakingtime. And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime, the breathing in unison. Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other. Who think the same thoughts without need of speech, And babble the same speech without need of meaning... No peevish winter wind shall chill. No sullen tropic sun shall wither. The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only. But this dedication is for others to read: These are...
T. S. Eliot
We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.
Alain Badiou
I know she’ll hate him. She likes to be the only one, you know. She likes to dream that she’s queen and that when the rest are dead there’ll be no one who can order her to do anything. She said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Goremenghast when she was ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was- everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits. She makes me frightened sometimes.
Mervyn Peake
We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you? and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
Ian Mcewan
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.
Bill Bryson
I forced words out: There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared , I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.
Haruki Murakami
in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his...
Herman Melville
Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?'
'In the abstract but not in the concrete,' said Ursula. 'When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted—oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only tempted NOT to.' The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.
David Herbert Lawrence
It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist's inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail.
Thomas Mann