Since Quotes (page 99)
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...I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
W. G. Sebald
I opened my eyesAnd looked up at the rain,And it dripped in my headAnd flowed into my brain,And all that I hear as I lie in my bedIs the slishity-slosh of the rain in my head.I step very softly,I walk very slow,I can't do a handstand--I might overflow,So pardon the wild crazy thing I just said--I'm just not the same since there's rain in my head.
Shel Silverstein
Lord Chesterfield said that since he had had the full use of his reason nobody had heard him laugh. I don't suppose you have read Lord Chesterfield's 'Letters To His Son'?
...Well, of course I hadn't. Bertram Wooster does not read other people's letters. If I were employed in the post office I wouldn't even read the postcards.
P. G. Wodehouse
While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.
Emile M. Cioran
The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [...] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.
T. S. Eliot
Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of bother, hope that's all behind you now."Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?"Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them."(...)"...thank you, and my best to what...
Douglas Adams
The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
Walker Percy
What saves us is efficiency--the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force-- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
Joseph Conrad
But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political...
John Stuart Mill
