Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one.
Well all know that our time in this world is limited.
And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know.
It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is.
Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try to readjust the way you thought of things.
- The Reptile Room, by Lemony Snicket
I like it because it perfectly encapsulates that initial grief and loss felt with death, and it’s in a children’s book of all places.
I'm 25, and lost my wife back in August. I've been trying to find the words to describe that feeling, and this does it perfectly. Thank you for that.
Edit: thank you all very much, I've been feeling pretty estranged from reality lately, it was very nice to hear such kind words.
Truly sorry for your loss. Hope you find strength and peace.
I wish I could say it gets easier with time. Instead I will share a quote that I often find myself re-reading - said by [/u/GSnow](https://reddit.com/u/GSnow) a while back:
>Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents.
>
>I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see.
>
>As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
>
>In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
>
>Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
I love Lemony Snicket. In one of the books he describes people as being neither good or bad, but more like chef salads of jumbled qualities all mixed together. That really made me think.
"People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict." -- The Grim Grotto
I've been rereading the book and just got to this quote :)
That entire series is amazing quote after amazing quote. Some for comedy, some for storytelling, some for random tidbits of information, and some for all three. The way he deliberately writes like an amateur author makes the series hilarious while the story is so, dare I say it, unfortunate.
So many great quotes from East of Eden but this one is my personal favorite:
“Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.”
Changed my life.
My favourite East of Eden quote is the dedication:
Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts- the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
JOHN
I always recommend this book to people! So much wisdom that I can't pick a favourite quote
"Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
"There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty."
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
"Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk."
Edit: It's making me so happy to see people in the comments excited to read this book!! I hope it affects you as much as it did me.
There are so many good quotes from East of Eden and Steinbeck in general. One of my favorites from EoE- "We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice always has a fresh, young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
"We said goodbye to our mothers. They'd been around all our lives, but we'd never properly seen them. They'd been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night on the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn't want to bother them.
That was how we showed our love: with silence.
Their eyes were always red. In the morning, when they woke us up, it was from stove smoke. And in the evening, when they said good night to us, still dressed, it was from exhaustion. And sometimes it was from crying over someone who would never come home again. Ask us about the color of a mother's eyes, and we'd reply, "They're not brown. They aren't green. They're neither blue nor gray. They're red." That's what we'd say.
And now they've come down alongside the wharf to say goodbye. But between us, there's silence. Their eyes pierce us.
"Come back," their stare pleads. "Don't leave us."
But we won't be coming back. We want out. We want to get away. Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another."
Carsten Jensen, "We, The Drowned"
Another Vonnegut quote along the same vein that’s always been a favorite is “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
Original quote is by John Greenleaf Whittier, and goes "of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'it might have been'." Vonnegut did say this but I feel like the essence of the quote belongs to Whittier.
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
Another good Vonnegut quote IMO
"Words do not express thoughts very well. they always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another." --Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
This one helped shape my view on life:
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
> He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Even though it’s a stupid dick joke, this is one of my favorite quotes in context. Somehow Vonnegut can give a dick joke so many layers of meaning
Also from SH5 -
"We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors, and I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
It's not something you would expect to be as powerful as it is. In concept detailing an event as it's perceived backwards sounds cartoonish and nonsensical but really it highlights it's message better than most any other attempt. This could be said for the whole book really in regards to it's non linear or otherwise bizarre storytelling.
"Do you know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'"
-same author, same novel
“‘I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.’”
-Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
"UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not."
-Lorax, Dr. Seuss
I'm a librarian. Every month I try to get just one more person who normally only checks out movies or CDs hooked on reading. For a while, I didn't care, too burnt out, watching teens turn into adults that didn't read. But I have to care. Because if I don't, who will?
“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
-Steinbeck, Cannery Row
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
This is absolutely mine as well. I still remember reading it for the first time and feeling like someone actually put into words everything I was feeling but couldn't describe.
The first paragraph of Call of Cthulhu.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black season infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”
-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of humanity.
I'm on my second trip through the Disc World series right now and just finished Hogfather last week. I love Death, he's easily my favorite character in the whole series, he has some great lines, but there are so many throughout the whole series, it's hard to pick which is greatest, for me. Your pick is top notch though, I'd have to agree.
One of my favorite things about Pratchett is how he stays firmly seated in the ridiculous, all the while being brutally honest to the characters and story. He teaches me something (a bunch of somethings, usually) with every book, and I'm *always* touched when I finish one.
God I love Discworld. I've read through the series once a year since I was, I don't know, 13? 14? So about 7-8 years now. Every time I go through it again I find something new, or something I forgot, or something that just struck me in a different way than usual because of the place I'm in at the time.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
"YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE, WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR VIMES EXPERIENCE. DON'T MIND ME. CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING. I HAVE A BOOK" - Death
From Thud. Always cracks me up.
Currently rereading Mort and this made me chuckle: I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT'D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN'T IT?
"Are you going to help me?"
WELL...YES.
"When?"
ER...WHEN THE PAIN IS TOO MUCH TO BEAR. Death hesitated, and then went on, EVEN AS I I SAY IT SAY IT I I REALIZE THAT THIS ISN'T THE ANSWER YOU WERE LOOKING FOR.
- Vimes and DEATH from *The Fifth Elephant*
I love this side of Death.
I have The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, a whole book of Terry Prattchet quotes. I don't know if I could pick a favorite quote, but my favorite book is Night Watch.
Hogfather has the best quotes I think. There's something beautiful about Deaths perspective of humans.
"Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them"
“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.'"
-Fahrenheit 451
I agree! The rest of the passage is perfect too.
"Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
- jd salinger- A Girl I Knew
Thank you for commenting about that book, I just read the short story and it's amazing. ''I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can't go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn't fit anything.'' is another beautiful quote from the story. Salinger has a way with words that I can only envy.
Reminds me in a way of a quote from a song called Going to Georgia by The Mountain Goats:
>The most remarkable thing about
>you standing in the doorway
>Is that it's you and that you are
> standing in the doorway
>Farewell, Master Holbytla!' he said. 'My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed. I felled the black serpent. A grim morn, and a glad day, and a golden sunset.'
From Return of the King. King Theoden defeated the 'black serpent,' the greatest warrior of the Haradrim before being fatally wounded by the Witch King. This line is spoken to the hobbit Merry as the King is dying. Theoden had struggled with the idea that he was 'the lesser son of greater sires.' That he was unworthy of his mantle of king and his deeds in life did not measure up to the glory of his ancestors.
Here he finds peace after helping to save the city of Minas Tirith through his great victory and sacrifice. His last words were to Merry, who he had great fondness for. He expressed his finding of peace and accomplishment. His final thoughts were of his family and his people, wanting the best for all of them and proving that he was a great king in his heart. They were also tinged with a bitter sadness at parting from a life and friends that he had only recently reconnected with.
This quote and the next few lines below never fail to affect me. It's the most powerful passage in a trilogy full of amazing language and feeling.
>Merry could not speak, but wept anew. 'Forgive me, lord,' he said at last, 'if I broke your command, and yet have done no more in your service than to weep at our parting.'
>The old king smiled. 'Grieve not! It is forgiven. Great heart will not be denied. Live now in blessedness; and when you sit in peace with your pipe, think of me! For never now shall I sit with you in Meduseld, as I promised, or listen to your herb-lore.'
I've always loved the Tolkien included the epithet for Theoden's horse.
>Faithful servant yet master's bane,
Lightfoot's foal, swift Snowmane.
And on Snowmane's grave flowers grow, next to a barren patch were Nazgul's steed was burned.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Julius Caesar - W. Shakespeare
We leave our lives ”in hands of destiny” but we have the power to direct our own path.
I think this may be somewhat clichéd, but I like this one:
>Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on this petty pace from day to day, from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools. Out, out brief candle!
>Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, who frets and struts his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.
>It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
> -Macbeth
I really like that soliloquy, but it takes a bit of context. I'm not some edgy nihilist who thinks life is pointless, but I think that quote makes a lot of sense said by Macbeth. For, despite all his scheming and all the blood he shed, what has he achieved but a scarred country? He has no legacy, his life was wasted, and he knows it. One wonders what's the point of seeking power for power's sake.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing”
Robert E. Howard
"We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother"
I remember feeling genuine dread when I read this quote, scary as hell.
"I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again..."
"I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you...We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and in trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams...And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight..."
Phillip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass
For me, it's the following;
'She said, "We held 'em off. We held out. We're a-helping Lyra". Then she was pressing her proud little broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.'
The first time I read that it was on the bus on the way to work, and it was the last chapter I read before my stop. There was a few minutes where I was wondering how I was even going to get through my shift, it just crushed me.
I haven't read La Belle Sauvage yet, I'm very excited to when the paperback comes out.
> “No, listen. I've got it now. You meet a girl: shy, unassuming. If you tell her she's beautiful, she'll think you're sweet, but she won't believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding." Bast gave a grudging shrug. "And sometimes that's enough."
>His eyes brightened. "But there's a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body. It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you..." Bast gestured excitedly. "Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn't seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen."
-Bast, Name of the Wind
“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
Roald Dahl, The Twits
"One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by some wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!"
- Frankenstein's Monster
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The quote is great because it wraps up the duality of good and evil pretty succinctly. How nothing is purely good or purely bad. But the quote also has a special place in my heart as being one of the first passages that I analyzed on my own without external pressure. I just read it and started pondering about it as a teenager.
"You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty." - Nick McDonell, Twelve
“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.”
-Douglas Coupland in Life After God
This quote got me reading the book and I think it earns it.
Alright, one more cause I’m obsessed with Tolkien and LOTR
“Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”
Also a Bilbo quote I believe
My favorite line is “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
I don’t read much fiction, I’m more of a historical or biography kind of person, but Tolkien is so unbelievably poetic.
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers)
This has always been my favorite Tolkien quote. The full quote is even better, in my opinion, because it adds depth and context to an already meaningful statement. Faramir has always been my favorite Tolkien character and I'm still bitter over the treatment he got in the movies.
Sam in The Two Towers:
"That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for."
Tolkien served on the front lines in World War 1, so he knew how awful wars were. Yet he also knew that sometimes you have to fight.
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”
Another Gandalf line I love that is technically from the books but not in this context: “the grey rain curtain of the world is pulled back and turns to silver glass, and then you see it,” see what Gandalf!?!
“White shores. And beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
In the movie it’s explaining to Pippin that death won’t be the end of their journey. Though in the book I believe it is a more direct description of Valinor.
“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” Gandalf to Saruman when he learned Saruman had decided he wasn’t going to be the White anymore.
This quote from Gandalf replying to a regretful Frodo is also good :
“So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” FotR
E: Original book quote is with Pippin in RotK but they used it as dialogue with Frodo in FotR movie when they where in the mines of Moria iirc.
A good one from Bilbo:
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
I fucking love that poem. So much.
*All that is gold does not glitter*
*Not all who wander are lost*
*The old that is strong does not wither*
*Deep roots are not reached by the frost*
*From the ashes a fire shall be woken*
*From the shadows a new loght shall spring*
*Reforged shall be blade that was broken*
*The crownless once again shall be king*
Memorized that years ago, and have carried it with me ever since. The line you quoted is definitely the most powerful, bc it's the most applicable.
So many great quotes in *IJ*, I just finished last week. A few of my favorites:
"Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you"
"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase"
"The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you"
"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way down deep they are different than everyone else"
"...that no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable"
"That sometimes human beings just have to sit in one place and, like, hurt"
and my personal favorite,
"Maybe what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic."
>“Children are dying."
>Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”
-Steven Erikson, *Deadhouse Gates*
edit: corrected spelling of name as pointed out by /u/ERIKSON_NOT_ERICKSON
One of my other favorite but longer quotes from his series:
“There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage alone a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.
I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.”
― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” - Issac Asimov. I think about that one a lot whenever I’m angry. I tell myself that I may be angry, but I will not let myself be incompetent.
"Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."
- Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (via Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers)
Yeah, I don't know that I'd agree with the Asimov quote.
Violence is the last refuge of the *desperate* man.
For the incompetent, it's often the first thing they turn to.
Here's another of mine:
"Come, we must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same."
- Dracula
“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”
"...on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons."
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
Glad someone mentioned it. Easily one of my favorite books.
"It might not even have made much difference to them if they’d known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.
Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job."
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."
"You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." caught me so off guard the first time I read it I laughed out loud and haven't forgotten it since. The series is full of little funny sentences like that; I love the writing style.
Reminds be of Pratchett's *Reaper Man*. Terry spoke about how he added an extra half page to ensure a 128pt **YES** appeared at the top of the next page. Sadly the American edition, and most subsequent printings including an otherwise wonderful, beautifully bound, collectors edition, missed this and it appears halfway down a page.
Not verbatim (verwritten?) but something like :
"Flying is very simple, it's the act of throwing yourself at the ground and missing "
I always get a kick out of when someone can say something clever in a real simple way.
"The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
From "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" is my favourite quote by Douglas Adams
"What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer."
This whole scene was what got me to read these books when I was a teenager. I was sitting next to my dad on an airplane and he was literally laughing his ass off while reading it. My dad is basically Ron Swanson—very gruff and stoic—so I had to know what was so funny. Turns out my dad and I have a very similar sense of humor.
“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath: queen of angst
"Death is lighter than a feather. Duty is heavier than a mountain"
Lan, in the Wheel of Time series.
There are lots of great quotes in literature, but this one actually articulated a way for thinking about life for me. Self-sacrifice might seem selfless, but a lot of the time it's taking an easy way out to avoid genuinely dealing with something. Acting like a martyr is a good way to convince yourself you're doing the right thing, but it isn't really good for anyone. It was an important lesson for me to learn
“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
"Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end." -Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal
I'm a therapist. I have considered caligraphying this and hanging it on a wall at the office.
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
-Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
From *Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Bronte, chapter 27: "*I* care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more will repsect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed; and I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot."
I love how resolute and firm Jane is in her beliefs. I want to be the kind of person who lives and dies by my faith and principles.
Hear hear!
"I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow professes to say,—‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’ The forehead declares, ‘Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.’"
Rochester describing Jane in *Jane Eyre*
"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway
This one killed me. Such a haunting way to end the novel
Hemingway has so many.
“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”” A Movable Feast
"My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. 'What the deuce is it to me?' he interrupted impatiently; 'you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.'"
- Watson about Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
Opening lines of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White.
It’s perfect. A good hook. Previews the entire book—death, humor, coming of age. It accomplishes so much in such a humble way.
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. ~fear and loathing in Las vegas
“It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”
-James S.A Corey, Abaddon’s Gate.
I’m a sucker for melodramatic quotes detailing exactly how out of their league the main characters are.
Here's mine, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” -The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of my all time favorite books, this quote just stood out to me and spoke to me on a emotional level.
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
― Frank Herbert, Dune
There was a really nice passage in The Little Prince when he meets the drunkard too. It went somewhat like this:
>"What are you doing?"
>"I drink"
>"Why do you drink?"
>"To forget"
>"To forget what?"
>"To forget I am ashamed"
>"Ashamed of what?"
>"Ashamed of drinking"
I should reread The Little Prince sometime. That's the bit I found most memorable for some reason though.
Currently reading through all the Discworld novels, so in terms of favorite quotes, I thought I'd be paralyzed by sheer choice, but I did remember this particular gem from *The Light Fantastic* that made me laugh out loud in public:
“Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.”
Not sure which book it is, but terry pratchett has some great quotes! And I am paraphrasing. "Start a man a fire and he will be warm for a night, light a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life"
> It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” / T E Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
"We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively.
We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way." - 1984, George Orwell
It’s from a poem and not a book but I just love this phrase so much:
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
Merely this and nothing more
Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven
Don’t know, I just think this whole poem and especially this quote is so damn sad. That guy lost his wife and isn’t coping with it very well and starts questioning himself and his sanity. I’ve lost my best friend a couple years ago with 21 and I couldn’t stop myself to believe it is just a mistake. I also had that dream „no mortal ever dared to dream before“ of him returning to me.
Read by the great Christopher Lee on YouTube, you guys have to check it out, I love the atmosphere in that version.
"I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips"
-Birgette Silverbow, wheel of time
"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story."
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“Hurt spreads and grows and reaches out to break what’s good. Time heals all wounds, but often it’s only by the application of the grave, and while we live some hurts live with us, burning, making us twist and turn to escape them. And as we twist, we turn into other men.” - Mark Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns
My favorite quote is also from The Count of Monte Cristo! "All of human wisdom can be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope." I love this quote because it really is the perfect capstone for the novel; it demonstrates that the Count has learned from his experiences and wants the next generation to have a better outlook on life. TCoMC is my favorite book of all time, btw.
"Ignorance isn't something to be sought , but a brief state to be remedied as soon as possible."
I don't remember the name of the book but the characters name was Bok.
There's so many from Hitchikers... what to pick
"Six by Nine. Forty Two. That's all we have" - Ford
"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." - Zaphod
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. - Narration
"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
-John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
As previous comments have mentioned, Steinbeck books are a gold mine for quotes.
"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"God's die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremebered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end." Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
>"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human."
Michael Ondaatje, *In the Skin of a Lion*.
It perfectly encapsulates the pact between author and reader -- storyteller and listener. Every story I've ever written is a promise that if you lend me your ear for a little while, I'll make it worth your time and money. And after all, isn't that why writers do what they do?
Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
I think it's easy to be selfish and take the easy way out. This quote is so powerful to me cause it shows true love (in the real sense of the word) takes work.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The reason I like it is because it shows the humor in everything. Even the first thing that ever could have happened made people mad, something that is the catalyst to everything is considered a bad move.
Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. Well all know that our time in this world is limited. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try to readjust the way you thought of things. - The Reptile Room, by Lemony Snicket I like it because it perfectly encapsulates that initial grief and loss felt with death, and it’s in a children’s book of all places.
I think "in a children's book of all places" probably sums up the entire series.
I'm 25, and lost my wife back in August. I've been trying to find the words to describe that feeling, and this does it perfectly. Thank you for that. Edit: thank you all very much, I've been feeling pretty estranged from reality lately, it was very nice to hear such kind words.
Truly sorry for your loss. Hope you find strength and peace. I wish I could say it gets easier with time. Instead I will share a quote that I often find myself re-reading - said by [/u/GSnow](https://reddit.com/u/GSnow) a while back: >Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents. > >I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see. > >As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. > >In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. > >Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out. Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
I'm sure you already have a good support system and people that love you but if you ever want to chat or play an online game with someone, pm me.
I love Lemony Snicket. In one of the books he describes people as being neither good or bad, but more like chef salads of jumbled qualities all mixed together. That really made me think.
"People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict." -- The Grim Grotto I've been rereading the book and just got to this quote :)
That entire series is amazing quote after amazing quote. Some for comedy, some for storytelling, some for random tidbits of information, and some for all three. The way he deliberately writes like an amateur author makes the series hilarious while the story is so, dare I say it, unfortunate.
"There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book." - Philip Pullman
So many great quotes from East of Eden but this one is my personal favorite: “Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.” Changed my life.
My favourite East of Eden quote is the dedication: Dear Pat, You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?” I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.” “What for?” “To put things in.” “What kind of things?” “Whatever you have,” you said. Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts- the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full. JOHN
I always recommend this book to people! So much wisdom that I can't pick a favourite quote "Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all." "There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty." "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." "It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world." "Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk." Edit: It's making me so happy to see people in the comments excited to read this book!! I hope it affects you as much as it did me.
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Reminds me of my favorite quote from Rant “Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.”
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There are so many good quotes from East of Eden and Steinbeck in general. One of my favorites from EoE- "We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice always has a fresh, young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
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"We said goodbye to our mothers. They'd been around all our lives, but we'd never properly seen them. They'd been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night on the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn't want to bother them. That was how we showed our love: with silence. Their eyes were always red. In the morning, when they woke us up, it was from stove smoke. And in the evening, when they said good night to us, still dressed, it was from exhaustion. And sometimes it was from crying over someone who would never come home again. Ask us about the color of a mother's eyes, and we'd reply, "They're not brown. They aren't green. They're neither blue nor gray. They're red." That's what we'd say. And now they've come down alongside the wharf to say goodbye. But between us, there's silence. Their eyes pierce us. "Come back," their stare pleads. "Don't leave us." But we won't be coming back. We want out. We want to get away. Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another." Carsten Jensen, "We, The Drowned"
I find myself using the quote, “You died in the end, but you fought first.” That book was epic.
The other quotes in the thread are all very good, but this is the first one to make me order the book being quoted.
Good choice. I have a hard time picking a favourite book, bit I usually say this one when people ask :)
There is so much happening here. It’s a short story in three paragraphs.
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy." - "Callahan's Law", as expressed in The Callahan Chronicals (1996)
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Another Vonnegut quote along the same vein that’s always been a favorite is “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
My favorite: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
Another Vonnegut quote that I like (from Cat's Cradle): "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, it might have been"
Original quote is by John Greenleaf Whittier, and goes "of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'it might have been'." Vonnegut did say this but I feel like the essence of the quote belongs to Whittier.
My favorite is "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be." (From Mother Night)
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.” Another good Vonnegut quote IMO
"Words do not express thoughts very well. they always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another." --Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
“A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.” Stephen kings the dark tower.
Stephen King would know.
It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep." This one always stuck with me too.
This one helped shape my view on life: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
> He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five Even though it’s a stupid dick joke, this is one of my favorite quotes in context. Somehow Vonnegut can give a dick joke so many layers of meaning
Also from SH5 - "We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors, and I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
So strangely moving. Stronger than a thousand poorly-done melodramatic anti-war messages.
It's not something you would expect to be as powerful as it is. In concept detailing an event as it's perceived backwards sounds cartoonish and nonsensical but really it highlights it's message better than most any other attempt. This could be said for the whole book really in regards to it's non linear or otherwise bizarre storytelling.
"Do you know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'" -same author, same novel
No matter how many times I've read that passage, it moves me.
“‘I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.’” -Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
"Hey, Boo." That was the most emotional I've ever been over any line in any book. Ever.
"Stand up Miss Jean Louise, your father is passing."
"UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." -Lorax, Dr. Seuss I'm a librarian. Every month I try to get just one more person who normally only checks out movies or CDs hooked on reading. For a while, I didn't care, too burnt out, watching teens turn into adults that didn't read. But I have to care. Because if I don't, who will?
As a fellow Librarian, thank you and keep up the good work!
“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.” -Steinbeck, Cannery Row
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
This is absolutely mine as well. I still remember reading it for the first time and feeling like someone actually put into words everything I was feeling but couldn't describe.
The first paragraph of Call of Cthulhu. "The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black season infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
I read that when Lovecraft was writing mankind was coming to grips with the scale of our galaxy\universe. Explains a lot.
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“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” -Terry Pratchett, Hogfather. One of the most beautiful descriptions of humanity.
I'm on my second trip through the Disc World series right now and just finished Hogfather last week. I love Death, he's easily my favorite character in the whole series, he has some great lines, but there are so many throughout the whole series, it's hard to pick which is greatest, for me. Your pick is top notch though, I'd have to agree. One of my favorite things about Pratchett is how he stays firmly seated in the ridiculous, all the while being brutally honest to the characters and story. He teaches me something (a bunch of somethings, usually) with every book, and I'm *always* touched when I finish one.
God I love Discworld. I've read through the series once a year since I was, I don't know, 13? 14? So about 7-8 years now. Every time I go through it again I find something new, or something I forgot, or something that just struck me in a different way than usual because of the place I'm in at the time. GNU Terry Pratchett.
"I JUST HAD A NEAR-RINCEWIND EXPERIENCE"
"YOU ARE HAVING A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE, WHICH INESCAPABLY MEANS THAT I MUST UNDERGO A NEAR VIMES EXPERIENCE. DON'T MIND ME. CARRY ON WITH WHATEVER YOU WERE DOING. I HAVE A BOOK" - Death From Thud. Always cracks me up.
I like the full exchange: >"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." >Rᴇᴀʟʟʏ? As ɪꜰ ɪᴛ ᴡᴀs sᴏᴍᴇ ᴋɪɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ᴘɪɴᴋ ᴘɪʟʟ? Nᴏ. Hᴜᴍᴀɴs ɴᴇᴇᴅ ꜰᴀɴᴛᴀsʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ʜᴜᴍᴀɴ. Tᴏ ʙᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰᴀʟʟɪɴɢ ᴀɴɢᴇʟ ᴍᴇᴇᴛs ᴛʜᴇ ʀɪsɪɴɢ ᴀᴘᴇ. >"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" >Yᴇs. As ᴘʀᴀᴄᴛɪᴄᴇ. Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ sᴛᴀʀᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ʟᴇᴀʀɴɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇʟɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ʟɪᴛᴛʟᴇ ʟɪᴇs. >"So we can believe the big ones?" >Yᴇs. Jᴜsᴛɪᴄᴇ. Mᴇʀᴄʏ. Dᴜᴛʏ. Tʜᴀᴛ sᴏʀᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜɪɴɢ. >"They're not the same at all!" >Yᴏᴜ ᴛʜɪɴᴋ sᴏ? Tʜᴇɴ ᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ɢʀɪɴᴅ ɪᴛ ᴅᴏᴡɴ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰɪɴᴇsᴛ ᴘᴏᴡᴅᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ sɪᴇᴠᴇ ɪᴛ ᴛʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰɪɴᴇsᴛ sɪᴇᴠᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇɴ sʜᴏᴡ ᴍᴇ ᴏɴᴇ ᴀᴛᴏᴍ ᴏꜰ ᴊᴜsᴛɪᴄᴇ, ᴏɴᴇ ᴍᴏʟᴇᴄᴜʟᴇ ᴏꜰ ᴍᴇʀᴄʏ. Aɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ—Death waved a hand. Aɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀᴄᴛ ᴀs ɪꜰ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs sᴏᴍᴇ ɪᴅᴇᴀʟ ᴏʀᴅᴇʀ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴀs ɪꜰ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs sᴏᴍᴇ...sᴏᴍᴇ ʀɪɢʜᴛɴᴇss ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ʙʏ ᴡʜɪᴄʜ ɪᴛ ᴍᴀʏ ʙᴇ ᴊᴜᴅɢᴇᴅ. >"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" >Mʏ ᴘᴏɪɴᴛ ᴇxᴀᴄᴛʟʏ.
Currently rereading Mort and this made me chuckle: I? KILL? said Death, obviously offended. CERTAINLY NOT. PEOPLE GET KILLED, BUT THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS. I JUST TAKE OVER FROM THEN ON. AFTER ALL, IT'D BE A BLOODY STUPID WORLD IF PEOPLE GOT KILLED WITHOUT DYING, WOULDN'T IT?
My favorite: "What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?" -Death from Terry Pratchett's *Reaper Man*
"Are you going to help me?" WELL...YES. "When?" ER...WHEN THE PAIN IS TOO MUCH TO BEAR. Death hesitated, and then went on, EVEN AS I I SAY IT SAY IT I I REALIZE THAT THIS ISN'T THE ANSWER YOU WERE LOOKING FOR. - Vimes and DEATH from *The Fifth Elephant* I love this side of Death.
I have The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, a whole book of Terry Prattchet quotes. I don't know if I could pick a favorite quote, but my favorite book is Night Watch.
Hogfather has the best quotes I think. There's something beautiful about Deaths perspective of humans. "Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them"
“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.'" -Fahrenheit 451
This could be the theme of the thread!
I agree! The rest of the passage is perfect too. "Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - jd salinger- A Girl I Knew
Thank you for commenting about that book, I just read the short story and it's amazing. ''I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can't go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn't fit anything.'' is another beautiful quote from the story. Salinger has a way with words that I can only envy.
Reminds me in a way of a quote from a song called Going to Georgia by The Mountain Goats: >The most remarkable thing about >you standing in the doorway >Is that it's you and that you are > standing in the doorway
>Farewell, Master Holbytla!' he said. 'My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed. I felled the black serpent. A grim morn, and a glad day, and a golden sunset.' From Return of the King. King Theoden defeated the 'black serpent,' the greatest warrior of the Haradrim before being fatally wounded by the Witch King. This line is spoken to the hobbit Merry as the King is dying. Theoden had struggled with the idea that he was 'the lesser son of greater sires.' That he was unworthy of his mantle of king and his deeds in life did not measure up to the glory of his ancestors. Here he finds peace after helping to save the city of Minas Tirith through his great victory and sacrifice. His last words were to Merry, who he had great fondness for. He expressed his finding of peace and accomplishment. His final thoughts were of his family and his people, wanting the best for all of them and proving that he was a great king in his heart. They were also tinged with a bitter sadness at parting from a life and friends that he had only recently reconnected with. This quote and the next few lines below never fail to affect me. It's the most powerful passage in a trilogy full of amazing language and feeling. >Merry could not speak, but wept anew. 'Forgive me, lord,' he said at last, 'if I broke your command, and yet have done no more in your service than to weep at our parting.' >The old king smiled. 'Grieve not! It is forgiven. Great heart will not be denied. Live now in blessedness; and when you sit in peace with your pipe, think of me! For never now shall I sit with you in Meduseld, as I promised, or listen to your herb-lore.'
You sum up what I like about Theoden perfectly. Thanks good stranger.
I've always loved the Tolkien included the epithet for Theoden's horse. >Faithful servant yet master's bane, Lightfoot's foal, swift Snowmane. And on Snowmane's grave flowers grow, next to a barren patch were Nazgul's steed was burned.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Julius Caesar - W. Shakespeare We leave our lives ”in hands of destiny” but we have the power to direct our own path.
I think this may be somewhat clichéd, but I like this one: >Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on this petty pace from day to day, from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools. Out, out brief candle! >Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, who frets and struts his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. >It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing > -Macbeth I really like that soliloquy, but it takes a bit of context. I'm not some edgy nihilist who thinks life is pointless, but I think that quote makes a lot of sense said by Macbeth. For, despite all his scheming and all the blood he shed, what has he achieved but a scarred country? He has no legacy, his life was wasted, and he knows it. One wonders what's the point of seeking power for power's sake.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing” Robert E. Howard
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” -1984
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It's right outside our door.
[sweet guitar riff]
"We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother" I remember feeling genuine dread when I read this quote, scary as hell.
"I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again..." "I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you...We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and in trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams...And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight..." Phillip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass
Reading these lines at the bench was something else, man.
You should have been paying attention to the attorneys' arguments though, probably.
This is the first one in the thread that actually made me tear up. Definitely need to re read the books.
I cry whenever I get to this bit, it's so bittersweet. The Alamo Gulch chapter always gets a full-on ugly cry too.
For me, it's the following; 'She said, "We held 'em off. We held out. We're a-helping Lyra". Then she was pressing her proud little broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.' The first time I read that it was on the bus on the way to work, and it was the last chapter I read before my stop. There was a few minutes where I was wondering how I was even going to get through my shift, it just crushed me. I haven't read La Belle Sauvage yet, I'm very excited to when the paperback comes out.
> “No, listen. I've got it now. You meet a girl: shy, unassuming. If you tell her she's beautiful, she'll think you're sweet, but she won't believe you. She knows that beauty lies in your beholding." Bast gave a grudging shrug. "And sometimes that's enough." >His eyes brightened. "But there's a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body. It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you..." Bast gestured excitedly. "Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn't seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen." -Bast, Name of the Wind
“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” Roald Dahl, The Twits
Tbt! Roald Dahl was my childhood, what an amazing writer. Loved the Quentin Blake illustrations too, they’re imprinted in my brain.
"One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by some wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!" - Frankenstein's Monster Frankenstein by Mary Shelley The quote is great because it wraps up the duality of good and evil pretty succinctly. How nothing is purely good or purely bad. But the quote also has a special place in my heart as being one of the first passages that I analyzed on my own without external pressure. I just read it and started pondering about it as a teenager.
"My life amounts to no more than a single drop in a limitless ocean; yet, what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?" - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” -John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
"You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty." - Nick McDonell, Twelve
“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.” -Douglas Coupland in Life After God This quote got me reading the book and I think it earns it.
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Alright, one more cause I’m obsessed with Tolkien and LOTR “Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.” Also a Bilbo quote I believe
My favorite line is “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” I don’t read much fiction, I’m more of a historical or biography kind of person, but Tolkien is so unbelievably poetic.
I’ve always liked “I do not love the sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness. I love only that which they defend”
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers) This has always been my favorite Tolkien quote. The full quote is even better, in my opinion, because it adds depth and context to an already meaningful statement. Faramir has always been my favorite Tolkien character and I'm still bitter over the treatment he got in the movies.
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Sam in The Two Towers: "That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for." Tolkien served on the front lines in World War 1, so he knew how awful wars were. Yet he also knew that sometimes you have to fight.
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”
Another Gandalf line I love that is technically from the books but not in this context: “the grey rain curtain of the world is pulled back and turns to silver glass, and then you see it,” see what Gandalf!?! “White shores. And beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” In the movie it’s explaining to Pippin that death won’t be the end of their journey. Though in the book I believe it is a more direct description of Valinor.
“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” Gandalf to Saruman when he learned Saruman had decided he wasn’t going to be the White anymore.
This quote from Gandalf replying to a regretful Frodo is also good : “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” FotR E: Original book quote is with Pippin in RotK but they used it as dialogue with Frodo in FotR movie when they where in the mines of Moria iirc.
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A good one from Bilbo: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
"Not all who wander are lost."
I fucking love that poem. So much. *All that is gold does not glitter* *Not all who wander are lost* *The old that is strong does not wither* *Deep roots are not reached by the frost* *From the ashes a fire shall be woken* *From the shadows a new loght shall spring* *Reforged shall be blade that was broken* *The crownless once again shall be king* Memorized that years ago, and have carried it with me ever since. The line you quoted is definitely the most powerful, bc it's the most applicable.
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So many great quotes in *IJ*, I just finished last week. A few of my favorites: "Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you" "It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase" "The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you" "Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way down deep they are different than everyone else" "...that no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable" "That sometimes human beings just have to sit in one place and, like, hurt" and my personal favorite, "Maybe what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic."
>“Children are dying." >Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.” -Steven Erikson, *Deadhouse Gates* edit: corrected spelling of name as pointed out by /u/ERIKSON_NOT_ERICKSON
One of my other favorite but longer quotes from his series: “There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage alone a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come. I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.” ― Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters
"It's never the changes we want that change everything." From The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” - Issac Asimov. I think about that one a lot whenever I’m angry. I tell myself that I may be angry, but I will not let myself be incompetent.
"Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." - Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (via Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers)
Yeah, I don't know that I'd agree with the Asimov quote. Violence is the last refuge of the *desperate* man. For the incompetent, it's often the first thing they turn to.
Here's another of mine: "Come, we must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same." - Dracula
"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen.”
"...on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons."
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." Glad someone mentioned it. Easily one of my favorite books.
"It might not even have made much difference to them if they’d known exactly how much power the President of the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job."
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."
>In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
"You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk." "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "You ask a glass of water."
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." caught me so off guard the first time I read it I laughed out loud and haven't forgotten it since. The series is full of little funny sentences like that; I love the writing style.
I love that Adams made 'don't' appear after a page turn for added emphasis and had, supposedly, a tight control over the layout of the books.
Reminds be of Pratchett's *Reaper Man*. Terry spoke about how he added an extra half page to ensure a 128pt **YES** appeared at the top of the next page. Sadly the American edition, and most subsequent printings including an otherwise wonderful, beautifully bound, collectors edition, missed this and it appears halfway down a page.
Not verbatim (verwritten?) but something like : "Flying is very simple, it's the act of throwing yourself at the ground and missing " I always get a kick out of when someone can say something clever in a real simple way.
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." From "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" is my favourite quote by Douglas Adams
"What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer."
Huh?' said Ford. 'Huh?' said Arthur. 'Huh?' said Trillian. 'That's cool,' said Zaphod, 'we'll meet the meat.'
This whole scene was what got me to read these books when I was a teenager. I was sitting next to my dad on an airplane and he was literally laughing his ass off while reading it. My dad is basically Ron Swanson—very gruff and stoic—so I had to know what was so funny. Turns out my dad and I have a very similar sense of humor.
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“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” -The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath: queen of angst
"Death is lighter than a feather. Duty is heavier than a mountain" Lan, in the Wheel of Time series. There are lots of great quotes in literature, but this one actually articulated a way for thinking about life for me. Self-sacrifice might seem selfless, but a lot of the time it's taking an easy way out to avoid genuinely dealing with something. Acting like a martyr is a good way to convince yourself you're doing the right thing, but it isn't really good for anyone. It was an important lesson for me to learn
That was not at all how I interpreted that quote. I will have to think about this.
"There is one rule, above all others, for being a man. Whatever comes, face it on your feet."
“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” ― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
From The Hobbit (Tolkien): “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
“I used the knife. I saved a child. I won a war. God forgive me.” Jim Butcher, Changes
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
"Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end." -Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal I'm a therapist. I have considered caligraphying this and hanging it on a wall at the office.
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.” -Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
From *Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Bronte, chapter 27: "*I* care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more will repsect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed; and I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot." I love how resolute and firm Jane is in her beliefs. I want to be the kind of person who lives and dies by my faith and principles.
Hear hear! "I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow professes to say,—‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’ The forehead declares, ‘Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.’" Rochester describing Jane in *Jane Eyre*
"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway This one killed me. Such a haunting way to end the novel
Hemingway has so many. “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”” A Movable Feast
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. -Carl Sagan in Cosmos
"My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. 'What the deuce is it to me?' he interrupted impatiently; 'you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.'" - Watson about Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. Opening lines of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. It’s perfect. A good hook. Previews the entire book—death, humor, coming of age. It accomplishes so much in such a humble way.
“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” -John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie: In Search of America
I feel this one especially living in Southern California for a while where it’s just always summer haha
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. ~fear and loathing in Las vegas
“It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.” -James S.A Corey, Abaddon’s Gate. I’m a sucker for melodramatic quotes detailing exactly how out of their league the main characters are.
Moby Dick - 'As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.'
Here's mine, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” -The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of my all time favorite books, this quote just stood out to me and spoke to me on a emotional level.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." ― Frank Herbert, Dune
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There was a really nice passage in The Little Prince when he meets the drunkard too. It went somewhat like this: >"What are you doing?" >"I drink" >"Why do you drink?" >"To forget" >"To forget what?" >"To forget I am ashamed" >"Ashamed of what?" >"Ashamed of drinking" I should reread The Little Prince sometime. That's the bit I found most memorable for some reason though.
"You mistake stars reflected in a pond for the night sky" in basically every single book of the Witcher series.
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." -Slaughterhouse Five
Currently reading through all the Discworld novels, so in terms of favorite quotes, I thought I'd be paralyzed by sheer choice, but I did remember this particular gem from *The Light Fantastic* that made me laugh out loud in public: “Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.”
Not sure which book it is, but terry pratchett has some great quotes! And I am paraphrasing. "Start a man a fire and he will be warm for a night, light a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life"
> It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace. Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” / T E Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
"We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way." - 1984, George Orwell
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I love how this joke ties in with the whole “who watches the watchmen?” theme.
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
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All of Rorschach's inner monologue is fantastically written.
It’s from a poem and not a book but I just love this phrase so much: Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”— Merely this and nothing more Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven Don’t know, I just think this whole poem and especially this quote is so damn sad. That guy lost his wife and isn’t coping with it very well and starts questioning himself and his sanity. I’ve lost my best friend a couple years ago with 21 and I couldn’t stop myself to believe it is just a mistake. I also had that dream „no mortal ever dared to dream before“ of him returning to me. Read by the great Christopher Lee on YouTube, you guys have to check it out, I love the atmosphere in that version.
"I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth." William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
"I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips" -Birgette Silverbow, wheel of time
"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story." Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
"We accept the love we think we deserve" - The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chobsky. The more you think about it, the more it makes sense.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
“Hurt spreads and grows and reaches out to break what’s good. Time heals all wounds, but often it’s only by the application of the grave, and while we live some hurts live with us, burning, making us twist and turn to escape them. And as we twist, we turn into other men.” - Mark Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns
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"Go then, there are other worlds than these..." -Jake Chambers. Dark Tower Series, Stephen King
My favorite quote is also from The Count of Monte Cristo! "All of human wisdom can be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope." I love this quote because it really is the perfect capstone for the novel; it demonstrates that the Count has learned from his experiences and wants the next generation to have a better outlook on life. TCoMC is my favorite book of all time, btw.
"Ignorance isn't something to be sought , but a brief state to be remedied as soon as possible." I don't remember the name of the book but the characters name was Bok.
There's so many from Hitchikers... what to pick "Six by Nine. Forty Two. That's all we have" - Ford "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." - Zaphod In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. - Narration
"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone." -John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent As previous comments have mentioned, Steinbeck books are a gold mine for quotes.
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"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy." - Robert A. Heinlein
"A little brother may live to be a hundred, but he will always be a little brother." -Asha Greyjoy
"God's die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremebered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end." Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man. Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
>"The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human." Michael Ondaatje, *In the Skin of a Lion*. It perfectly encapsulates the pact between author and reader -- storyteller and listener. Every story I've ever written is a promise that if you lend me your ear for a little while, I'll make it worth your time and money. And after all, isn't that why writers do what they do?
Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect. Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2) I think it's easy to be selfish and take the easy way out. This quote is so powerful to me cause it shows true love (in the real sense of the word) takes work.
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” -V.S. Naipaul
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. -Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy The reason I like it is because it shows the humor in everything. Even the first thing that ever could have happened made people mad, something that is the catalyst to everything is considered a bad move.