Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 25, 2012 - 10:14am

Have you ever had lines from books that stick with you? Change your world view, maybe even somehow draw you into the world of the book? Tell me yours! I need a break from this story!!!!!!!

Mine are:

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." --- "Araby" James Joyce

""And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it."---- "Moby Dick" Herman Melville

"To have traveled so far... From east to west, a thousand terrible miles; my feet treading all God's surface - his Ocean, his swamps, his slopes and ridges - to find myself at last a mark in the aching snow from whence I beheld through a blue haze a world of mountains piled upon mountains."---- "Cold Mountain" Charles Frazier

"“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” ----1984 George Orwell

"Jesus wept" ----The Bible

DaveShepherd's picture
DaveShepherd from Calgary is reading No Country for Old Men February 25, 2012 - 10:33am

This quote from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" always stuck with me (it occurs just after the beginning of the end of the world):

What is happening?
I don't know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not.

"Who is John Galt?" stuck with me, but probably due to repetition. Same with "M-O-O-N that spells _____".

There are a bunch from Terry Pratchett books, but damned if I can remember them right now.

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 25, 2012 - 10:36am

Yeah, "The Road" (book) was great, the movie? Not so much. I love the use of language in it. 

"Same with "M-O-O-N that spells _____" Haha, The Stand, one of my all time favorite novels.

 

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

Dave's picture
Dave from a city near you is reading constantly February 25, 2012 - 12:03pm

If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.

 

I've always loved that line...that line made the book for me, can't say why exactly.

Good thread, man, there's so many...I haven't had coffee yet so it may have to wait.  I was thinking about this the other day, and almost broke out Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran.  Pretty much the whole book, but

"One may not reach the dawn, save by the path of the night."

or

"A great man has two hearts; one bleeds and the other forebears."

 

More later, I used to be a quote collector! =D

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 25, 2012 - 12:17pm

Dude, those are BEAST! MORE! 

Dave's picture
Dave from a city near you is reading constantly February 25, 2012 - 1:48pm

I found Figh Club at a time when i was getting divorced, losing my house, hating my job, just sliding down hill.  I read FC and found, among so many others, this, which turned a lot of things for me

"It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything." 

I went back and read it again, and highlighted and dog eared something, it seemed, on practically every page.  And I guess I ended up giving that copy to someone who needed it more than me, but flipping through my other copy, I'm reminded of others that stuck, in particular

"You're not how much money you've got in the bank.  You're not your job.  You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself.... You're not your name.... You're not your problems.... You're not your age.... You are not your hopes"

And in not so good a way, "I'm a thirty year old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need."

But this isn't a Fight Club thread, so

"A female, using a biological weapon, exploiting a moment of male weakness, loneliness, to deprive him of his life.  A shelter turning into a trap." George Jonas in Vengeance

 

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 25, 2012 - 2:25pm

Dude that Jonas quote is money!
 

Love some Fightclub too, there were too many quotes to choose from, that book changed my life. 

Ches Smith's picture
Ches Smith from Houston, TX February 25, 2012 - 2:45pm

"And so these parties divided upon the midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s jounreys."

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

“You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Suset Limited

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"

- George Orwell, 1984

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

aliensoul77's picture
aliensoul77 from a cold distant star is reading the writing on the wall. February 25, 2012 - 2:54pm

"She would have been a good woman, if there was someone there to shoot her every day of her life."  --Flannery O'Connor, "A good man is hard to find"

"Go then, there are other worlds than these."--Jake to Roland, Dark Tower

 

Jose F. Diaz's picture
Jose F. Diaz from Boston is reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel February 25, 2012 - 3:29pm

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."

-Lewis Carroll

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down or speed up?"

"Your heart is my pinata."

-Chuck Palahniuk

"You don't just turn creativity on like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood."

"What mood is that?"

"Last minute panic."

-Calvin & Hobbes

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 25, 2012 - 4:37pm

My GOD Ches, that is epic: “You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an accomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left."-Cormac McCarthy, The Suset Limited

Also, love some Hitchhikers Guide!

@Alien I only got partway into "The Dark Tower" series, do they get better?

@Joe -- Ha! Calvin and Hobbes nailed it! 

Some other ones I remembered. 

"Believe in yourself" Sun Tzu

"That which depends on me I can do; that which depends on others I can neither control nor predict" Sun Tzu

Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill. -- Betty Friedan and Neil Strauss "The Game"

‎"My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires" James Joyce

"Religion isn't evil. Men and Women simply find it a convenient excuse for their evil actions and what is in their hearts." James Beauseineur

 

Dr. Guillotine's picture
Dr. Guillotine from Phoenix, AZ is reading Kurt Vonnegut Slaughter House-Five February 25, 2012 - 7:30pm

There ain't no real pleasure in life--The Misfit/Flannery O'Connor.

Chester Pane's picture
Chester Pane from Portland, Oregon is reading The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz February 25, 2012 - 7:45pm

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

-Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Words carry oceans on their small backs.

-Lidia Yuknavitch

What is to give light must endure burning.

-Victor E. Frankl

I'm not trying to put legs on a snake...

-Mark Vanderpool

eross's picture
eross from The beautiful state known as Kansas is reading Cathleen Ni Houlihan February 25, 2012 - 8:10pm

"To sum up, on the whole I am satisfied with things the way they are. There is a prejudice against the spoken lie, but none against any other, and by examination and mathematical computation I find that the proportion of the spoken lie to the other varieties is as 1 to 22,894. Therefore the spoken lie is of no consequence, and it is not worth while to go around fussing about it and trying to make believe that it is an important matter." - "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It", Mark Twain

"But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body." - "The Awakening", Kate Chopin

"By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it." - "The Awakening", Kate Chopin

"For the soul is like a fine-toned harp that vibrated to the slightest external force or movement, and the presence and glance of some persons can radiate around us a divine joy, while others may kill the soul with a sneer or frown." - "Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland", Lady Wilde

"'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies' said Jojen. 'The man who never reads lives only one.'"- "A Dance with Dragons", George R.R. Martin

"It is a spectator sport to look at someone else's books, if not an act of voyeurism or armchair psychology." - "The Book on the Bookshelf", Henry Petroski 

"Never throw stones if you think they're going to come back and hit you." - "Hit List", Laurell K. Hamilton

"I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." - "Dubliners", James Joyce

"Zhuangzi and Huizi were wandering on a bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, 'Look at those mottled fish out wandering at ease. That's what fish like!' Huizi said, ' You are not a fish. How do you know what fish like?' Zhuangzi said, 'You are not me. How do you know I don't know what fish like?'". - Zhuangzi

"I have my mind...and a mind needs books as a sword  needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge." - George R.R. Martin 

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish, as my old gaffer used to say." - "The Fellowship of the Ring", J.R.R Tolkien

Sorry quote overload, I could continue for days! 

Dave's picture
Dave from a city near you is reading constantly February 25, 2012 - 8:36pm

Welcome Eross, it's good to see new members participating!  If you really want to be brave, make an into thread, and I'll pose the UnOfficial Official Welcome meme, and a guy called Pandamask will say hi, and tell you to some of the ins and outs of LitReactor.

 

Or not.

Either way, were glad to have you.

aliensoul77's picture
aliensoul77 from a cold distant star is reading the writing on the wall. February 25, 2012 - 10:52pm

@Matt--yes.

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 26, 2012 - 5:33am

"'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies' said Jojen. 'The man who never reads lives only one.'"- "A Dance with Dragons", George R.R. Martin"

Holy shit Eross! That's deep. I quoted Dubliners too, so many great stories. Welcome btw! 

avery of the dead's picture
avery of the dead from Kentucky is reading Cipher Sisters February 26, 2012 - 7:07am

“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Boone Spaulding's picture
Boone Spaulding from Coldwater, Michigan, U.S.A. is reading Solarcide Presents: Nova Parade February 26, 2012 - 7:20am

Ewww. All the quotes I remember are dark and disturbing. Maybe the received wisdom from the quotes I remember are as tools or defenses against a threatening and cruel world? Whatever the case, I'm a brighter, sunnier personality than these quotes reflect...

“We live as we dream – alone.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.” Alan Moore, Watchmen #9

“I finished the ale, started to order a third one, and decided against it. I'd had enough. More than enough. Or I never would have. You take just so much from a bottle, and then you stop taking. From then on you're putting.” Jim Thompson, Savage Night

I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.”      Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets 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."  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“What little mind you have is ugly and misdirected.” Stephen King, The Green Mile

“Every fear hides a wish.” David Mamet, Edmond

“People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 26, 2012 - 12:31pm

@Jess, I like that Yates quote, people ignore or lie about the truth all the time, even to themselves. 

 

@Boone, Dude! DUDE that Conrad quote is perfect. Oh to weave such things out of words....sais bon! Also, like the new pic, it's got a certain Je ne sais quo alright thats enough French

Dr. Guillotine's picture
Dr. Guillotine from Phoenix, AZ is reading Kurt Vonnegut Slaughter House-Five February 26, 2012 - 12:33pm

I'm surprised this topic hasn't morphed into something else by now.

 

But on topic, how about:  "This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time."

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 26, 2012 - 12:35pm

This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time."

HAHA I think of this one quote everytime I step into my cubicle at work.

PandaMask's picture
PandaMask from Los Angeles is reading More Than Human February 26, 2012 - 12:40pm

“All I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that-and nothin pleases em’, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothin makes em happy. And they holler at me on account of I ain’t made em’ happy, and we all push and pull some more.” -Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of the Titans

“The thing about smart motherfuckers is that sometimes, they sound like crazy motherfuckers to stupid motherfuckers.” -Rober Kirkman, The Walking Dead

Churtward's picture
Churtward from Gainesville, VA is reading Play It As It Lays February 26, 2012 - 12:59pm

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined efforts of everybody I've ever known." Chuck Palahniuk-Invisible Monsters  

"Beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power." -Chuck Palahniuk- Invisible Monsters 

"Thank god for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk". Travis Bickle-Taxi Driver  

"All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."-Travis Bickle-Taxi Driver 

"The days go on and on... they don't end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people."-Taxi Driver  

"Laugh, the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone."-Oldboy 

"Come get one in the yarbles!" Alex DeLarge  

"Follow my dreams? Or start a career? My dream is my career." -Nasty Ray 

"Inspiration is free."-Nasty Ray 

"A man who never spends time with his family can never be a real man." Don Vito Corleone 

Churtward's picture
Churtward from Gainesville, VA is reading Play It As It Lays February 26, 2012 - 12:59pm

haha just read that you said favorite quotes from BOOKS. Well some of 'em were. Oh well lol

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner February 27, 2012 - 2:29am

Ha! Well these work too

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 5, 2012 - 3:43am

"Oh for shame how the mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given."  Homer "The Odyssey"

jennilea's picture
jennilea from Kentucky is reading biology textbooks March 7, 2012 - 2:42am

"Consider the moon, consider wet grass, consider company. Consider glove linings, camel's-hair coats, fur stoles, feather boas, consider the heartbreaking, lost-innocence flavor of cashmere. Life is good, and love is all that matters. Why will we seek death, why do we truly hunger for nothing but the hateful hug of the candle, the bitter kiss of the filament? Accidents of the universe we may be, but we are beautiful accidents and we must not live as though we were ugly. The flame is a cheat, and love is the only." - Peter S Beagle "The Parable of the Moth"

"It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine." - Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“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

“I've got to think that that was unethical," Joshua said.
"Josh, faking demonic possession is like a mustard seed."
"How is it like a mustard seed?"
"You don't know, do you? Doesn't seem at all like a mustard seed, does it? Now you see how we all feel when you liken things unto a mustard seed? Huh?”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb

Jose F. Diaz's picture
Jose F. Diaz from Boston is reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel March 7, 2012 - 2:56am

“Nobody's perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him....”

-Christopher Moore

bryanhowie's picture
bryanhowie from FW, ID is reading East of Eden. Steinbeck is FUCKING AMAZING. March 7, 2012 - 10:43am

“I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
—  Samantha Black Crow, in American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 7, 2012 - 10:55am

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

 

“Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.”
― Cormac McCarthy

 

 

 

Stacy Kear's picture
Stacy Kear from Bucyrus, Ohio lives in New Jersey is reading The Art of War March 7, 2012 - 3:34pm

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men
like air
-Sylvia Plath

To see clearly
without flinching
without turning away
this is agony
The eyes taped open
two inches from the sun
-Margaret Atwood

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened." Borges"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened." Borges

Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.
-Palahniuk

Loving without knowingness, moving without effort, in the soft current of water and desire, breathing in an ecstasy of dissolution
-NIN

Just a few

Stacy Kear's picture
Stacy Kear from Bucyrus, Ohio lives in New Jersey is reading The Art of War March 7, 2012 - 4:07pm

someone please share with me how to delete a post :-)

Brandon's picture
Brandon from KCMO is reading Made to Break March 7, 2012 - 4:20pm

Can't delete.  All you can do is edit.

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 7, 2012 - 4:39pm

Just edit and put "double post" happens to me all the time. 

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like March 16, 2012 - 2:20pm

"In any creative acivity, art is madness, craft is sanity.  The balance between them makes them work." -- Simon Callow, actor & writer

Pretty much says it.

aliensoul77's picture
aliensoul77 from a cold distant star is reading the writing on the wall. March 17, 2012 - 6:34am

Brian Edward Killeen's picture
Brian Edward Killeen from New York is reading The Face of Another by Kobo Abe March 17, 2012 - 9:06am

"Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level." The Face of Another by Kobo Abe

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 17, 2012 - 12:56pm

"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."
— Oscar Wilde

 

Now I have to go clean my apartment. 

jejune81's picture
jejune81 March 17, 2012 - 2:56pm

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being


"Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory." - Milan Kundera


 

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 17, 2012 - 4:10pm

@jejune81 those are MONEY. I love them. 

Courtney's picture
Courtney from the Midwest is reading Monkey: A Journey to the West and a thousand college textbooks March 18, 2012 - 8:04am

I've noticed a plethora of King quotes. My favorite:

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are, too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win."

Arturo Bandini's picture
Arturo Bandini from Denver, CO is reading Beautiful Ruins March 26, 2012 - 8:14am

"Any fool can face a crisis, it's the day to day living that wears you out."  - Chekhov

 

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Bukowski

Jose F. Diaz's picture
Jose F. Diaz from Boston is reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel March 26, 2012 - 2:24pm

“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”
-Stephen King

ReneeAPickup's picture
Class Facilitator
ReneeAPickup from Southern California is reading Wanderers by Chuck Wendig March 26, 2012 - 2:41pm

I love that one, Doc.

Renfield's picture
Renfield from Hell is reading 20th Century Ghosts March 26, 2012 - 6:05pm

"Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food."

-- DFW

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 27, 2012 - 6:53am

Boone's story reminded me of this:

“My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. the facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe.”

 

Tim O'Brien, 'In the Lake of the Woods'

avery of the dead's picture
avery of the dead from Kentucky is reading Cipher Sisters March 27, 2012 - 7:07am

Which reminds me of....

"It was not the sunlight.   It was a rigged 105 round.  But if I could ever get the story right,how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree,if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect,then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must've been the final truth."

- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Matt Attack's picture
Matt Attack from Richmond, Va. is reading As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner March 27, 2012 - 7:12am

I don't think I have read anything by him that I didn't like. Good quote, good book. 

 

avery of the dead's picture
avery of the dead from Kentucky is reading Cipher Sisters March 27, 2012 - 7:12am

He's one of my favorite authors. 

Velma Ferguson's picture
Velma Ferguson from Nova Scotia living in Ontario is reading The Hunger Games to discuss with my grade 8s March 27, 2012 - 7:17am

I think this line sums up life for many, especially my grade eight students:

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."-Lewis Carroll