Favorite Book Quotations

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Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 8:23 pm

Joseph Conrad - Heart Of Darkness:

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"

Franz Kafka - Die Verwandlung

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

Translation: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature.

Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha

In dieser Stunde hörte Siddhartha auf, mit dem Schicksal zu kämpfen, hörte auf zu leiden. Auf seinem Gesicht blühte die Heiterkeit des Wissens, dem kein Wille mehr entgegensteht, das die Vollendung kennt, das einverstanden ist mit dem Fluß des Geschehens, mit dem Strom des Lebens, voll Mitleid, voll Mitlust, dem Strömen hingegeben, der Einheit zugehörig.

José de Espronceda - La Canción Del Pirata

Que es mi barco mi tesoro,
que es mi dios la libertad,
mi ley, la fuerza y el viento,
mi única patria, la mar.

Baiting Guru Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 12237

A bit dark, I admit, but it has stuck with me for years.

Quote:

I held that life was a ferment, a yeasty something which
devoured life that it might live, and that living was merely
successful piggishness. Why, if there is anything in sup-
ply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world.
There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air ;
but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Na-
ture is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions
of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins
are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but
find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every
bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the
fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah!
It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest.
Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a
lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows
a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest
and most piggish life is left

Edit: I forgot to attribute it. "The Sea Wolf" - Jack London.

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 10:12 pm

J.R.R Tolkien - The Hobbit

In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit...

Not so much the quote itself but the way he just started writing his book on a blank paper in an essay.

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 10:26 pm

Pretty much everything quoteable from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg´s (1742-99) "Sudelbücher" ("Aphorismen"). And many many lines from Goethe´s Faust 1.
^^Nice that you mention Kafka Smile

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 1:57 am

There are three quotes which have stuck with me:

"Give me liberty or give me death" - Patrick Henry

"Freedom is not free" - a United States expression for gratitude for the service of members of the military. And there are several songs published with that title.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. - From Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

OK OK I am a patriotic girl.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 2:35 am

^^

"When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 3:10 am

"Hubris is a sense of excessive self-confidence that only children and the mad should have. But when a grown-up has hubris, it becomes very dangerous..."

-a book by a controversial kinda guy (minding the rules of the forums)

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 6:35 am

"I am very tired of this Government, which I have never seen, and which is always insisting that I must do disagreeable things, and does no good to anybody."

Naomi Novak - Throne of Jade

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 7:53 am

More Tolkien - this time from "Return of the King":

Quote:

"Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor"

It's so epic, it makes Greek mythology look like a 'Find Waldo'-book.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 7:55 am

I've always been a Tolkien fan:

Quote:

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.

Quote:

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

Quote:

I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.

Edit: @TheDane: Every time I hear that quote in the movie I get goosebumps and the urge to charge down a hill with a spear.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:17 am

T.E. Lawrence from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

He saw the odd in everything, and missed the even...

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:31 am

"Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
The Bible, Matthew 5:3

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 10:04 am

^^ I'm not religious in any way but I do appreciate the poetry of the KJV. This is one of my favourite parts (Corinthians 1 11:13)

Quote:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 10:41 am

John Milton - Paradise Lost.

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."

Kinda reminds me of being an admin at Eater.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 12:40 pm

Wladyslaw Szpilman - The Pianist (a memoir of a young Jewist pianist's survival in Warsaw 1939-1945)

"Tomorrow I must begin a new life. How could I do it, with nothing but death behind me? What vital energy could I draw from death"

Alan Jolis - Speak Sunlight (a memoir of sun-filled galician summers)

"To love is to allow yourself to be haunted. We discover this only after a person dies, and then the haunting becomes central, but maybe it always was central, and we simply were too busy, too distracted to realise it"

Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns

"Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces,she could not help but wish for more of it."

^ raw throat moment when I read the book - the full excerpt:

"Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could see Laila again, wished to hear the clangor of her laugh, to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up, would not see the beautiful young woman that she would one day become, would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding. She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much, to be old and play with Aziza's children.

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed, And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings."

From the same book - "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

"For you, a thousand times over"

And from my younger days, a quote that has always stayed with me:

Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 12:47 pm

Here is a whole wall of text for you:

Quote:

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy
Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Quote:

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!

Quote:

...
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
...
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

And part of poem:

Quote:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep...

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 3:31 pm

Ops forgot my favorite (poem)

Quote:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

--- Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of the easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

Plato - The Symposium:

Quote:

"I maintain that while all the gods are happy, Love - is the happiest of them all, for he is the most beautiful and the best. Love is the youngest of the gods and stays young forever.
And he is delicate . . . for he walks not on earth, but in the softest of all the things that are, there he walks, there he has his home. For he makes his home in the characters, in the souls, of gods and men - and not even in every soul that comes along: when he encounters a soul with harsh character, he turns away; but when he finds a soft and gentle character, he settles down in it.
He is the youngest then, and most delicate. In addition he has a fluid, supple shape. For if he were hard, he would not be able to enfold a soul completely or escape notice when he first entered it or withdrew.
Love is neither the cause nor the victim of any injustice; he does no wrong to gods or men, nor they to him. If anything has an affect on him, it is never by violence, for violence never touches love. And the effects he has on others are never forced, for every service we give to love we give willingly."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Quote:

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."

I love tons of quotes from Mark Twain. I don't know which are my favorites, but here are two:

Quote:

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Quote:

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 4:24 pm

Oh, I completely forgot Carl von Clausewitz - "Vom Kriege":

Quote:

War Is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means. We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 4:31 pm

Quote:

The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into sort of a decline

and:

Quote:

Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. He didn't know the names of the trees and the flowers, but he knew the rhubarb crumble sales figures for Schleswig-Holstein

Sorry, but I don't do deep & meaningful.

here · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 5:52 pm

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

and one for the a certain group of people to remember (forum rules)
cum hoc ergo propter hoc

Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 6:54 pm

Quote:

My mother is a fish.

William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

This quote is actually an entire chapter in the book.

Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 12:27 am

Män som hatar kvinnor by Stieg Larsson (Men who hate women or it's English version title: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".)

Quote:

"Folk har alltid hemligheter. Det handlar bara om att lista ut vilka."
Translation: "People always have secrets. It's just a matter of finding out what they are."

Quote:

"Är det inte fascinerande att nazister alltid lyckas placera ordet frihet i sin propaganda."
Translation: Isn't it fascinating that nazis were always happy placing the word "Freedom" in their propaganda?

Haven't been reading a lot of books lately but if I can come up with more I will post them here.

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Quote:

"I could feel this new thing, almost hear it, smell it, touch it. Meeting up with AIM for the first time loosened a sort of earthquake in me…I am thirty-seven now but I feel as if I had lived for a long time- I can see things in perspective, not subjectively, no, but in perspective…I recognize that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly…I, that wild, rebellious teenager of ten years ago, am nursing a baby, changing diapers, and making breakfast for my somewhat extended family. And yet it was great while it lasted and I still feel that old excitement merely talking about it. Some people loved AIM, some hated it, but nobody ignored it"