Padfoot and Prongs - Book Quotes

2009-08-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Hey folks. Welcome to the Good Books Inc. quotation page.

Here, you can find a list of some of our favorite books, and the quotes that make them so amazing. Every time we finish a book we try our hardest to pick out some of the finest examples of writing from what we have read, and post them for you to look at. For those of you who are looking for quotes from your favorite reads, hopefully you will find them here. For those of you who might just be looking for a bit of inspiration, then you have come to the right place; however be weary because many of the quotes are apt to contain spoilers.

However our goal is to one day have a comprehensive site where any one who has just read, or is looking to read a book can glance on up and check out some quotes, which will hopefully spark their desire to read more...
BUT WE CAN'T DO IT ALONE!!!

While we are working hard to provide you with some of the best passages that literature has to offer, we are of course biased and are drawn to some quotes more than others. If you have read any of the books on the list, or have just finished a book that was chalk-full of amazing writing, please leave some comments with your favorite highlights. We want as many quotes and books as possible, so break out those highlighters and post it notes...and start finding quotes!

Thanks to every one for the help so far and we look forward to hearing more of your favorite passages in the future!

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

2009-08-15T13:12:00.001-07:00

I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. (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.)

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many f them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing in a week, I slump down just so far then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath.”

I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.

People are made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people could remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

(…) I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine year old.

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colors arrows from a Fourth of July Rocket.

A keen wind that had been hiding itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot with out which the world would not exist. A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying “Ah!” in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made on scrap of difference to me, because where ever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street, café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I took up a silver knife and cracked off that cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawerence

2009-08-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

She never got beyond the second page. He read a great deal and had a quick, active intelligence. She could understand nothing but love-making and chatter. He was accustomed to hating all his thoughts sifted through his mother’s mind; so, when he wanted companionship, and was asked in reply to be the billing and twittering lover, he hated his betrothed.
He leaned with his back against the side of the chimney-piece, his hands in his pockets. He was a big, raw-boned man, who looked as if he would go to the world’s end if he wanted to. But she saw the despair on his face.
But the girl gradually sought him out. If he brought up his sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the last picture Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like water that shakes with a steam of gold in the dark, she would ask: “Why do I like this so?”
Miriam loitered behind, alone. She did not fit in with the others; she could very rarely get into human relations with anyone: so her friend, her companion, her lover, was Nature. She saw the sun declining wanly. In the dusky, cold hedgerows were some red leaves. She lingered to gather them, tenderly, passionately. The love in her finger-tips caressed the leaves, the passion in her heart came to a glow upon the leaves.
It was if his fretted, tortured soul, run hot by thwarted passion, jetted off these saying like sparks from electricity. She did not grasp anything he said. She only sat couched beneath his cruelty and his hatred of her.
He hated her bitterly at that moment because he made her suffer. Love her! She knew he loved her. He really belonged to her. This about not loving her, physically, bodily, was a mere perversity on his part because he knew she loved him. He was stupid like a child. He belonged to her. His soul wanted her. She guessed somebody had been influencing him. She felt upon him the hardness, the foreignness of another influence.
He had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life. When he thought round, Miriam shrank away. There was a vague, unreal feel about her. An nobody else mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not. It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape was his mother.
Religion was fading into the background. He had shoveled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realize one’s God. Now life interested him more.
“You never give it a chance,” she said, “Then suddenly all her passion of grief over him broke out. “But it does matter!” she cried. “And you ought to be happy, you ought to try to be happy, to live to be happy. How could I bear to think your life wouldn’t be a happy one!”
To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort—to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep—that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life—our immortality.

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

2009-08-10T15:28:00.000-07:00

For those of who who have read this and understand the magic of Bokononism... you can find all of the quotes and Calypsos related to the text here. There was just to much to include in this post. What follows are simple quotes related to the actual novel.

“If I actually supervised Felix, “ he said, “then I’m ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the ties, and the motions of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control.”
The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable outside of Place and Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn’t interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn’t really interested either As things turned out, we both had overestimated our apathies, but not by much.
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind. The Fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.
“I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes”. “And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.
“Americans,” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, “are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
He was enchanted by the mystery of coming ashore naked on an unfamiliar island. He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water. It was a rebirth for him
“She broke my heart. I didn’t like that much. But that was the price. In this world you get what you paid for.”
“Jesus Christ?” “Oh,” said Castle. “Him” He shrugged. “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have goo voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”
“What is sacred to Bokononists?” I asked after awhile. (…) “Just one thing.” I made some guesses. “The ocean? The sun?” “Man,” said Frank. “That’s all. Just man.”
Science is magic that works.
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" "See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars." And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.
“I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?” “In one of two ways,” he said, “putrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.” “Neither one very pleasant, I expect,” I suggested. “No,” said Castle the elder. “For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”
“It felt so funny to me, like nothing else I’d ever touched,” and Newt, investigating his old fondness for the reticule. “I wonder whatever happened to it.” “I wonder what happened to a lot of things, “ said Angela. The question echoed back through time—woeful, lost.
“Think of what paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.”

The Fall - Albert Camus

2009-07-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

A single sentence will suffice for modern man; he fornicated and he read the papers.

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest and we all know that there in lies happiness. Although to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretended to condemn such joys as selfishness.

To tell the truth, just from being so fully and simply a man, I looked upon myself as something as a superman.

Maybe we don’t love life enough.

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatter brained woman, sacrificing everything for her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that’s all. Bored like most people.

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of worlds as it were, never in reality. All those books, barley read, those friends barley loved, those cities barley visited, those women barley possessed. I went through the gestures of boredom and absentmindedness. Then came human beings’ they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling too, and that was unfortunate for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one’s mind one succeeds in dominating everyone? I discovered in myself, sweet dreams of oppression.

That’s the way man is. He has two faces. He cannot love with out self-love.

Do not wait until the last judgment. It happens every day.

Survivor - Chuck Palhaniuck

2009-07-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

The sky is blue and righteous in every direction. The sun is total and burning and just right there in front. We’re on top of the clouds and this is a beautiful day forever.

People used the telephone because they hated being close together but were to scared to be alone.

You have a choice, live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice Every time you don’t throw yourself down a flight of stairs, that’s a choice. Every time you don’t crash your car, you re-enlist.

Right now, me getting killed would be redundant.

The joke is that we all have the same punchline.

The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secrete is, you will hurt less and less each time you don’t feel a thing. Trust me on this. With her lying dead after 10 years of heart-to-heart talks every week, my first thought was, here’s just something else for me to pick up.

You think maybe if you can just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos. But one day your changing a patio light with a 5-year old light bulb span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe 10 more times before you are dead.

As I Lay Dying - Faulkner

2009-07-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

Please ignore the bad grammar/spelling. It is written that way. If you have a problem with the lack of apostrophes, take it up with Faulkner.

"She ought to taken them," Kate says. "But those rich town ladies can change their minds. poor folks can't."

It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older. Then I would wait until they all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up hearing them asleep, feeling myself with out touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my parts and wondering if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been doing it perhaps for the last two years before I could have wanted to or could have.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind--and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent, shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

I said You dont know what worry is. I dont know what it is. I dont know wheter I am worrying or not. Wheter I can or not. I dont know wheter I can cry or not. I dont know wheter I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

That was when I learned tht words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fewar was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than pride or fear. Cash didn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn't matter.

My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Tender is the Night- Fitzgerald

2009-06-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.
His eyes were of bright hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and where was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking-and this is a faltering attention, for who looks at us?--glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more. His voice with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, or self control and of self-discipline, her own virtues.
"You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually looked like something blooming."
They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sough each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast...
"But kiss me now, love me now. I'll love you and never let Nicole see."
She was sorry, and rather relieved at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual for her to watch a man walking in a slow dream.
This was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world's rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going through the partitioning of the tings of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult.
He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole's eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory if the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.
"...Isn't it funny and lonely being together, Dick. No place to go except close. Shall we just love and love? Ah, but I love the most, and I can tell when you're far away from me, even a little."
Sitting on the stanchion of this life-boat I look seaward and let my hair blow and shine. I am motionless against the sky and the boat is made to carry my form into the blue obscurity of the future.
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there will always be the person I am to-night."
He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, or the month or the year.
His father had done that from a good heart--his father had been sure of what he was with a deep pride of the two proud widows who raised him to believe that nothing could be superior to "good instincts," honor, courtesy, and courage.
...remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him.
...it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was an element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.
She knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize
"It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water..."
“You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

2009-04-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

“Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

…fragile girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.

“She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if evindices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known then, because of a painting that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from noting, there’s been no escape.”

“Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the kind of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

“So hung up with words, words You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but –“ a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head— “in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who care? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the close little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.”

“You could fall In love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Tyrstero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. Wharfinger supplied words and a yarn. I gave them life. That’s it. “

“But now it came to her, as if the rain whispered it…”

“On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”

“A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always…”

“When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.” His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.”

“Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.”

Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

2009-03-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

“…where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.”

“Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”

“He came out of reform school as innocent of viciousness as he was of fractions and long division. Hazel loved to hear conversation but he didn’t listen to words—just to the tone of conversation. He asked questions, not to hear the answers but simply to continue the flow. He was twenty-six--dark haired and pleasant, strong, willing, and loyal. “

“The remarkable thing,” said Doc, “isn’t that they put their tails up in the air—the really remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying—so maybe they’re praying.”

“He had observed that a man got just as drunk on half a glass as on a whole one, that is, if he was in the mood to get drunk at all.”

“The starfish were twisted and knotted up for a starfish loves to hang onto something and for an hour these had found only each other.”

“One twist—one little twist and the engine caught and labored and faltered and caught again. Gay advanced the spark and reduced the gas. He switched over to the magneto and the Ford of Lee Chong chuckled and jiggled and clattered happily as thought it knew it was working for a man who loved and understood it.”

“Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them.”

“Fate just didn’t intend Gay to go on that frog hunt and Fate took a hell of a lot of trouble and people and accidents to keep him from it.”

“Monterey was not a town to let dishonor come to a literary man.”

“It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”

“Oh, it isn’t a matter of hunger. It’s something quite different. The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous—but not quite.”

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this to shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”

"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."

“How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise—the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book—to open the page and let the stores crawl in by themselves.”

John Steinbeck - East of Eden

2009-03-29T07:39:00.000-07:00

Om nom nom everything this man writes.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how many people looked and walked and smelled even.

It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God because they could put their faith there and let the smaller securities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they know beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units—because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.

He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn’t discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father’s books, he was the first He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow, so that when his dog died the world ended.

From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

Maybe—maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure—never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself? I can see it pretty clearly. I can see how you loved him and what it did to you. I did not love him. Maybe he loved me. He tested me and hurt me and punished me and finally he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make up for something. But he did not love you, and so he had faith in you. Maybe—why, maybe it’s a kind of reverse.

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wiggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity saying, ‘I couldn’t help I; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”

And I fell that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent towards gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because ‘Thou mayest.’

I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody. And my life has not been a full orchestra for a long time now. A single note only—and that note unchanging sorrow. I’m not alone in my attitude, Lee it seems to me that too many of us conceive of a life as ending in defeat.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

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.

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 has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

There is no dignity in death and in battle. Most that is a splashing about of human meat and fluid, and the result is filthy, but there is a great and almost sweet dignity in the sorrow, the helpless, the hopeless sorrow, that comes down over a family with the telegram.

“It set him free… it gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man.”

“All great and precious things are lonely.”

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

2009-03-09T18:17:00.001-07:00

Here are some striking quotes from Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451:

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents."

"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."I paid for all this - how? Playing the stock-market, of course, the last refuge in the world for the dangerous intellectual out of a job."

"The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen, and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burned!"

"Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes."

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives

The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!
It was a pleasure to burn.

Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you’ve had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Paradise Lost - John Milton

2009-02-05T17:51:00.001-08:00

We are including the line numbers, along with line breaks, for easy reference.

"What in me is dark/ Illumine what is low raise and support/ that to the height of this great argument/ I may assert internal providence/ And justify the ways of God to men" I 22-26

"A mind cannot be changed by place and time/ The mind is its own place and in itself/ can make a heavn'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." I 253-55

"Awake, arise, or be forever fallen." I 330

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice/ to reign is worth ambition, though in hell:/better to reign in Hell, than serve in heavn'n" I 261-263

"To be weak is miserable." I 157

"What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will/ and study of revenge, immortal hate/ and courage never to submit or yield." I 105-8

"Long is the way/ and hard, that leads out of heavn' and into light." I 432-33

"I made him just and right/ sufficient to have stood, though free to fall." III 98-99

"So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear/ farewell remorse; all good to me is lost;/ evil, be thou my good." IV 108-10

"Eased the putting off/ these troublesome disguises which we wear." IV 750-51

"Freely we serve/ because we freely love, as in our will/ to love or not; in this we stand or fall." V 538-540

"Grace was in all her steps, heav'n in her eye/ in every gesture dignity and love." VII 488-89

"Her virtue and conscience of her worth/ that would be wooed and not unsought, be won." VII 502-3

"Among the faithless, faithful only he." V 897

"So dear I love him that with him all deaths/ I could endure, without him live no life." IX 832-33.

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

2009-02-05T17:31:00.001-08:00

This is an on-going list. There are many many more that will be added over time. So keep checking back to see new quotes.

"What is morality?" she asked? "Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to what is good, integrity to stand by that good at any price."

Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden peculiar emptiness which was not emptiness but silence, not despair but immobility, as if nothing inside her was destroyed, but everything stood still. Then she felt the wish to find a moments joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive specter by some work or some sight of greatness. Not to make it she thought, but to accept, not to begin but to respond, not to create but to admire. "I need it to let me go on."

"I don't think I would mind it much now, the dying. I know it would be alot easier. Only I think that it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it."

He did not know whether she would wait for him, whether she would survive. But he knew that she could not live through his battle, and he could not call her to him, until it was won. So he waited, holding his love, in the place of the hope which he had no right to hold.

He felt as passionately as he had ever felt, that she was the most desirable woman on earth, but what came from it was only a desire to desire her... a wish to feel, not a feeling.

There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, bu it was only impatience not pain. She dismissed it, in the confident knowledge hat they were both working towards a future that would bring them what they wanted, including each other.

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

2009-01-11T17:18:00.000-08:00

Here are some great quotes from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. We made sure to leave out the jucier ones for those of us in the audience who prefer to keep it PG. Make sure to check out Prongs review of the book if you love these quotes!

" I stare into a thin, weblike crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No...one....would...care. In fact some, if they noticed my absense, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here."

"She placed the file on top of the desk before asking, "Doin' the crossword?" dropping the g in "doing" -- A pathetic gesture of intimacy, an irritating stab at forced friendliness."

"Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obvisouly enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being-- flesh, blood, skin, hair-- but my depersonilization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had ben eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, the rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why -- I couldn't put my finger on it. The only thing that calmed me was the satisfying sound of cie being dropped into a glass of J&B."
"If another round of Bellinis comes within a twenty foot radius of our table were going to light the maitri de on fire. So you know, warn him."

"This is what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, or receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathizing, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt any more. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged..."

"How could she ever understand that there isn't any way could be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to?"

"...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusonary, and thought I could hide my cold gaze and you cans hake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable" I simply am not there. "

"My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it. I have no surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed."

"Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on other. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this -- and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed -- and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. i gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has ben no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing..."

...and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love. I wonder if even now, right here in Nowheres, she can see the darkening clouds behind my eyes lifting And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will."

The Rum Diary - Hunter. S. Thompson

2009-01-11T17:12:00.001-08:00

Here are some amazing quotes from The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. If these do not make you want to pick up a book and read then not much will.

Not so much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who runs onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the whole of making was divided into two teams- Sala’s Boys, and the others. The stakes were fantastic and every play was vital – and although he watched with a nearly obsessive interest, he was very much the fan, shouting unheard advice in a crowd of unheard advisors and knowing all the while that nobody was paying any attention to him because he was not running the team and never would be. And like all fans he was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then he be hauled off by guards while the crowd laughed

“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words like Love, that I never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest of a fool to use them with any confidence.

Yeah, they all ended up like Puerto Ricans. They fled and they couldn’t say why, but they damn well wanted out and they didn’t care if he newspapers understood or not. Somehow they got the idea that by getting the hell away from where they were they could find something better. They heard the word, the rotten devilish word that makes people incoherent with desire to move o – not everybody in the world lives in tin shacks with no toilets and no money at all and no food but rice and beans’ not everybody cuts sugarcane for a dollar a day, or hauls a load of coconuts into town to sell for two sense each – the cheap, hot, hungry, world of their fathers and their grandfathers and all their brothers and sisters was not the whole story, because if a man could muster the guts or even the desperation to move a few thousand miles there was a pretty good chance that he’d have money in his pocked and meat in his belly and one hell of a romping good time.

On the way down the hill we walked three abreast in the cobblestone street, drunk and laughing and talking like men who knew they would separate at dawn and travel to the far corners of the earth.

They were eerie days, and my fatalistic view of Yeamon was not so much conviction as necessity, because if I granted him even the slightest optimism I would have to admit a lot of unhappy things about myself.

He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who march between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honor – you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.

Those were good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that If I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead of me.

Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn’t stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was—cheap, sullen, and garish – nothing good was going to happen here.

Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down the street. Sounds of a San Jean night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in long Caribbean night.

Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut

2008-08-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

“After we finished hanging Hoess,” Mengel said to me, “I packed up my clothes to go home. The catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice within an hour I did the very same job—once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the same.”

I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child’s cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, and those still hiding, that it was time to go home. The cry was this: “Olly-olly-ox-in-free.” And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and seek with a sweet and mournful—“Olly-olly-oxen-free.”

And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her. “There—“ she said, “that’s what we’ll look like when we’re dead.”

It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two.

(About Nazis) They were people. Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. To be frank—I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well as people, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause. Too hard. Amen. Too hard.

“If you imagine that I’m going home to think it over,” I said, “you’re mistaken. When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep like a log. I’m not a soldier, not a political man. I’m an artist. If war comes, it’ll find me still working at my peaceful trade.”

And I did fool everybody, I began to strut like Hitler’s right-hand man, and nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside.

Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains. And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was! What a map I could draw from a tourist a micron high, a submicroscopic Wandervogel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga’s belly button. (…) Oh how we clung, my Helga and I how—mindlessly we clung!

Only one thing counted—The Nation of two. And when that nation ceased to be, I became what I am today and what I always will be, a stateless person.

I was tempted take the morphine reflecting that, if it made me feel happy, I would, after all, have enough money to support the habit. But then I understood that I was already drugged. I was feeling no pain. My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was my ability to let my emotions be stirred by only on thing—my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

We once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, as a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.

“You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.”

“We all cling to something,” I said. “To the wrong things—“ he said, “and we start clinging too late. I will tell you the one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe(…) All people are insane(…) They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

People should be changed by world wars, else what are world wars for?

“And then I discovered something I had never known before—what a true friend was,” he said. “I throw my lot in with you gladly, friend. Nothing else interests me. Nothing else attracts me in the least. With your permission, my paints and I would like nothing better than to go with you wherever Fate taxes you next.” “This—this is friendship indeed,” I said. “I hope so,” he said.

I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

“Three people in all the world knew me for what I was—“ I said. “And all the rest—“ I shrugged. “They knew you for what you were, too,” he said abruptly.

“Tell me what to live for—anything at all,” she said beseechingly. “It doesn’t have to be love. Anything at all!” She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely my own sense of the world’s being a junk shop. “I’ll life for that chair that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall! Tell me to live for it, an I will! … Just tell me what it should be!... Tell me why you want to go on being alive, so I can go on wanting to be alive too!”

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There were teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history—gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.” Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself! There’s life in the old boy yet! And, where there’s life—There is life.

"We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that."
"My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you."

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Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

2008-05-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

What shall we choose? Weight or lightlessness?

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

Thomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where al bodies were qual. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women.

Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once more on her shoulders. There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably happy to hear him breathing at her side

He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends.

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that ye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up for his own free will is a monster.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience. History is as light as an individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

I can’t help thinking about the editor in Prague who organized the petition from the amnesty of political prisoners. He knew perfectly well that his petition would not help the prisoners. His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist.

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

2008-05-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Desires are already memories

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

”The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.”

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

This – some say – confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city with out figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

“You reach a moment in life when among the people you have known, the dead out number the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new fact you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means, I too, am dead .

Perhaps all that is left of the worlds is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, that we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.

At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unreliable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.

Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances’ the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sens out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.

Dennis Lehane - A Drink Before the War

2007-12-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

As I grew, so did the fires, it seemed, until recently L.A. burned, and the child in me wondered what would happen to the fallout, if the ashes and smoke would drift northeast, settle here in Boston, contaminate the air. Last summer, it seemed to. Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.

And I could hear the answer to my question in the soft, tired voice she adopted when she talked about him. She loved him, plain and simple. Some part of him that I certainly can’t see anymore must still show itself to her in their private moments, some goodness he possesses that shines like the grail in her eyes. That has to be it, because nothing else about their relationship makes any sense to me or anyone else who knows her.

The Hero always gave me a dope slap upside the head whenever he caught me looking in the mirror. “Men built those things so women would have something to do,” he’s say. Hero. Philosopher. My father, the Renaissance man.

She felt like everything good. She felt like the first warm gust of spring and Saturday afternoons when you’re ten years old and early summer evenings on the beach when the sand is cool and the waves are colored scotch. Her grip was fierce, her body full and soft, and her heart beat rapidly against my bare chest. I could smell her shampoo and feel the downy nape of her neck against my chin.

There is a war going on. It’s happening in playgrounds, not health clubs. It’s fought on cement, not lawns. And as long as it doesn’t push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist.

The Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells

2007-09-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasm, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.

I might just as well have worked to from sheep into llamas, and llamas into sheep. I suppose there is something in the human form that appeals to the artistic turn of mind more powerfully than any animal shape can. But I’ve not confined myself to man-making. Once or twice…”

So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels. This pain-----"

A mind truly opened to what science has to each must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained—it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way towards… Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is there?

“Then I am a religious man, Pendick, as every sane man must be. It may be I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you—for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven and hell. Pleasure and pain—Bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s hour in the dark? This store men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure – they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust….

There is, thought I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live.

Mr. Peanut - Adam Ross

2007-01-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

There is the same thrill of one-way glass, Hastroll thought, as in hearing the sound of your voice recorded. Or catching sight of yourself in the background of a photograph. Or passing yourself on a television screen in an electronics storefront--a peep of a view as your image walks toward you. For you are always a secret to yourself, Hastroll thought. But there are glimpses and hints and clues.

Men dream of starting over. Not even necessarily with another woman. They dream of a clean slate, of disappearing, of walking off a plane on a layover and making a new life for themselves in a strange city--Grand Rapids, say, or Nashville. They dream of an apartment all their own, of silence, of joining Delta Force and fighting in Iraw, of introducing themselves by the nickname they'd always wished they had. Of a time and place where they can use everything they know now that they hadn't known then--that is, before they were married. And then they might be happy.

When people travel, and especially when they fly, they see the choice to do so as unique. That's part of the lore, its miracle and romance.

That picture of his wife's face: her expression well beyond exhaustion and grief and elation, in a state of having been saved and having saved herself. The picture of her relief. Of having seen something terrible through. he wondered, was that what a woman looked like after she gave birth? Did she have the same expression of amazement and pain and of loss and gain? So much risk in the making, David thought. Making life could utterly break your heart.

"You know," his father finally said, "as I've grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don't think that now."..."I think sins are what you ignore."

"Can I tell you something I have learned about love?"..."If you love someone truly, and they love you, there's no such thing as a confession."

She kissed him, and the taste of her wet lips was salvation.

It occurred to Pepin that you could be married to any number of people, that you were simply trading on what you were willing to give and take, on whatever good came with the bad. And it was also a sad truth that you might not be equipped for certain kinds of ease of happiness. Why, because that might set you free? Because nothing, then was determined? That everything was wide open? Was that the source of the fear?

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

2007-01-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

This perhaps was what lay at the very root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to b wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. you had to come by it honestly, you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is in a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.

My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountability limitless. My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished. I felt at once both lust and disgrace and wondered, Why do I relish this reversal to animal?

I would have married an alligator if only it would share its bed. And I might as well have married an alligator, for all the kinds Eunice showed me. She had to grace or charm whatsoever. She had non charm, or anticharm. A bottomless well of antagonism and hostility. And she was terrifically ugly. And she smelled like rotten leaves.

...but the moments that passed while we worked the river were neither brief nor long, war in face somehow removed from the very restriction or notion of time--we were outside of time; is how it felt to me; our experience was so uncommon we were elevated to a place where such concerns as minutes and seconds were not only irrelevant but did not exist. This feeling, speaking personally, was brought on not only by the wealth our ever growing piles of gold represented, but also from the thought that this experience was born of one man's unique mind, and though I had never before pondered the notion of humanity, or whether I was happy or unhappy to be human, I now felt a sense of pride at the human mind, its curiosity and perseverance; I was obstinately glad to be alive; and glad to be myself.

"Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood--weak blood, diluted--and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean. Most people are imbeciles, really, but Morris was not like this. He should have lived longer. He had more to give. And if there is a god he is a son of a bitch."

Looking back at the camp I thought, I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself.

'Gentlemen, it is a question often asks, and today I put it to you, and let us see if you know the answer. What is it that makes a man great? Some will point to wealth. Others to strength of character. Some will say it is a great man who never loses his temper. Some that it is one who is fervent in his worship of the Lord. But I am here to tell you precisely what it is which makes a man great, I hope that you ill listen to my words on this day, and that you will adopt them into your hearts and souls, and that you will understand my meaning. For yes! I wish to bestow greatness upon you.' ... 'A great man is one who can pinpoint a vacuity in the material world and inject into this blank space an essence of himself! A great man is one who can create good fortune in a place where there previously was none through sheer force of will! A great man, then, is one who can make something from nothing.

When I see you, I feel the same. It is when I am away that I lose myself.

Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

2005-11-08T12:25:00.000-08:00

But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair…” “…So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?”

“Okay, I give up I’ll dial. Anything you want me to be; ecstatic sexual bliss—I feel so bad I’ll even endure that. What the hell. What difference does it make.”

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the emphatic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

Thinking this he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another’ finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile.

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

"I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile."