My quotes

But I learned in time that this benignity, this cordiality, this music, belonged in no shape to me: it was a part of himself; it was the honey of his temper; it was the balm of his mellow mood; he imparted it, as the ripe fruit rewards with sweetness the rifling bee; he diffused it about him, as sweet plants shed their perfume. Does the nectarine love either the bee or bird it feeds? Is the sweetbriar enamoured of the air?

Villette, Charlotte Bronte

VERONICA: "You know what I want, babe?"

J.D.: "What?"

VERONICA: "Cool guys like you out of my life."

Heathers

The world is full of strange behaviour
Every man has to be his own saviour
I know I can make it on my own if I try
But I'm searching for a great heart
to stand me by.

Great Heart, Johhny Clegg

I remember Cousin Hilary saying that the point about Cain and Abel was not that Cain killed his brother, but that one was a ploughman and the other was a shepherd. All humanity sprang from one or the other, and you could still tell their issue apart. When they started on a journey the descendants of Cain fussed about tickets, the descendants of Abel lifted their eyes to the cab of the locomotive or the bridge of the ship; and although Cain must always murder Abel in the end, in the meanwhile Abel had a better run for his money.

The Mottled Lizard, Elspeth Huxley

Just think of yourself as the missing link in the daisy chain of pain.

Miserable Destiny, Sean Altman

JIMMY: So she just walked away, huh?

GUY: Yeah, Jimmy. Walked away and got to the horizon and kept on going.

JIMMY: Beautiful women have a way of doing that, you know.

GUY: Yeah, I know. I'm familiar with the phenomenon. I wanted her too much, Jimmy.

JIMMY: That's exactly right.

GUY: It's Guy Noir's Law. The object of desire is repelled in direct proportion to the strength of the desire.

JIMMY: Absolutely.

Guy Noir
Saturday, October 6, 2001

You may have had a stoker's heart but you travelled too long on a first class ticket and the trouble with men travelling on first class tickets is that they start believing people never give anything to them but only take things from them, and when a man believes that it hangs round his neck like a label. Don't feed this animal, it's not used to it and feeds itself.

The Love Pavilon, Paul Scott

Bits and Pieces

"Crying, kissing, and cornflakes - The Grand Slam" -- Miles Henty,May to Decemeber

"We met in Vegas, I tore my best red suit and Lady Luck had to smack my face." -- Fliptop Twister, Rockapella

"So now it's all about me

I've had enough I'm tired of crawling, had enough, waiting for you, all of my life is passing before me and you don't care, not at all

It's all right, if that's the way it has to be, you say you wanted to be free, I think it's time I see, I can't do nothing for you, so now it's all about me

I'm not trying to just run away, but I'm so tired of waiting for you. I just need you to give it a chance but no you don't care

It's all right, if that's the way it has to be, you say you wanted to be free, I think it's time I see, I can't do nothing for you, so now it's all about me"
- It's All About Me, Ball in the House

By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune
(Now my dear lady) hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore; and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.

      The Tempest, I.178-184

Simeon looked up at the young man sitting opposite him and wondered, not for the first time, what it must be like to have been born without a sense of doubt. Would that be a blessing or a curse or a mere physical deprivation, like being born without a sense of smell? He failed, for the moment, to make up his mind on the question.

Paradise Postponed, John Mortimer

I fear we are drifting into the arena of the unwell.

Withnail & I

Whitehall is a jungle, but like other jungles, it has a few watering holes where creatures who at any other hour of the day would rip each other to pieces may assemble at sunset and drink their fill in precarious companionship.

The Night Manager, John Le Carré

Tomorrow I'll be gone

24 hours ago I said to myself
'What's the use in doing what you want?'
Who am I to take the path less travelled
When tomorrow I'll be gone.

I'm just a mortal in diguise
I am not superman.
And if I am what is this kryptonite?
Takes me from my art, my work, my play, my day and night
Writing useless songs.

Suddenly I hear a voice calling out
Telling me to be a fool for love.
Don't you want to breathe it in and breathe it out?
Look down from above.

So It Seems, Similiar Jones

`When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions.'''

Lie to me, say that you and me,
The muse will always be there.
We will be watching the moments evolve
So it seems.

So It Seems, Similiar Jones

This is not full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight,Alexandra Fuller

Nothing worse in my brain than when I feel too sane

Fliptop Twister,Rockapella

He found the situation full of whimsical romance: there was something half-attractive, half-repellent in the thought of this vulgar woman journeying to places he loved and revered. Why should she not be transfigured? The same had happened to the Goths.

Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster

There are days in a life in which one is the fly and rare, magical, moments in which one is, at long last, a windscreen.

Monarch of the Glen

It is infuriating that your unhappiness does not turn to fat.

Charade

..., and indeed she was hardly conscious of him as she read on into the small hours of the morning to the book's inevitable but satisfying unhappy ending.

Jane and Prudence,Barbara Pym

She was feeling the last three months as a bewildering chaos of emotion, through which she had been pulled, will-less, like a fish at the end of a string, with a sense of being used by something impersonal and irresistible.

A Proper Marriage, Doris Lessing

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

A Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing

In love: there are people who keep a lock of hair or a piece of cloth in an envelope, sometimes come on it, and tenderly smile. In love: a glow of tender lost possibilities, like the light left behind in the sky at moonset. That would be appropriate to her position: in fact people would like it. Ah me, my sweetly fractured heart that aches gently like a rheumatic knee with the approach of bad weather.

Love, Again, Doris Lessing

It is said that we live in 'a culture of appearances' - that more and more we all judge people by how they look. (More and more, I think, people behave to conform with how they look.)

Doris Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words

We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.

Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife

Among the girls Miss Heath Jones's lessons were not always appreciated, for most of the sheltered young women in that era displayed no particular anxiety to have the capacity for thought developed within them. Even now I recall the struggles of some of my contemporaries to avoid facing some of the less agreeable lessons of 1914. There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think - which is fundamentally a moral problem - must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain

Personally I haven't the least objection to being superfluous so long as I am allowed to be useful,....

Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain

  Mister Bowles laughed at this, an explosive sound. He was smoking a thin cheroot, but he did not offer me one. "Everything strives for light," he said. "Everything."

  "Possibly," I said. "But striving for light is the natural result of normally preferring darkness."

Pascali's Island, Barry Unsworth

"You only live one time," he said. "It's easy when you're happy and everything is going good. The days go so fast. When you're mad, they go forever."

Manny Ramirez, Boston Globe post ALDS Game 1

And you are as honest as the day, thought Una, which was inconvenient when she was in love with the secret, scent-filled night.

"Have you ever heard, Hem, why a peacock gives those terrible screams? He has looked down and suddenly seen his feet. He had forgotten he had them because he was so busy admiring his train."

The Peacock Spring, Rumer Godden

At that time, I thought there was something tragic in Amin's life, a profound sorrow, whereas my own life and its glooms were the result of mismanagements and timidity.

Desertion, Abdulrazak Gunrah

..I can only say that it is a part of my religion to look well after the cheerfulnesses of life, and let the dismals shift for themselves; ...

Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

Gustave Flaubert

Why should it be in the least matter what people thought of one? Why should it in the least matter what one thought of oneself--and therefore--why should one think at all?

The Head of the House of Coombe, Frances Hodgson Burnett

It was mere Nature that she should have pondered and pondered and sometimes unconsciously longed to feel herself part of the flood of being sweeping past her as she stood apart on the brink of the river.

The Head of the House of Coombe, Frances Hodgson Burnett

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people?

---

One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course. Let this be a reply. No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.

Adventures Among Books, Andrew Lang

I will not clothe myself in wreck--wear gems
Sawed from cramped finger-bones of women drowned;
Feel chilly vaporous hands of ireful ghosts
Clutching my necklace: trick my maiden breast
With orphans' heritage. Let your dead love
Marry it's dead.

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura

I must go down to the seas again,
   to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
   and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song
   and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face
   and a grey dawn breaking.


I must go down to the seas again,
   for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call
   that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day
   with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume,
   and the sea-gulls crying.


I must go down to the seas again
   to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way
   where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn
   from a laughing fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream
   when the long trick's over.

Sea Fever , John Masefield

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.

A Room with a View, E. M. Forster

In fact, Mr. Watson, it's a queer world, and the longer I live in it the queerer I find it. Once I thought it would be a good idea to regulate things myself and run the world as it ought to be run; but I gave it up long ago. The world's a stage, they say; but the show ain't always amusing, by a long chalk, and sometimes I wish I didn't have a reserved seat."

Aunt Jane's Nieces, Edith van Dyne (aka L. Frank Baum)

I hoped that going to Ireland would show me something of where I belonged, even if it pointed me straight back to the island of Jamestown and the house that I wanted to leave. Perhaps it is that way for everyone, I thought. You start out with the whole world to range across and claim, and you end up returning to the place where you started, chosing a few square feet of land, the way my father had done.

The Promise of Light, Paul Watkins

They never sat up all night with Trouble, Peter Piper used to say. And I told him they were quite right. If you make a fuss over trouble and put it to bed and nurse it and give it beef tea and gruel, you can never get rid of it.

The Racketty-Packetty House, Francis Hodgson Burnett

They are nostalgic and harbour a self-satisfied weariness that belongs to those who pursue divine wishes, who possess the sort of patience required to graft lemon trees and orange trees and make a new sour crop.

The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The rich, noisy, city, fat with food and drink, is a spent thing; its chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide-and-seek with the undertaker. Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace. She flecks her whip upon flesh that is more alive, upon that stream of hungry boys and girls who tramp the streets of every city, recognizable by their pride and discontent, who are the Future, and who possess the treasure of creative power.

The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather

The rain had gone, and the cold that had come in behind it was formidable. My motor was idling and the heater was on high. The outside temperature registered six on my dashboard thermometer.

"Why is it again we live 'round here?" Hawk said.

"We like the seasonable change," I said.

Cold Service, Robert B. Parker

I don't know what you think about being young. To me, it's a time for growing used to disappointment.

Rumpole and Penge Bungalow Murders, John Mortimer

"You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know."

Mortal Stakes, Robert B. Parker

Anyway, I'm tempermentally inclined to talk about the Good (or at least Better) Old Days; I feel nostalgic for every era that preceeded my birth.

The Geographer's Library, Jon Fasman

"Cambridge was placed here," I said, "across the river from Boston to provide comic relief."

Hush Money, Robert B. Parker

Nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood.

Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau