Quotes from Books - Happy, Sad, Hilarious, Whatever

[Kataomoi00]

Post any quotes or lines or parts from books that have left any type of impact on you (whether it made you laugh, feel emotional, or if you just liked it!).

"Think about it: waiting a million years. Could you wait that long? Maybe it's the last of its kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse five years ago and set up their foghorn and sound it out towards the place where you bury yourself in sleep and memories of what world where there were thousands like yourself. But now you're alone. All alone in a world that's not made for you, a world where you have to hide.

But the sound of the foghorn comes and goes, comes and goes and you stir in the muddy bottoms of the deeps and your eyes open like the lenses of a two-foot camera and you move slow. Slowly, for you have the ocean sea at your shoulders all heavy. But that foghorn comes through over a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar."

- The Foghorn by Ray Bradbury

 

[Jones McCann]

With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of these human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered, and the stains of human passion will be lost amid the chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and out most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited. We shall be rewarded with everything our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile.

 

[Autumnal Equinox]

I still think this is one of the best opening lines from any work of fiction. From Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

 

[malt ipecac]

Somehow it was all tied up with a story he'd heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man's instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years' curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off.

 

[Contra Pozz]

You will never represent, Raphaël, a young girl's erotic dream. You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you. It's already too late, in any case. The sexual failure you've known since your adolescence, Raphaël, the frustration that has followed you since the age of thirteen, will leave their indelible mark. Even supposing that you might have women in the future - which in all frankness I doubt - this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough. You will always be an orphan to those adolescent loves you never knew. In you the wound is already deep; it will get deeper and deeper. An atrocious, unremitting bitterness will end up gripping your heart.

From Whatever by Michel Houellebecq

 

[Fictional Character]

I still think this is one of the best opening lines from any work of fiction. From Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

Shirley Jackson had some amazing opening lines. We Have Always Lived in the Castle also has a great opening paragraph.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantaganet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

 

[Jones McCann]

Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.

 

[Yaoi Huntress Earth]

One that made me bust up laughing was in Clive Barker's "Imajica" that goes..."If that was Judith, then who the fuck was he fucking?" Granted, I was listening to the audiobook version and the narrator really hit it.

 

[Minister Burroughs]

I really like this one from Paradise Lost. One of the few times the poem rhymes, and it works really well. When Satan first sees Eve asleep.
"Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire
Of gesture or lest action overawd
His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remaind
Stupidly good"

 

[Devyn]

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group. ... So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it - perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts."

-Will and Ariel Durant, "The Lessons of History"

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"

 

[Bland Crumbs]

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

 

[WizardOutcast]

I'm not sure if it counts, but I really wasn't expecting that when I read it.

"Chapter 139: How I did not become a Minister of State
................................................................................................................
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................................................................................................................"
-Epitaph of a Small Winner, Machado de Assis (1880)

 

[Andrew Neiman]

From Heaney's translation of "Beowulf," this has got to be one of the best introductions of a villain ever:

So times were pleasant for the people there
Until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
Began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
Haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
And the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
In misery among the banished monster,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlaw
And condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
The Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
Because the Almighty mad him anathema
And out of the curse of this exile there sprang
Ogres and elves and evil phantoms
And the giants too who strove with God
Time and gain until He gave them their reward.

From the Iliad, this has got to be one of the most powerful single lines in all of fiction:

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before-
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

From Whatever by Michel Houellebecq

So much better than "Serotonin."

 

[Croan Çhiollee]

Suddenly it occurred to me that if I wanted I could go to America myself. It was the
first time the opportunity had ever presented itself. I asked myself – "do you want to
go?" There was no answer. My thoughts drifted out, toward the sea, toward the other
side where, taking a last look back, I had seen the skyscrapers fading out in a flurry of
snowflakes. I saw them looming up again, in that same ghostly way as when I left. Saw
the lights creeping through their ribs. I saw the whole city spread out, from Harlem to
the Battery, the streets choked with ants, the elevated rushing by, the theaters emptying.
I wondered in a vague way what had ever happened to my wife.

Henry Miller; Tropic of Cancer

 

[Devyn]

"Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon...The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that 'them television fellers' could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time."

From Bill Clinton's autobiography "My Life"

 

[Orion Balls]

On the main street was a store with a show window full of pink parasols. They walked in and said to the clerk, “We want to buy parasols.”

“We don’t sell parasols here,” said the spider clerk.

“Well, lend us a parasol apiece,” said all three.

“Gladly, most gladly,” said the clerk.

“How do you do it?” asked Eeta.

“I don’t have to,” answered the spider clerk.

“How did it begin?”

“It never was otherwise.”

“Don’t you never get tired?”

“Every parasol is a joy.”

“What do you do when the parasols are gone?”

“They always come back. These are the famous twisted-nose parasols made from the famous pink grass. You will lose them all, all three. Then they will all walk back to me here in this store on main street. I can not sell you something I know you will surely lose. Neither can I ask you to pay, for something you will forget, somewhere sometime, and when you forget it, it will walk back here to me again. Look—look!”

As he said “Look,” the door opened and five pink parasols came waltzing in and waltzed up into the show window.

“They always come back. Everybody forgets. Take your parasols and go. You will forget them and they will come back to me.”

This part from a Carl Sandburg story is the entire reason why I have never bought an umbrella in my life. They never stay. I think umbrellas just belong to everyone.

 

[tenry]

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”
Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"
I always think of this quote when someone overreacts with exclamation marks

 

[buying gf]

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”
Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"
I always think of this quote when someone overreacts with exclamation marks

Reaper Man is one of my favourite Pratchett books. I re-read it soon after he died, and this quote stood out to me:

"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?"