first page of Grimus

Go, go, go, said the bird; human kind
Cannot bear very much reality

(T.S. Eliot)

Come, you lost atoms, to your Centre Draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw;
Rays that have wandered into darkness wide,
Return, and back into your sun subside.

(FARID-U-Din' ATTAR,
The Conference of Birds, trans. Fitzgerald)

Crow straggled, limply bedraggled his remnant.
He was his own leftover, the spat-out Scrag
He was what his brain could make nothing of.

(TED HUGHES,
Crow's Playmates)

The sands of Time are steeped in new Beginnings.

(IGNATIUS Q. GRIBB,
The All-Purpose Quotable Philosophy)

- First page of Grimus by Salman Rushdie.

victim, James Baldwin

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of a victim has ceased to be a victim, he or she has become a threat!"

- James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–November 30, 1987).  He was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist.

O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling

"O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of [...]"

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Minnami, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan

"Minnami, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan"

"My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Salman Rushdie quotes it in The Satanic Verses.

a letter from Henry James Sr. to his two sons

"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."

Salman Rushdie quoting Henry James Sr. in his book The Satanic Verses, Chapter VII The Angel Azraeel.
According to Paul Brains's notes for The Satanic Verses:
The passage here quoted comes in fact from Henry James, Sr.’s book, Substance and Shadow (1866), p. 75. It is quoted in William James’ introduction to his father’s writings, collected in the volume entitled The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James (1884) but is not presented by him as a letter. The passage
is most readily available in Matthiessen (156). David Windsor points out that Rushdie evidently encountered the passage as the epigraph to José Donoso’s novel, The Obscene Bird of Night where the quotation is (mis-) attributed thus: “Henry James Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William.”

Was That An Insult?

The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it;
if you can’t ignore it, top it; if you can’t top it;
if you can’t top it, laugh at it;
if you can’t laugh at it, it’s probably deserved

-    J Russel Lynes

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

-    Groucho Marx

I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion.

-    Robert L Stevenson

He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

-    Raymond Chandler

He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.

-    Arthur Miller

I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions

-    Mark Twain

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

-    Jonathan Swift

He would stab his best friend to write an epigram on his tombstone.

-    Oscar Wilde

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire

-    Winston Churchill

He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

-    Ayn Rand

He had a winning smile, everything else was a loser.

-    George C Scott

The tautness of is face sours ripe grapes.

-    William Shakespeare

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

-    George Bernard Shaw

He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong.

- Benjamin Disraeli

The Tao of Physics, India, LHC

"Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists...Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter."

- Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics.

To celebrate India's connection to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Experiment, India's Department of Atomic Energy gifted a two-metre bronze statue of Nataraja (Dancing Shiva ) to CERN on June 18, 2004 with a plaque that had the above lines of Fritjof Capra engraved on it.

quote Horror

"Sometimes we all go mad"
- Norman Bates

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"What was the worst thing you've ever done?"
"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..."

- Ghost Story

-0-

"You may go wherever you wish in the castle except where the doors are locked, where of course, you will not wish to go."

- Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker

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"Truly effective horror cuts you in half, to use a nice dismemberment metaphor, and then pulls you apart. Ambivalence is at the heart of horror - things that are gruesome can also be strangely compelling. half of you wants to look, or to know, and the other half doesn't. One response is about pleasure and the other about pain, and it is the business of horror to put the two in touch with each other."

- Clive Barker, A-Z of Horror

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"Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the wester. It is not a kind of fiction...Horror is an emotion"

- Douglas Winter in his introduction to Prime Evil

opening paragraph of 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 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The paragraph is believed to the the single greatest opening paragraph in horror fiction.

Quotes by Mark Twain

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.


All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.


When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.


There are many excuses for our sins, but the most popular is providence.


I never let my schooling interfere with my education.


Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.


Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.


There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.


Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.


Training is everything. the peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.

James Ahmed, Guerrillas, Naipaul

“When everybody wants to fight
there’s nothing to fight for.
Everybody wants to fight his own little war,
Everybody is a guerrilla.”

- James Ahmed, the protagonist of V.S. Naipaul's Novel, Guerrillas

Orwellian Quotes

According to George Orwell:


All people are equal but some people are more equal than others.


The best way to end a war is to lose it.


Political language - and this is true with variations of all political parties - is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.


As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.


Poverty frees eccentrics from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. Its properties are well known. It causes dreams; it intoxicates whole people; gives them false memories; quickens their reflexes; keeps their old wounds open; torments them in their repose; leads them into delusions, either of grandeur or persecution; and makes nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vain.

- Paul Valery; History and Politics

The Master and Margarita,

Mikhail Bulgakov

'For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by the
ocean? Look, it's filling with fire. A war has started there. If you look
closer, you'll see the details.'
Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of land
spread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a relief
map. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village near
it. A little house the size of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox.
Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house flew up along with a cloud
of black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of the
little two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke pouring from it.
Bringing her eye stffl closer, Margarita made out a small female figure
lying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little child
with outstretched arms.
That's it,' Woland said, smiling, 'he had no time to sin. Abaddon's
work is impeccable.'

In 1980, when Milan Kundera heard that his novel 'The Joke' was being described as a “major indictment of Stalinism” he quickly contradicted this saying

“Spare me your Stalinism. The Joke is a love story.”

[…] I do not know why, but I have never seen a machine that, however perfect in the philosophers' description, is perfect in its mechanical functioning. Whereas a peasant’s billhook, which no philosopher has ever described, always functions as it should […]

- William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose

It took me years to draw close to the Jew within me. I had to get rid of many prejudices within me and to meet many Jews in order to find myself in them. Anti-Semitism directed at oneself was an original Jewish creation. I don’t know of any other nation so flooded with self-criticism. Even after the Holocaust, Jews did not seem blameless in their own eyes. On the contrary, harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against victims, for not protecting themselves and fighting back. The ability of Jews to internalize any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves is one of the marvels of human nature.
The feeling of guilt has settled and taken refuge among all the Jews who want to reform the world, the various kinds of socialists, anarchists, but mainly among Jewish artists. Day and night the flame of that feeling produces dread, sensitivity, self-criticism, and sometimes self-destruction. In short, it isn’t a particularly glorious feeling. Only one thing may be said in its favor: it harms no one except those afflicted with it.

~ Aharon Appelfeld, a Hebrew-language author, who did not learn the language until he was a teenager.

The folk-song is the true, original and natural expression of the people’s soul, it’s companion in joy and sorrow, the encyclopedia of its religion, the philosophy, the treasure-house to which it commits its faith, its family and national history

~Paul Lafargue