"From reading too much,
and sleeping too little,
his brain dried up on him
and he lost his judgment.
- Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
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There’s more to life than books you know – but not much more.
—Morrissey
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Found these two at fivedials.com
“The powerful always seek to limit freedom by talking of the misuse of freedom, but freedom cannot be called freedom unless one has the right to misuse it... More than evil itself, I have learnt to fear the menace of good that comes in the form of improving others...” (Rabindranath Tagore from Jibansmriti, Rabindra Rachnabali)
I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark that I admit was highly paradoxical:-0-
“In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least, one much closer to the author’s intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn’t play the game. The reply is a simple one: he refuses to lie…He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened…One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth…."
“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”
We are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety.
“But I refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which is still more feeble than their own, and which brandishes before an eager public albums of coloured photographs, instead of the now vanished masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with eliminating savage life, and unaware of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows of those that history has already destroyed”
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane (p.41)
"The genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs." - Francis Bacon.
"Proverbs embody the current and practical philosophy of an age or nation." - William Fleming.
"Proverbs teach the real people's speech, and open up the hitherto sealed book of the native mind" - John Beames.
‘...the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the
future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’
- Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever p.17
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The best thing would be to write down everything that happens from day to day.
Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
I am a sick man… I am an angry man.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we” – not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one – participate in its coming into being.
A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.- The Trial, Franz Kafka
This is a true story, but I can’t believe it’s really happening.
I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
Enough.
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.
"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!"
"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"
"My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Salman Rushdie quotes it in The Satanic Verses.
"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.
- J Russel Lynes
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
Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.
I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion.
He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.
I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
He would stab his best friend to write an epigram on his tombstone.
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.
He had a winning smile, everything else was a loser.
The tautness of is face sours ripe grapes.
He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong.
"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.
"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
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"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
"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.
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.
“When everybody wants to fight
there’s nothing to fight for.
Everybody wants to fight his own little war,
Everybody is a guerrilla.”
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.
