Favorite Novel Quotes....

[SEVERUSMAX]

From Fortune's Favorites, by Colleen McCullough, "They're alright for a poke, but I'll have none to wife!"

And from her "First Man In Rome", "My idea of a good husband DOES not include Homer and Thucydides!"

Also from that novel, "My dear Nicopolis, why don't you do me the ENORMOUS favor of going to the Tiber, and jumping in!"

From Orwell's 1984, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever."

 

[Adrenaline]

I'm reading Possession: A Romance by Byatt right now. This passage jumped right out at me because I share it to a certain extent and because it's an idea that's often explored (in different ways) by Murakami, a favourite author of mine.

Do you know -- the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination. Whatever the absolute Turth -- or Untruth -- of that old life-in-death --Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him.

[...]

Do you touch at my meaning? When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats -- I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination ---

And this from An Admirable Woman by Arthur A. Cohen, simply because I loved the "voice" of the narrator so much.

Quite simply: I know I terrify. I want to hold back. I so want to restrain myself, to be moderate, to be tender and loving. And I can't quite manage it. At the very least I blurt out what I really think. I point the moral. I become enraged. It isn't for show that I do this. I am actually a poor performer; the angrier I become, the more my language rushes, the more incontinent and imprudent my speech. So, obviously, I am not scored highly for tact. I have too little wit to bring it off...Instead I scorn. I strive for irony, the grace note of clever times; instead, my foot ends planted on the neck. I go with a short sword for the heart. It's too serious a business to be merely deft. When I want to kill, I want to kill. And when it's all done--whether my subject is abominated or celebrated--I have left behind a bloody trail.

 

[Affirmation]

"His guts were alive with the sense that turds of epic dimensons were about to hit a gigantic fan, and he was centrally situated in the spray-zone."

-- Tim Willocks, 'Green River Rising'

 

[Guest]