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/lit/ - Literature

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1109073 No.1109073 [Reply] [Original]

Need some good quotes from your favorite books.


care to share /lit/?

>> No.1109099

Why do you * need * them?

>> No.1109113

>>1109099


just looking for some inspiration, why?

>> No.1109117

Relevant to my interests.

>> No.1109126

From the last book I read:

“Far fewer women would indulge in copulation,” answered Ferral, “if they could obtain in the vertical position the words which they need and which demand a bed.”

>> No.1109129

shameless self-bump.

i'll post one to get the ball rolling.

"Have you ever had so much to say that your mouth closed up tight struggling to harness the nuclear force coalescing within your words? Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside you that you didn’t dare let them escape in case they blew you wide open? Have you ever been so angry that you couldn’t look in the mirror for fear of finding the face of evil glaring back at you?"
— Ellen Hopkins (Crank)

>> No.1109139

"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity." – Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

>> No.1109192

'He said, "You thought that was Moira? Oh, no, boy, I buried her beneath the garden. This is Jo. She finally left her husband for me. And then, when I had her... O, Lord, when I had her, boy, I tore her apart, I made her bloom, and I left her to dry in sand the way she had dried my heart." He laughed, clinging more tightly to my arm so that I could not get away. "Her flower was not as pretty as Moira's. Moira. Lovely Moira." He sniffed the air, as if he could still smell the fragrance of the opening flower. "I made Jo bloom, boy, and then I stepped on her flower, and I kept it in darkness and dust. Now, boy, that's what love is." He laughed even while he crushed the dried blossom with his free hand.'
- Douglas Clegg, The Nightmare Chronicles

>> No.1110486

love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that’s what men normally call love

>> No.1110522

"That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying."

"In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable."

"When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves."

"If you aren't rich you should always look useful."

"The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out,
crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself."

All from Journey to the End of the Night.

>> No.1110531

A couple more I highlighted:

"This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody."

"An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time."

"Motivated by nothing but his good heart, he had set no conditions and asked nothing in return. To that little girl far away he was giving enough tenderness to make the whole world over, and he never showed it.
Suddenly he fell asleep in the candlelight. After a while I got up to look at his face. He slept like everybody else. He looked quite ordinary. There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad."

"Children don't know the law. Their parents slap them to teach them the law and protect them from pleasure."

>> No.1110540

"We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

-Slaughterhouse Five

>> No.1110569

"One day." Nanny nodded. "Yes. I'll drink to that. One day. Who knows? One day. Everyone needs 'One Day'. But it ain't today. D'you see? So you come on out and balance things up. Otherwise, this is what I'll do. I'll get 'em to dig into the Long Man with iron shovels, y'see, and they'll say, why, it's just an old earthworks, and pensioned-wizards and priests with nothin' better to do will pick over the heaps an' write dull books on burial traditions and suchlike, and that'll be another iron nail in your coffin. And I'd be a little bit sorry about that, 'cos you know I've always had a soft spot for you. But I've got kiddies, y'see, and they don't hide under the stairs because they're frit of the thunder, and they don't put milk out for the elves, and they don't hurry home because of the night, and before we go back to them dark old ways I'LL SEE YOU NAILED!"

-Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

>> No.1110652

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.

>> No.1110846

He felt feeling in the pain of others, reminding himself how merciless the world is. In watching the news, murders of children and girls, terrorism of the Far East, he felt pain, which he had not recognized before in such a blessed life. It was from this he found journalism, and a deeper part of himself, one his Father could not bond with.

- Mae Walton, a work in progress.

>> No.1110849

Probably one of my favourites:

"He was, in fine made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of fine Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don't want, we may sweep away."

>> No.1110857

"OP is a faggot. Fuck you I hope you get cancer and AIDS"

- Anonymous

>> No.1112330

"Instead of making life a continual feast you chop it into days and swallow them continuously, like pills."

>> No.1112331

Sorry, "continuously" ^^^^

>> No.1112349

The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.

- Marquez (100 Years of Solitude)

>> No.1112359

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

From Of Human Bondage

>> No.1112405

"My ambition is handicapped by my laziness"

>> No.1112420

Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou'retired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon'tletyourfeetstop.

>> No.1112439

Not my favorite, but the fastest I could remember

"Falling is love is creating a religion whose God is fallible."

-J.L. Borges (Nueve citas dantescas)

>> No.1112467

"The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so graciously surrounds human loneliness."
-- A Letter That Never Reached Russia (Nabokov)

"Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar."
-- Gods (Nabokov)

>> No.1112479

"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else." - Cormac Mccarthy No country for old men.

>> No.1112542

"They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them."