EPIGRAPHS — QUIZ

[Anonymouṡ No.20084957]

[Anonymouṡ No.20084965]

Epigraphs are great. They set the mood AND let the author show off how much he's read. Also, since they're conveniently placed at the beginning, you get to enjoy them even if you give up on the book after two pages.

Here are a hundred to identify. (We're only concerned with those which appear right away, so nothing from individual chapters, etc.) A mix of serious & light stuff, fiction & non-fiction. (Several, especially with fantasy / science-fiction, were written specifically for the work which 'quotes' them.)

A modest hint if needed: the hundred authors, in alphabetical order:

Richard Adams, John Berryman, Roberto Bolaño, Ray Bradbury, Mikhail Bulgakov, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Robert Burton, Truman Capote, Thomas Carlyle, Rachel Carson, Tom Clancy, Joseph Conrad, Michael Crichton, John Crowley, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Samuel Delaney, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gerald Durrell, Lawrence Durrell, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, James Ellroy, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Henry Fielding, Bobby Fischer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Gaddis, Neil Gaiman, John Gardener, William Gass, William Golding, Robert Graves, Ursula Le Guin, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Harris, L. P. Hartley, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Herbert, Theodor Herzl, Aldous Huxley, Charles Jackson, Clive James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, M. M. Kaye, Garrison Keillor, Ken Kesey, Stephen King, Arthur Koestler, T. E. Lawrence, Harper Lee, C. S. Lewis, M. G. Lewis, Jack London, Malcolm Lowry, Norm Macdonald, William Manchester, Hilary Mantel, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, P. J. O'Rourke, George Orwell, Walter Pater, Mervyn Peake, Georges Perec, Robert M. Pirsig, Edgar Allen Poe, Terry Pratchett, Mario Puzo, Thomas Pynchon, Oliver Sacks, J. D. Salinger, Anne Sexton, Mary Shelley, Laurence Sterne, Josephine Tay, Hunter S. Thompson, J. R. R. Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, John Kennedy Toole, Mark Twain, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Evelyn Waugh, Mary Webb, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, T. H. White, Tennessee Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gene Wolfe, Richard Yates

[Anonymouṡ No.20084974]

1)
"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?"

— Paradise Lost X 743–45


2)
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

— Balzac


3)
Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

— John 12:24


4)
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω." (I saw with my own eyes the Sybil hanging in a bottle at Cumae, and when the boys asked "Sybil, what do you want?" she answered "I want to die.")

— Petronius, 'Satyricon'


5)
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

— Wernher von Braun

[Anonymouṡ No.20084979]

6)
"...We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this ... seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forhead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature ... Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his *Views and Reviews*: 'The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore...' "

— H. G. Wells, 'Outline of History'


7)
Alas! When passion is both meek and wild!

— Keats


8)
...A story that was the subject of every variety of misrepresentation, not only by those who then lived but likewise in succeeding times: so true is it that all transactions of pre-eminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity.

— Tacitus


9)
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

— Juan Ramón Jiménez


10)
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!”

— Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

[Anonymouṡ No.20084989]

11)
I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.

— E. B. White


12)
Motto: ...und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen.

...and everything one knows, and not just heard rushing and roaring, can be said in three words.

— Kürnberger


13)
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man in the clouds, and have him speak to thee?

— John Bunyan, 'The Pilgrim's Progress'


14)
Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he lay dying in a foreign land, “The descent to hell is the same from every place.”


15)
QUEEN: I will try the forces
Of these compounds on such creatures as
We count not worth the hanging, but none human...
CORNELIUS: Your Highness
Shall from this practice but make hard your heart.

— Shakespeare, 'Cymbeline'


There is in this passage nothing much that requires a note, yet I cannot forbear to push it forward into observation. The thought would probably have been more amplified, had our author lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been practiced in later times, by a race of men that have practiced tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings.

— Dr. Johnson

[Anonymouṡ No.20084993]

16)
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

— Samuel Johnson


17)
Ταρασσει τοὐϚ Ἀνϑρώπους οὐ τὰ Πράγματα, αλλα τὰ περι τῶν Πραγμάτων, Δογματα.

It is not events themselves, but their opinions about those events, which trouble people.

— Epictetus, Handbook 5


18)
What stops a man who can laugh from speaking the truth?

— Horace


19)
And can you, by no drift of circumstance,
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy...

— Hamlet, III, i, William Shakespeare


20)
Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet honesti:
Audebit, quaecumque parum splendoris habebunt.
Et sine pondere erunt, et honore indigna ferentur.
Verba movere loco; quamvis invita recedant,
Et versentur adhuc inter penetralia Vestae:
Obscurata diu populo bonus eruet, atque
Proferet in lucem speciosa vocabula rerum,
Quae priscis memorata Catonibus atque Cethegis,
Nunc situs informis premit et deserta vetustas.

But the man whose aim is to have wrought a poem true to Art’s rules, when he takes his tablets, will take also the spirit of an honest censor. He will have the courage, if words fall short in dignity, lack weight, or be deemed unworthy of rank, to remove them from their place, albeit they are loth to withdraw, and still linger within Vesta’s precincts. Terms long lost in darkness the good poet will unearth for the people’s use and bring into the light — picturesque terms which, though once spoken by a Cato and a Cethegus of old, now lie low through unseemly neglect and dreary age.

— Horace

[Anonymouṡ No.20084997]

21)
All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

— T. K. Whipple, 'Study Out the Land'


22)
We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

— Frank Bidart, 'Borges and I'


23)
"If I wasn't real," Alice said — half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — "I shouldn't be able to cry."
"I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?" Tweedledum asked in a voice of great contempt.

— 'Alice Through The Looking-Glass', Lewis Carroll


24)
Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.

— 'The Maid's Tragedy', Beaumont & Fletcher


25)
Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu'on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive?... Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d'éviter les utopies et de retourner à une societé non utopique, moins 'parfaite' et plus libre.

Utopias appear to be much more feasible than we once thought. And we are now faced with a much more distressing question: How can we avoid their final realisation? Utopias are feasible. Life marches towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of ways to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less 'perfect' and freer society.

— Nicolas Berdiaeff

[Anonymouṡ No.20085005]

26)
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice...

— 'The Broken Tower', Hart Crane


27)
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

— John Donne


28)
And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good —
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?


29)
As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

— Romans 9:25


30)
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

— Jonathan Swift, 'Thoughts on various subjects, moral and diverting'

[Anonymouṡ No.20085007]

31)
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

— Charles Baudelaire


32)
Diesem Ambos vergleich’ ich das Land, den Hammer dem Herscher;
Und dem Volke das Blech, das in der Mitte sich krümmt.
Wehe dem armen Blech, wenn nur willkürliche Schläge
Ungewiss treffen, und nie fertig der Kessel erscheint!

To this anvil I compare the land; this hammer, the ruler;
And the people, the brass in the middle, crumpled.
Alas! when it suffers beneath random blows,
And the finished kettle never appears!

— Goethe


33)
The quality of mercy . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown...

— Shakespeare, 'The Merchant of Venice'


34)
The motions of Grace,
the hardness of the heart;
external circumstances.

— Pascal, Pensée 507


35)
Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air), it ill becomes any man of sense to to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.

— DE SELBY

[Anonymouṡ No.20085015]

36)
NO INTERESTING PROJECT CAN BE EMBARKED ON WITHOUT FEAR. I SHALL BE SCARED TO DEATH HALF THE TIME.
— Sir Francis Chichester in Sydney

FOR MY PART I AM ALWAYS FRIGHTENED, AND VERY MUCH SO. I FEAR THE FUTURE OF ALL ENGAGEMENTS.
— Gordon in Khartoum

I AM PICKT UP AND SORTED TO A PIP. MY IMAGINATION IS A MONASTERY AND I AM ITS MONK.
— Keats to Shelley

HE WENT AWAY AND NEVER SAID GOODBYE.
I COULD READ HIS LETTERS BUT I SURE CAN'T READ HIS MIND.
I THOUGHT HE'S LOVIN ME BUT HE WAS LEAVIN ALL THE TIME.
NOW I KNOW THAT MY TRUE LOVE WAS BLIND.
— Victoria Spivey?


37)
And if the babe is born a boy
He's given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

— William Blake


38)
Mores hominum multorum vidi

He saw the customs of many men

— Horace, 'Ars Poetica'


39)
Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,
My first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

— Anne Sexton


40)
... Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee.

— Shakespeare

[Anonymouṡ No.20085020]

41)
“But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this — we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.”
— W. WHEWELL: Bridgewater Treatise.

“To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.”
— BACON: Advancement of Learning.


42)
Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears.

— Winston Churchill


43)
"Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast."

— Scott Joplin


44)
Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, portentaque.

Dreams, magic terrors, spells of mighty power,
Witches, and ghosts who rove at midnight hour.

— Horace


45)
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? ... Are we or they the Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?

— Kepler, quoted in 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'

[Anonymouṡ No.20085026]

46)
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escape.

— 'Antigone', Sophocles


47)
A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

— Isaac Watts


48)
Et ignotos animum dimittit in artes ('And he applied his mind to obscure arts')

— Ovid, 'Metamorphoses'


49)
Yet ye shall be as the wings of a dove

— Psalms 68:13


50)
A little later, remembering man's earthly origin, 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return', they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying 'We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!'

— Flora Thompson, 'Lark Rise'

[Anonymouṡ No.20085034]

51)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— W. B. Yeats


I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein and Cary Grant.

— Miss Peggy Lee


52)
Vengeance is mine; I will repay.

— Deuteronomy 32:35


53)
"You have confused the true and the real."

GEORGE STANLEY / In conversation


54)
IN EARTH AND SKIE AND SEA
STRANGE THYNGS THER BE

— Doggerel couplet from the Sherd of Amenartas


55)
Caesar was and is not lovable. His generosity to defeated opponents, magnanimous though it was, did not win their affection. He won his soldiers' devotion by the victories that his intellectual ability, applied to warfare, brought them. Yet, though not lovable, Caesar was and is attractive, indeed fascinating. His political achievement required ability, in effect amounting to genius, in several different fields, including administration and generalship, besides the minor arts of wire pulling and propaganda. In all these, Caesar was a supreme virtuoso.

— ARNOLD TOYNBEE


"Not a simple man!"

— said of MacArthur by a Japanese statesman to John Gunther, 1950

[Anonymouṡ No.20085038]

56)
“Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.”

— John Myers O'Hara, 'Atavism'


57)
“... who are you, then?”
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

— Goethe, 'Faust'


58)
Nihil cavum sine signo apud Deum.

In God nothing is empty of sense.

— Irenaeus, 'Adversus haereses'


59)
There is pleasure sure
In being mad, which none but mad men know.

— Dryden, 'The Spanish Friar'


60)
'Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale colour, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.'
— LINNAEUS, 1979

'You cannot recall a new form of life.'
— ERWIN CHARGAFF, 1972

[Anonymouṡ No.20085047]

61)
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.

— Genesis 2:10


62)
Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in the town;
Sometimes I get a great notion
To jump into the river ... an’ drown.

— From the song “Good Night, Irene,” by Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax


63)
We know the sound of two hands clapping.
But what is the sound of one hand clapping?

— A ZEN KOAN


64)
The devil ... prowde spirite ... cannot endure to be mocked.

— THOMAS MORE


65)
All History is contemporary history.
— BENEDETTO CROCE

At certain times the world is overrun by false scepticism. Of the true kind there can never be enough.
— BURCKHARDT, Weltgesichtliche Betrachtungen

One insults the memory of the victims of Nazism if one uses them to bury the memory of the victims of communism.
— JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL, La Grande Parade

In a universe more and more abstract, it is up to us to make sure that the human voice does not cease to be heard.
— WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, Journal

We should esteem the man who is liberal, not the man who decides to be so.
— MACHIAVELLI

To philosophize means to make vivid.
— NOVALIS

Those who are nearer to reality can deal with it light-heartedly, because they know it to be inexhaustible.
— GOLO MANN

[Anonymouṡ No.20085049]

66)
"So foul a sky clears not without a storm."

— Shakespeare


67)
Dogs don't lie and why should I?
Strangers come they growl and bark,
They know their loved ones in the dark.
Now let me, by night or day,
Be just as full of truth as they.


68)
Truth is the daughter of time.

— OLD PROVERB


69)
If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?
— I Corinthians

Need I look upon a death's head in a ring, that have one in my face?
— John Donne, 'Devotions'


70)
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

— Charles Lamb

[Anonymouṡ No.20085051]

71)
Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio.

Nothing is more offensive to wisdom than excessive cleverness.

— Seneca


72)
"Nobody can rule guiltlessly"

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just


73)
"Honesty's the best policy."
— Miguel Cervantes

"Liars prosper."
— Anonymous


74)
"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."

— Ecclesiastes


75)
Three fingers whiskey pleasures the drinkers,
Moving does more than that drinking for me.
Willy, he tells me that doers and thinkers
Say moving's the closest thing to being free.
— BILLY JOE SHAVER, "Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me"

To live outside the law you must be honest.
— BOB DYLAN, "Absolutely Sweet Marie"

I know of only two very real evils in life: remorse and illness.
— LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace

[Anonymouṡ No.20085061]

76)
"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."

— G. K. Chesterton


77)
"It's a Barnum and Bailey world,
just as phony as it can be,
But it wouldn't be make-believe
if you believed in me"

— Billy Rose and E. Y. 'Yip' Harburg, 'It's Only a Paper Moon'


78)
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Muad‘Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. And take the most special care that you locate Muad’Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not be deceived by the fact that he was born on Caladan and lived his first fifteen years there. Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place.

— from “Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan


79)
To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.
— WILLIAM OSIER

The physician is concerned (unlike the naturalist) ... with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identiy in adverse circumstances.
— IVY MCKENZIE


80)
Frères humains qui aprés nous vivez,
N’ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis,
Car, se pitié de nous povres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.

Fellow human beings who live after us,
Do not harden your hearts against us,
For if you pity us poor men,
God will soon have mercy on you.

— François Villon, 'Ballade des pendus'

[Anonymouṡ No.20085067]

81)
The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
The second thing Tak did, he wrote the Laws.
The third thing Tak did, he wrote the World.
The fourth thing Tak did, he wrote a cave.
The fifth thing Tak did, he wrote a geode, an egg of stone.

And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched and the Brothers were born.
The first Brother walked towards the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no Laws, and was enlightened.
The second Brother walked towards the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened.
But some of the living spirit of Tak was trapped in the broken stone egg, and it became the first troll, wandering the world unbidden and unwanted, without soul or purpose, learning or understanding. Fearful of light and darkness it shambles for ever in twilight, knowing nothing, learning nothing, creating nothing, being nothing...

— From 'Gd Tak Gar' (The Things Tak Wrote) trans. Prof. W.W.W.Wildblood, Unseen University Press, AM$8. In the original, the last paragraph of the quoted text appears to have been added by a much later hand.


Him who mountain crush him no
Him who sun him stop him no
Him who mhammer him break hi no
Him who fire him fear him no
Him who raise him head above him heart
Him diamond

— Translation of Troll pictograms found carved on a basalt slab in the deepest level of the Ankh-Morpork treacle mines, in pig-treacle measures estimated at 500,000 years old.


82)
Mistress Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
with silver bells and cockle shells
And marigolds all in a row.


83)
'Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?'

— Henry VIII to Eustace Chapuys, Imperial ambasssador


84)
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

— The Creation of Éa


85)
I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four people are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.

— S.Freud: Letters

[Anonymouṡ No.20085070]

86)
Look with all your eyes, look

— Jules Verne, 'Michael Strogoff'


87)
ενα σωρό κομμάτια άπό ύαλί κόκκινα, πράσινα ή γαλάςια.
('A number of pieces of glass: red, green and blue.')

— C. P. Cavafy, 'Of Colored Glass'


88)
She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.

— 'Puck of Pook's Hill', Rudyard Kipling


89)
O scatheful harm, condition of poverty

— Chaucer


90)
To S.A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth's soft hand explored your shape, and the blind
worms grew fat upon
Your substance.

Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a memory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels
in the marred shadow
Of your gift.

[Anonymouṡ No.20085072]

91)
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles's Oedipus, who, seeking enlightment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further...

— From a letter of Schopenhauer to Goethe, November 1815


92)
Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.

— Paradise Lost: Book I


93)
On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

— Emmanuel Lasker


94)
But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers,
The bright blue sky and velvet sod,
Were strange conductors to the bowers
Thy daring footsteps must have trod.

— Emily Bronte


95)
"Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time"
— Paul Valéry

"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness"
— Jacob Boehme

"Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped"
— The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982

[Anonymouṡ No.20085079]

96)
‘We are the Pilgrims, Master: We shall go
Always a little further. It may be
Behind that last blue mountain topped with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
White on a throne, or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men are born...’

— James Elroy Flecker


‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.’

— Tennyson


97)
Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for mortal men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne;
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them;
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.


98)
"Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen"

"If you will it, it is no dream"


99)
This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. “Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.” And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, “But Hodge shan’t be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.”

— 'The Life of Samuel Johnson', James Boswell


100)
Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci.

He that joins instruction with delight,
Profit with pleasure, carries all the votes.

— Horace

[Anonymous No.20085805]

>>20084993
>It is not events themselves, but their opinions about those events, which trouble people.

[Anonymous No.20087030]

Bump

[Anonymous No.20087378]

Only some easy ones:
1) Frankenstein
4) Waste Land
30) Confederacy of Dunces?
78) Dune?
84) Silmarillion
97) LoTR

[Anonymous No.20087463]

>>20084957
Here are the ones I know:
3 - The Brothers Karamazov
4 - The Waste Land
5 - Gravity’s Rainbow
12 - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
14 - The Tunnel
16 - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
18 - The Anatomy of Melancholy
22 - The Pale King
24 - The Mill on the Floss (??? - the epigram is v familiar though)
30 - A Confederacy of Dunces
32 - Carlyle’s The French Revolution? (safest bet for a Goethe epigram)
35 - The Third Policeman
48 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
52 - Anna Karenina
57 - The Master and the Margarita
95 - Blood Meridian
97 - The Lord of the Rings
Good thread! Thanks for posting these, I would like to see the full list of books at some point

[Anonymous No.20087479]

My favorite epitaph:

"I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

-Guy de Maupassant.

[Anonymous No.20087486]

>>20087463
Whoops looked it up and 100 is Anatomy of Melancholy not 18. That was a bit of a guess. a very fitting epigram to end the quiz on though

[Anonymouṡ No.20088021]

>>20087378
All correct except 84. There are 100 questions and 100 different authors, so no author can be repeated. 97 is definitely LotR, so 84 can't be Silmarillion, although it does sound a bit like it. It's science-fiction / fantasy.

[Anonymouṡ No.20088056]

>>20087463
>>20087486
Almost all correct.

Yes, 100, not 18, is Robert Burton. 18 is relatively obscure non-fiction; one of the hardest I think.

24 isn't Mill On The Floss although it is by George Eliot. The Mill On The Floss's epigraph is "In their death they were not divided" (2 Samuel).

32 is indeed The French Revolution. Yeah, Carlyle said "Close your Byron and open your Goethe" or something, didn't he?

[Anonymouṡ No.20088060]

>>20087479
Dunno if that was ever used as an epigraph for a book? Could have been. It would have been quite a sad book though I guess haha.

[Anonymouṡ No.20088092]

>>20087378
>>20087463
>>20087486

Some of these I thought were relatively easy (e.g. 97) but others definitely not.

Quite a few of the others are theoretically easier because they have the title of the book (or almost the title of the book) hidden in them. e.g. 51.

Others are more-or-less deducible because they basically say exactly what the book is about, e.g. 60.

>I would like to see the full list of books at some point
I have to go out today so the thread might be gone by the time I get back. If it's still up I'll post a few hints. When it finally dies I can give the answers.

[Anonymous No.20088104]

>>20084993
>"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[Anonymouṡ No.20088111]

>>20088104
Yup. They used this as an epigraph for the film too IIRC.

[Anonymous No.20088137]

93)
bobby fischer teaches chess

[Anonymous No.20088158]

>>20085051
no idea where 75 is from but i'd like to know