/lit/ - Literature

[Parhelion No.647459]

"If he is not the word of God then God never spoke." Cormac McCarthy, The Road.

ITT we post our favorite ever quotes from books.

[Anonymous No.647460]

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

[Anonymous No.647465]

>>647460
Eye c wut u ded thar

Also:

"It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better place I go to now, than I have ever been."

[Anonymous No.647467]

"He loved Big Brother."

that line
broke
my
heart :(

[Anonymous No.647466]

"War does not negate decency. It demands it, even more so than in times of peace."

[Anonymous No.647470]

Everything by >>646033

[Anonymous No.647471]

"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man! I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!" - Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick

[Anonymous No.647475]

"I give [the watch] to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

[Anonymous No.647483]

"I decline to accept the end of man... I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

[Anonymous No.647484]

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

[Anonymous No.647486]

"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

[Anonymous No.647487]

>>647475

My kind of quote. Source please?

/Soundly vaguely like something Vonnegut said...

[Anonymous No.647489]

>>647487

It's from The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner.

[Anonymous No.647496]

"People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."

[Anonymous No.647499]

>>647489

Swing and a miss for me then. Thanks for the info. As I Lay Dying kicked my ass. Is S&F filled with more such gems?

[Anonymous No.647500]

>>647499

The Sound and the Fury has three narrators. I only enjoyed one of them. So I guess you could say yes and no.

[Anonymous No.647502]

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I have nothing. If I give all my possessions to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous, or selfish, or argumentative. Love is not arrogant or rude. Love holds no grudges. Love does not delight in injustice, but rejoices in the truth. Love bares all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are gifts of prophecies, they will cease. If there are tongues, they will be stilled. If there is knowledge, it will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. But now, I am no longer a child and it is time to put away childish things. And so these three will remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love."

[Anonymous No.647504]

"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that isprovided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear ordread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all anothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived init and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y naday pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give usthis nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

Hemmingway - A Clean, Well Lighted Place.

[Anonymous No.647506]

"Pain and damage don't end the world. Or despair or f'n beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then you've got more beatings in store. Stand it like a man...and give some back."

[Anonymous No.647508]

"You want to know the only thing my brother ever had to teach me?" His voice was hitching and thick with tears.

"Yes," the gunslinger said. He leaned forward, his eyes intent upon Eddie's eyes.

"He taught me if you kill what you love, you're damned."

"I am damned already," Roland said calmly. "But perhaps even the damned may be saved."

"Are you going to get all of us killed?"

Roland said nothing.

Eddie seized the rags of Roland's shirt. "Are you going to get her killed?"

"We all die in time," the gunslinger said. "It's not just the world that moves on." He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. "But we will be magnificent." He paused.

"There's more than a world to win, Eddie. I would not risk you and her--I would not have allowed the boy to die--if that was all there was."

"What are you talking about?"

"Everything there is," the gunslinger said calmly. "We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand." Now it was Eddie who said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.

Roland gently grasped Eddie's arm. "Even the damned love," he said.

Eddie eventually slept beside Susannah, the third Roland had drawn to make a new three, but Roland sat awake and listened to voices in the night while the wind dried the tears on his cheeks.

Damnation?

Salvation?

The Tower.

He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names.

The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last, Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names.

[Anonymous No.647514]

"A worthwhile day, I had killed two spiders, I had upset the balance of nature – now we would all be eaten up by the bugs and the flies. I walked further down the hill, I was near the bottom when a large bush began to shake. The King Spider was after me. I strode forward to meet it."

- Bukowski, Ham On Rye

[Anonymous No.647516]

>>647506

Har har har.

[Anonymous No.647599]

"Life is hard, and it's harder if you're stupid."

-- George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

[Anonymous No.648791]

bumping with

"Walking alone in the teasing rain, I rememberedour days together in this earth. The dog of your boyhood teaches you a great deal about friendship, love, and death. Old Skip was my brother. They had buried Skip under the old elm tree, yet this was not totally true...........for he really lay buried in my heart."

;_;

[Anonymous No.648818]

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

[Anonymous No.648828]

He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

[Anonymous No.648832]

Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

-Mishima

[Anonymous No.648844]

>>648832

gives me a fuckin hard on every time

[Anonymous No.648849]

"Only dead fingers speak in Braille."- Burroughs, from Naked Lunch. Who the fuck knows if it means anything, but it pleases me on an aesthetic level.

[Anonymous No.648862]

He inserted the spear into the makeshift vagina

Found this gem in Velocity by Dean Koontz

[Anonymous No.648874]

>>648791

[Anonymous No.648877]

"Men of great spirit will always be at risk when small souls rule the world." From an obscure sci-fi novel but damn I love it.

[Anonymous No.648884]

If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.

[Anonymous No.648890]

"An attitude was all we needed anyway, all we had ever needed, and this one would sit more comfortably than Reece’s stern, demanding creed. It meant, I guess, that at the end of our training cycle the camp delivered up a bunch of shameless little wise guys to be scattered and absorbed into the vast disorder of the Army, but at least Reece never saw it happen, and he was the only one who might have cared."

From Richard Yates's short story 'Jody Rolled The Bones'. Still breaks my heart every time I read it.

[Anonymous No.648895]

Moby Dick is full of awesome quotes.

[Anonymous No.648899]

From Nabokov's afterword to Lolita.

"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."

Especially important to me because I'm an ESL as well.

[Anonymous No.648909]

OP's quote fails.

Even if Jesus was not the word of God, then God still spoke through creation.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

etc.

[Anonymous No.648924]

As if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, I that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much life myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

The Stranger

[Anonymous No.649028]

>>648924

Camus is the greatest.

[Anonymous No.649029]

>>647471

Everything by Ahab could be put in here.

[Anonymous No.649040]

>>647483

Faulkner's Nobel Speech is one of the greatest ever written for the Nobel.

[Anonymous No.649048]

>>649040
you know that because you read most of them and not by heresay?

[Anonymous No.649064]

>>649048

Actually, yeah. For a rhetoric class in college, we had to read a bunch of them and then I found them interesting, so I read the rest.

Other good ones include:
Toni Morrison
Jean-Paul Sartre (simply because he chose to decline it...first one ever)
Albert Camus

If you want to see some real inspiration, look at Hemingway's speech. (sarcasm)

[Anonymous No.649074]

>>649048
What's this heresay of which you speak?
You mean heresy, no? What, boy? Speak up!

[Anonymous No.649079]

"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt... "- catch 22

[Anonymous No.649099]

I feel like the punch-line to a joke I might have told you ten years ago. But you know: life just catches up on you. When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun - that "life" is always scheduled to being next week, next month, next year, after the holidays - whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.

[Anonymous No.649840]