Found myself lost in BEST OPENING LINES and FAMOUS CLOSING LINES while looking for the source of the line, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
Shoutouts to the occasional quotesporn committee OftenBen and flagamuffin and the ever-virtuous galen.
I realized that's it's been almost two months since people have posted quotes from RECENT readings. Maybe you just were given a new book!
The lists of closing and opening lines were interesting. The person posting the lists had favourite authors, and if you look, you'll see the brief comments before each quote are a little silly.
For example:
- Best opening sentence about incest that doesn’t explicitly mention incest, but is, like, totally about incest:
Check back to this over the week. I hope there will be some interesting quotations. It doesn't have to be a beginning or ending. It doesn't have to be something you are reading. Mine will be lyrics to a song that I just now heard and read.
― Steven Peck, A Short Stay in Hell My first venture into Russian literature. Better than I expected so far.Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.
Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As a very dumb and emotional teenager I feel like I want to weigh in. I think that yes, teenagers are overly dramatic and whiny, and both stupid and short sighted. But when it comes to monumental changes and such, especially when it comes to love and emotions a lot of things change in your teenage years. And thus having a quote about love changing you hit home is natural. But then again I'm 16 so I'm submerged in all those wonderful dramatic years.
Condensed from Physical Culture by Harry Emerson Fosdick.Imagination, common sense, and courage - even a moderate exercise of these will produce remarkable results. If a man is primarily after wealth, the world can whip him; if he is primarily after pleasure, the world can beat him; but if a man is primarily growing a personality, then he can capitalize anything that life does to him.
"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said. "Why?" "He was in despair." "What about?" "Nothing." "How do you know it was nothing?" "He has plenty of money."
while I pondered weak and weary, Over many quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-- Only this and nothing more." Poe's The RavenOnce upon a midnight dreary
These lectures are fantastic. I just took a course in Mechanics, so now I am going through Feynman's treatment of the subject, and everything seems to make more sense. By the way, I love these posts. I always end up adding a couple of books to my "To Read" just based on these quotes. If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
- Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume 1
Thanks fballs - I'm going to nominate you now to be a member of the ad hoc quotesporn committee. Please post another one in a month or so if the rest of us forget. That quote by Feynman is fantastic: all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
That sentence is so full of metaphoric potential that it might well inspire a future #todayswritingprompt post.
"How can you be out of vegan parfaits, are YOUUU going to go out to my car and tell my daughter that you’re out of vegan parfaits? " "Asian women are so beautiful. When I was little and realized I wasn’t going to grow up to be Asian, I cried so hard. " "Stay out of my namaste space."
dropped this on my profile a couple days ago Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis BonaparteMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
This is scarily true. From within the tradition, it is hard to decipher which parts of it are unhealthy and anti-human We think we might be springing ourselves from the past even as we reclaim it. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-- Melville, Moby DickSay you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. […] Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
And from the same:Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas HardyWhy it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as a gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.
Heller's "Catch-22." I'm really enjoying it. "They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
"No one's trying to till you," Clevinger cried.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
"And what difference does that make?"
Just got finished with my 'have to read' list, and I'm getting started on my 'want to read' list. To days selection is called The Eye of God, by James Rollins. It's been recommended to me twice, once as good action with decent science fiction flavor, and once as action packed science fiction. It opens with an Einstein quote.The disctinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
From Structures by James Edward Gordon.Because the strain energy storage of horn and tendon, as materials, is better than that of yew, a composite bow can be made shorter and lighter than a wooden one. This is why we talk of a wooden bow as a 'long' bow. The composite bow could be made small enough to be used on horseback, as was indeed done by the Parthians and the Tartans. The Parthian bow was handy enough for the cavalrymen to be able to shoot backwards, as they retreated, at their Roman pursuers; from this we get the phrase 'a Parthian shot'.
Not something I read as such but we had a sing-song very late in the evening at our christmas party. One of the songs I have heard all my life without really hearing it, but it has stuck with me a little since the night. Wolf Tones - The streets of new york...
So I went to Nellies beside Fordham road and i started to learn about lifting the load
But the heaviest thing that I carried that year
Was the bittersweet thought of my hometown so dear
I went home that December 'cause the oul fella died
Had to borrow the money from Phil on the side
And all the brught flowers and brass couldn't hide
The poor wasted face of me father.
...
Whereas the male, costumed, is one who has gained his powers and represents some specific, limited, social role or function. Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live ByThe woman is immediately mythic in herself and is experienced as such, not only as the source and giver of life, but also in the magic of her touch and presence. …