favorite quotes

[ComeBackZinc]

Something to take your mind off of apps, if you need that, or perhaps to remind us why we love the study of English in the first place.

My offering:

"Love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself." -- Franz Kafka

[bdon19]

"Love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself." -- Franz Kafka

So encouraging, ComeBack.

One of my favorites, especially in terms of literary studies:

"That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly."

--Neville from Virginia Woolf's The Waves

[takethiswaltz]

"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience, and experience only,' I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!' "

-- Henry James, "The Art of Fiction."

[rdsull89]

This seems fitting in the middle of application anxiety:

"It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so." - Frank O'Hara

[anxious_aspirant]

Arthur Danto: "In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits. ”

[yank in the M20]

I'm sure we all have zillions--can't possibly pick just one. But this is one I keep coming back to, I love the energy/speed as it pulls you along:

“And it was that self-same summer—June 5th, if precision is your watchword—that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man-boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?).”

―

Nicola Barker

,

Five Miles From Outer Hope

[hedgerows]

My first favorite quote ever (and one I still love) is this one from A. A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh":

"Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known."

[veniente]

'Yes, I am giving him up.' - J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

[thestage]

All art is quite useless

I'm sure you all know the source

[Stately Plump]

"...Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed."

[thestage]

HEY I GET IT

[Stately Plump]

HEY I GET IT

[thestage]

hey wait here's another obvious one for app season

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

to the last syllable of recorded time

[thestage]

from the you know you're a lit nerd when department:

I wanted to make sure I got that quote right, so I googled it. problem is I just typed in "tomorrow" and actually expected that to be the first result.

[ComeBackZinc]

you had such a vision of the streets

as the street hardly understands

-TS Eliot

[eatriceorgohome]

I like it so much, I used a bit of it in my s.o.p. :

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

-Ignatius Riley from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces

[andsoitgoes161]

Words, I have discovered, are like embers. They smolder. They drop to the bottom of our souls, where for years they give off only a modest heat, and then out of nowhere a life-wind suddenly whips up and the words burst into red-hot, spirit scorching flame.

Does language contain history the way plywood contains flight? Are we bruised each day by syllabic collisions, our spirits slashed by combinations of vowel and consonant? At a cocktail party, say, or at a ball game, or at our daughter's wedding, would you feel Death slide between your ribs if someone were to utter the name of your ex-husband? Can a color cause bad dreams? Can a cornfield make you cry? Do we irradiate language by the lives we lead?

Both Tim O'Brien.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rilke.

[tristramshandy]

from A Happy Death. simple enough:

"In this flowering of air, this fertility of the heavens, it seemed as if a man's one duty was to live and be happy." - Albert Camus

[WendyMoira]

"I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."

Marcus Zusak

Also- "In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it a means of pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man."

from Leo Tolstoy's extended essay "What is Art?"

This was an inspired and appropriate idea for a post here. I love words...

[thestage]

Better Rilke, and a real favorite line of mine, from the first Duino Elegy:

For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us

Your translation mileage may vary.

Edited February 29, 2012 by thestage

[antecedent]

Words, I have discovered, are like embers. They smolder. They drop to the bottom of our souls, where for years they give off only a modest heat, and then out of nowhere a life-wind suddenly whips up and the words burst into red-hot, spirit scorching flame.

Does language contain history the way plywood contains flight? Are we bruised each day by syllabic collisions, our spirits slashed by combinations of vowel and consonant? At a cocktail party, say, or at a ball game, or at our daughter's wedding, would you feel Death slide between your ribs if someone were to utter the name of your ex-husband? Can a color cause bad dreams? Can a cornfield make you cry? Do we irradiate language by the lives we lead?

Both Tim O'Brien.

Andsoitgoes, I swear we're kindred spirits!

"Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"What a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow."

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Edited February 29, 2012 by antecedant

[perrykm2]

“This [oatmeal] represents your soul in its pure state. Your soul on the day you were born. You were perfect. You were happy. You were good.

Now, enter Concept Number Two: crap. Don't worry, folks. I don't use actual crap up here. Only imaginary crap. You'll have to supply the crap, using your mind. Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time--friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids!--and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'Thanks so much!' You say, 'Crap away!' You say, and here the metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?”

from a George Saunders short story.

More like an excerpt, but very relevant to all aspects of life.

Edited February 29, 2012 by perrykm2

[ComeBackZinc]

My own Rilke: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

[DorindaAfterThyrsis]

"Those are my best days, when I shake with feare"

- J.D. Holy Sonnet XIX

Also, (a holdover from my dance career):

"...and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body"

-Whitman,Preface to Leaves of Grass

[TripWillis]

Too many to choose from, but I'll do my best:

"One only has to open one's eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening and come home to recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of this generalized misery would not go without a picture of 'satisfactions' which hides it and becomes the means to elude it and break free from it." -- Henri Lefebvre, "The Right to the City"

"All writing is pigshit." -- Antonin Artaud

"...the people who are the readiest and eagerest and willingest to swallow miracles are the very ones who are the hungriest to see you perform them." -- Hank Morgan in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court