QUOTABLE QUOTES

Do you often underline or mark passages that speak out to be shared? thats what this topic is about. Include passsages you have marked that would like to share from your reads. they can be ones that inspire you, anger you, make you laugh, and think

Please include the author and title of the read, along with any comments you wish to include with them or add context/..Heres an example

wyrd sistersTerry Pratchett 'the duke had a mind that ticked like a clock, and like a clock it reguarly went cuckoo"

wifedom Anne Funder "I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & bitterley that I thought I'd save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished."

in the mountainsElizabeth Von Armin "Oh delight delight to think one didnt die this time, that one isnt going to die this time after all, but is going to get better,going to live, presently to be quite well again and able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one"

Enjoy!

Do you often underline or mark passages that speak out to be shared? thats what this topic is about. Include passsages you have marked that would like to share from your reads. they can be ones that inspire you, anger you, make you laugh, and think

Please include the author and title of the read, along with any comments you wish to include with them or add context/..Heres an example

wyrd sistersTerry Pratchett 'the duke had a mind that ticked like a clock, and like a clock it reguarly went cuckoo"

wifedom Anne Funder "I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & bitterley that I thought I'd save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished."

in the mountainsElizabeth Von Armin "Oh delight delight to think one didnt die this time, that one isnt going to die this time after all, but is going to get better,going to live, presently to be quite well again and able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one"

Enjoy!

I don't always quote from the book when I write the review, but sometimes I have so many quotes that I put them in a separate post.

Here's a couple of quotes from River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile :

Speke was again quick to rebuff any suggestion that he dress like an Arab on his journey. "The Arabs at Unyanyembe {near Kazeh} had advised my donning their habit for the trip, in order to attract less attention," he wrote, "a vain precaution, which I believe they suggested more to gratify their own vanity in seeing an Englishman lower himself to their position, than for any benefit that I might receive by doing so." Later, when Burton saw what Speke had written, he would declare it just another example of the young man's profound ignorance, scoffing at the idea that any Arab would envy an Englishman. -Chapter 13

...Galton also wrote a popular book called The Art of Travel, which offered explorers practical information... and advice to hire women for expeditions, explaining that they like to carry heavy objects and cost little to feed because they can just lick their fingers while cooking. -Chapter 15

And from Minor Detail:

"We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army."

It's the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier.

But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.

Galton also wrote a popular book called The Art of Travel, which offered explorers practical information... and advice to hire women for expeditions, explaining that they like to carry heavy objects and cost little to feed because they can just lick their fingers while cooking

>3 labfs39: OMG

Here's a couple from The Bad Immigrant, an interesting novel by Nigerian American author, Sefi Atta.

I was so prepared for being black in America that I could separate the racist from the person and deal with the unracist part of them. In fact, racism was a given now. Yes, because it was safer for me to assume white people were racist until proven otherwise. It was also reasonable to, because if I were white, it would take a lot of effort not to be racist in America. You passed someone sleeping on a street, what color was he or she likely to be? You watched breaking news about an innocent suspect shot to death by the police, well, you could easily misconstrue that black people were inferior.

As for black-on-black crime, or whatever it was called, I wasn't worried about that. I was coming from a country where practically every crime committed was black on black.

and

I was winding {Moriam} up again and she was in no mood. To be honest I was nervous about meeting Alice's parents. I hoped they were my kind of immigrants—bad ones, not the kind who aspired to be honorary whites.

On storytelling:

You are looking to supply the deficiencies of reality, to provide order where life is a matter of contingent chaos, to suggest theme, and meaning, to make a story that is shapely where real life is linear.

- Penelope Lively from Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013)

From The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton (1925)

But the young people—what did they think? That would be the interesting thing to know. They had all, she gathered, far more interests and ideas than had scantily furnished her own youth, but all so broken up, scattered, and perpetually interrupted by the strenuous labour of their endless forms of sport, that they reminded her of a band of young entomologists, equipped with the newest thing in nets, but in far too great a hurry ever to catch anything.

hee like that last. And I really like Lively, havent read that one tho. will have to look for it

I collect quotes! It's a habit I picked up from my mother.
I've started putting really impactful ones in the comments section of my books, thanks to the conversation we had before...

A recent favourite, from All My Puny Sorrows which speaks to me (in the context of the story) about how much easier it is to worry and rage about things on which we can have no impact than to deal with our fears and grief around more immediate situations in which we might bear some responsibility:

"My mother talked to me about Canadian mines in Honduras, the travesty of it all, her rage against the world having found this particular nook to make itself at home in tonight. Tomorrow it would be something else, Muslim gardeners from Oshawa being held without trial in Guantanamo and languishing in solitary confinement, or any situation that was either randomly awful or awful but entirely outside the ability of an ordinary mortal to stop it from happening." (Ch 12)

And an old favourite, I've lived by for decades now... from Illusions:

“Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world -- even if what is published is not true.”

>9 leamos: I like that quote and the idea behind it quite a bit.

Ordinary mortals organize to do all kinds of things they couldn't achieve on their own.

(I meant to post this here, but accidentally posted it on my own thread. Anyhow, here it is!).

Here's a little excerpt that has stayed with me since I read it. Llewellyn Morgan, a classicist at Oxford, has a wonderful blog on which he posts about his research and work. Here he translates a bit of Epicurus on the role of friendships in living a good life:

It is from a letter written by Epicurus to a fellow Epicurean, and it’s preserved for us by the Roman philosopher Seneca (Epist. 7.11). It simply says, “I say this not to many people, but just to you: we are, each for the other, an audience large enough” (haec ego non multis, sed tibi: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus). But what struck me about it was that the relationship that Epicurus here describes existing between himself and his correspondent, intimate communication between two individuals, is exactly what Lucretius also establishes between himself and Memmius in the DRN.

What Epicurus is describing is I think a kind of ideal for Epicureans, perhaps even the quintessence of an Epicurean life of pleasure and ἀταραξία, freedom from anxiety. The intimate colloquy with a friend answers to a cluster of things that Epicurus believed contributed to the good life. Epicurus’ school was located in the Garden (Κῆπος), a small property belonging to him just outside Athens, a place of retreat from public life which Epicurus shared with friends, and in which their friendship was expressed through communal living, eating, and conversation. Cicero caricatures Epicureans as “carrying on discussions in their own little gardens” (in hortulis suis … dicere, Leg. 1.39), while Epicurus himself, in a letter he wrote as he lay dying to a friend named Idomeneus, describes the intense pain he was in, but insists his suffering is offset by “the joy in my soul at the recollection of our past conversations”

"An audience large enough" is often where I begin when I think about the role of social media in our lives, and the merits of small groups of people conversing (like this) versus Twitter or Booktok.

The link: https://llewelynmorgan.com/2016/04/08/lucretius-face-to-face/

>13 rv1988: "An audience large enough" is often where I begin when I think about the role of social media in our lives, and the merits of small groups of people conversing (like this) versus Twitter or Booktok.

I love the idea of "an audience large enough," and it's making me think about how "large enough" varies from person to person. For me, large enough is a small group of friends and people in Club Read that I feel as though I "know". I don't need the faceless crowds of social media. But I think some people feel stifled with the same few people all the time. Perhaps it has to do with level of extroversion? I'm not talking about people who need public acclaim, but simply people who like more lively and varied interaction.

>14 labfs39: But we are a "faceless crowd of social media!" A smaller and more topically focused crowd than you'd find at X or Facebook, to be sure, but that's what we are.

>15 KeithChaffee: Except I've actually met many of the long-timers here on Club Read. :-)

I like the sentiment, Rasdhar. I like communal feel here. I imagine Epicurus transplanted would be turned off my the screened distance. But if grew up in our world, he might feel more warmly towards it.

From Ladies Lunch

Dandellion

"This was the moment the sun crested the mountain -a sudden unobstruced fire. It outlined the young peoples backs with a faintly furred halo, while here, in the garden,it caught the head of a silver dandelion fiercly, tenderly transfigured into light. I experienced a bliss of thought, new and inevitable and I said "Leiber Gott if I ever ask you for anything you dont even have to listen because nothing is necessarry except this"

Making Good

She asked Margot why she did not like Rabbi Sam"oh but I do! How can one not like Rabbi Sam. But I dont much care for exercises that are force fed intimacy and pressure cooking healing" could have used this line at the many such mandatory workshops we had every year at the start of school.

Relative time

We need a moral: let us be patient with each other aand with ourselves and suffer the diverse paces at wich we move though one anothers time and place

>18 cindydavid4: The first part is beautiful! Love the bit about pressure cooking healing too.

I'm nearly halfway through An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison, a prominent clinical psychologist now on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who is a leading authority on bipolar (manic-depressive} disorder, both because she has studied it and because she has had a severe case of it since she was a young teenager. As I probably mentioned I'm re-reading it now, in large part because I was diagnosed with severe bipolar I disorder with psychotic features last month. This particular quotation from the book hit home for me, as one of my residency professors suggested that I might be able to get rid of one of the "ists", my psychiatrist or my psychotherapist, in the near future:

At this point in my existence, I cannot imagine leading a normal life without taking lithium and having had the benefits of psychotherapy. Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible. But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief. But, always, it is where I have believed—or have learned to believe—that I might someday be able to contend with all of this.

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one’s own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy.

.

This paragraph crossed my mind again this morning. It's from David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing, which is narrated in the first-person plural by the ghosts of the generation of young men lost to the AIDS pandemic:

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

Wow, love that

>21 KeithChaffee: This is wonderful, thanks for posting it.

from the brave escape of edith wharton

Attached to a packet of papers "to my biographer, make the gist of me"

When her sister in law writes about the woes and privitations of old age, she writes: "the farthest I have penetrated this ill-famed Valley, the more full of interest and beauty too have I found. It is full of its own quiet radience, and in the light I discover many enchantments which the midday dazzel obscured"

From held, havent read this but found the quote in a review, and its making me want more

"“There are so many ways the dead show us they are with us. Sometimes they stay deliberately absent, in order to prove themselves by returning. Sometimes they stay close and then leave in order to prove they were with us. Sometimes they bring a stag to a graveyard, a cardinal to a fence, a song on the wireless as soon as you turn it on. Sometimes they bring a snowfall.”

"besides, whats the use of knowing what time it is in the counntry? Time for what? twilight sleep

Some interesting quotes on writing from Haruki Murakami in Absolutely on Music--Conversations between Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa:

"So how did I learn how to write? From listening to music. And what's the most important thing in writing? Its rhythm. No one's going to read what you write unless it's got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward."

***************

"You can usually tell whether a new writer's work is going to last by whether or not the style has a sense of rhythm. From what I've seen, though, most literary critics ignore that element. They mainly talk about the subtlety of the style, the newness of the writer's vocabulary, the narrative momentum, the quality of the themes, the use of interesting techniques, and so forth. But I think that someone who writes without rhythm lacks the talent to be a writer."

***************

{T}he rhythm comes from the combination of words; the combination of the sentences and paragraphs; the pairings of hard and soft, light and heavy, balance and imbalance, the punctuation, the combination of different tones....I'm a jazz lover, so that's how I set down a rhythm first. Then I add chords to it and start improvising, making it up freely as I go along. I write as if I'm making music."

Thats very interesting!

>27 arubabookwoman: i read this a couple days ago. I’m still thinking about it.

>27 arubabookwoman: Really interesting about rhythm. Thinking about some of my favourite authors, it is there, be it in the cadence, the structuring, or the plot unwinding itself. I wonder if we recognise this subconsciously when reading? It also just occurred to me that this is perhaps why we revisit certain books again and again.