Literary quotes

[Grendelsbayne]

Don't know if anyone's interested, but I came across this quote while reading the other morning and it hit me kind of close to home. Put a light on something i've always had trouble with to some extent and lately much more than usual. Anyway, I didn't want to just move on and let it fade away as lots of little things in life tend to do, so I thought maybe I could make a thread here for people to share some quotes they've read that meant something to them.

Mine is:

You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things. - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

 

[think]

"It's Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood": Inspirations for Inner Healing

I heard this quote in a meeting and found it as the title of a Claudia Black book - I already have one of her books but did not know about this book. the quote is powerful for me and yeah it is great when I searched the quote again that the book came up and not some new age author that had copied the quote-- mmm well maybe Claudia is a new age author but that is ok with her ---

 

[TrickyDickie]

"They who would be young when they are old, must be old when they are young."

John Ray, 1670

Quoted in the front of The Alienist, by Caleb Carr.

I find it to be very true.

 

[auntiehill]

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

 

[Grendelsbayne]

I found another one this morning:

"Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do." - Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

 

[Australis]

One of my favourite quotes is from Stargate, I think it counts because it refers to Asimov.

“Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, ‘Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.’”

Also see my sig.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Reread Hamlet this week and found this one:

"That we would do we should do when we would, for this 'would' changes."

 

[think]

Without a goal, everything becomes successful. ~think

 

[Malicia]

I often looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question - what is the stars, what is the stars?

Sean O'Casey

 

[Grendelsbayne]

I found this one last night in the Brick by Brick volume of the Doom Patrol comics by Gerard Way:

"Friends help you write the fiction you want to be by looking in your heart and seeing the truth inside."

 

[Miss Chicken]

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”

“ If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”


from The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.

 

[BK613]

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?” - Charles Bukowski

 

[think]

https://www.google.com/books/editio...y0EC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA51&printsec=frontcover
^from here-

~ Immanuel Kant
"all bodies are heavy"

 

[publiusr]

“A hard man is good to find”
—from? I forget

 

[Australis]

^ Mae West.

Who also said, "It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men."

 

[Australis]

And from Terry Pratchett.

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

"[...] responsibility was the inevitable price one had to pay for independence; irresponsibility was something which, in the very nature of things, could not co-exist with independence."

The Commodore by C.S. Forester

 

[Grendelsbayne]

I found two more last night:

"Only a narrow-minded and embittered person can bear a grudge against ordinary people for not being heroes."

and

"Only he who loves can remember so much."

Both from A Boring Story by Anton Chekhov.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Been a while, but I just found a new one:

"I'm not going to blame my past, but we all have one and it follows us around like a prison, always keeping us from being the person we truly wish to be."

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods

 

[Avro Arrow]

It’s been two years since the last post, and our usual cutoff is one year. I think this one has run its course.