Post a random quote from a book you're reading

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"There was so much great stuff in the mirror then. All those horrible painful social disasters that I did not see and had never heard of little more than a decade ago. Now they're everyday life." ~ (Empathy by Sarah Schulman)

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

"You held out your hand for an egg, but fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation. Close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. In time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die; then you will have learned the great lesson of how to endure without a sob.”

Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (1849)

Kalr Eight was with Translator Zeiat at a manufactory down by the water, watching a slithering, silver mass of dead fish tumble into a wide, deep vat, while a visibly terrified worker explained how fish sauce was made. "So, why do the fish do this?" asked Translator Zeiat, when the worker stopped for breath.

-"Ancillary Mercy" by Ann Leckie

"We are not retreating, we are advancing in reverse"

"I would never have tripped, I'm far too graceful"

"'They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit' Valkyrie said.
'Then they have obviously never met me'"

"The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves"

"'You don't treat me like a child.'
He smiled. 'Of course I do. You just seem to have the ridiculous notion being treated like a child means to be treated with less respect than an adult.'"

"Doors are for people with no imagination"

"I am sophisticated, charming, suave and debonair, but I have never claimed to be civilized."

"'Power has a way of bringing out the worst in people. Mevolent. Serpine. Hitler. Lord Vile. Darquesse. We are all the same.'
'You just put me on a list with Hitler.'
'You are going to start sulking again, aren't you?'
'Hitler, for gods sake.'
'Power corrupts, you're better off learning that now, so you can prepare for later.'
'But Hitler!'
'We may need to focus here.'"

Behind the scenes, we in the Army did our utmost to discourage "instant integration" of the armed forces and were, to a certain extent, successful. When Trumsn finally issued the executive order, I was in Fort Knox on an inspection trip. While addressing an assembly of officers I was asked, in effect, what Truman's order would mean to the Army in practical, everyday terms. For example, should they build seperate service clubs for white and black soldiers? Unknown to me, there were newspaper reporters in the assembly. My Frank but generalized responses to questions were interpreted and reported as "stubborn resistance" to desegregation in the U.S. Army "until it had been totally achieved by the American people." Of course. these stories generated headlines embarrasing to me and the President.

Omar Bradley,
"A General's Life"

“Any place you love is the world to you.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince

"What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." (MS 107 192; c. 10.11.1929)

from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998

"Charlotte Brontë suffered from chronic shyness. In company she would gradually swivel in her chair until she sat at a 45 degree angle. She had pondered her own panic, using her self-consciousness to view herself being looked at ... The watcher is watched, and knows herself watched: she in turn observes the watcher of her watchfulness".


Davies, Stevie. “'Three Distinct and Unconnected Tales': The Professor, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights.” The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, edited by Heather Glen, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 77-78.

Pale Sisters! reared amid the purple sea
Of windy moorland, where, remote, ye plied
All household arts, meek, passion-taught and free,
Kinship your joy and Fantasy your guide!
Ah! Who again 'mid English heath shall see
Such strength in frailest weakness, or so fierce
Behest on tender women laid, to pierce
The world's dull ear with burning poetry?
Whence was your spell? and at what magic spring,
Under what guardian Muse, drank ye so deep
That still ye call and we are listening;
That still ye plain to us and we must weep?
Ask of the winds that haunt the moors, what breath
Blows in their storms, outlasting life and death!


Anonymous. Appended to Donald Hopewell, 'The Misses Brontë: Victorians', Brontë Society Transactions, 10:55 (1940), 3-11.

A beautiful sonnet I'd never seen before

"Materialism is KFC for the soul." - Lost Connections by Johann Hari

“Can toilet paper think?”

From Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop, NY: Basic Books, 2008, p. 28

“Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.”

― Mary Doria Russell, Children of God

"The aria, the sweet music, rose afar, but rushing swiftly on fast-strengthening pinions - there swept through these shades so full a storm of harmonies that, had no tree been near against which to lean, I think I might have dropped ... The effect was as a sea breaking into song with all its waves. The swaying tide swept this way, yet then it fell back ere I followed its retreat".

Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 1854 (Oxford World's Classics)

From Tuesdays with Morrie, MItch Albom, 1997

"The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. Our class met on Tuesdays. It met after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of LIfe, and it was taught from his experience. No grades were given, but there were oral exams each week. You were expected to respond to questions, and you were expected to pose questions of your own. You were also required to lift the professor's head to a comfortable spot on the pillow or place his glasses on the bridge of his nose. The last class of my old professor's life had only one student. I was the student".


In tribute to my dear mentor, N.

From Celtic Revival by William Butler Yeats:

"It is better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where dwell the mis-shapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls themselves, "Be ye gone"? When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!

P.s. William Butler Yeats is my favorite foreign poet and i love fairy tales as well!