Meaningful Quotes and Passages from Books

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“Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.”

— Alice Walker, The Color Purple

There's, perhaps, even more important passages in this book for me, but I don’t think I’ll share them here. It was the perfect book to read when I wanted to leave an abusive religion and abusive marriage or even understand my experiences.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

I’ll say ‘amen’ to that!

"Who then invested you with the mission to announce to the people that there is no God? What advantage find you in persuading man that nothing but blind force presides over his destinies, and strikes haphazard both crime and virtue?"

--Robespierre, Discours, Mai 7, 1794

Who but yourself?

The advantage of not having someone waving their faith in my face.

“In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”

― Cervantes, Don Quixote

Maybe I should pace out my current reading of Lord of the Rings…

In all seriousness, I’ve not read Don Quixote since I was 15, but it left such an impression on me that I still think about it sometimes. I was expecting it to be funny and entertaining, which it was, but I wasn’t expecting the pathos or insights into the human condition.

That's what I thought when my mother dragged me to see "The man of La Mancha"

I’ve not seen it yet. I need to watch it one of these days. I do love musicals… I’ve also been meaning to watch the ballet.

It would probably be a good idea to reread the book, too. It’s fascinating to me to reread books that I read when I was young because, even if I thoroughly enjoyed them as a young person, I pick up on stuff - nuances, meaning, and insight - that I didn’t when I lacked as much experience. In a way, books seem to grow with you.

Most of my mother's attempts at inducing culture in me were abject failures, but the interpretation of the Don Quixote story impressed me.
I guess "Hair" did too, but it wasn't the storyline.

I saw a Hair revival on Broadway back in 2008 or 2009, I think. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Back on topic.

"" It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it.""

Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Robespierre addressed Hubert, leader of the radicals, an outspoken atheist. Robespierre was not particularly devout in any faith except faith in his own power. Hubert wound up getting his head chopped off at Robespierre's orders. Later, in an uprising, Robespierre was mauled in the jaw and bled to death. I am a little bit rusty for what happened afterward. It all occurs at the end of Zanoni.

I think a new regime was founded, which Napoleon later overthrew in a complicated plot.

From Book Three, chap. 6, of Zanoni:

Now the energy of Jean Nicot had never been sufficiently directed to the art he professed. Even in his earliest youth, the political disquisitions of his master, David, had distracted him from the more tedious labours of the easel. The defects of his person had embittered his mind; the atheism of his benefactor had deadened his conscience. For one great excellence of religion--above all, the Religion of the Cross--is, that it raises patience first into a virtue, and next into a hope. Take away the doctrine of another life, of requital hereafter, of the smile of the Father upon our sufferings and trials in our ordeal here, and what becomes of patience? Without patience, art never can be high; without patience, liberty never can be perfected. By wild throes, and impetuous, aimless struggles, Intellect seeks to soar from Penury, and a nation to struggle into Freedom. And woe, thus unfortified, guideless, and unenduring--woe to both!

“Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

" Ask Not for whom the bell tolls , It tolls for Thee " John Dunne, i think ? got me through 7 th grade .
Followed many years later by the Words to the Song " time " performed by Pink Flloyd . Some Weird synchronisity in there....some 10 yrs apart.

" If You Love something, Set it Free . If they come back ? It was meant to be " author Unknown .

-MZD, House of Leaves

"the world is prone to misconstruction" - from Dombey And Son, Charles Dickens

" He never allowed himself a joke in his speeches, nor attempted even the smallest flourish of rhetoric. He was very careful in his language, labouring night and
day to learn to express himself with accuracy, with no needless repetition of words, perspicuously with regard to the special object he might have in view. He had taught himself to believe that oratory, as oratory, was a sin against that honesty in politics by which he strove to guide himself. He desired to use words for the purpose of teaching things which he knew and which others did not know; and he desired also to be honoured for his knowledge. But he had no desire to be honoured for the language in which his knowledge was conveyed." From Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope

"Who has not ascertained by his own experience the different lights through which the same events may be seen, according to the success, or want of success, which pervades the atmosphere at the moment?" (ditto)