“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.”
Jane Austen, Persuasion
May 24th, 2012
May 23rd, 2012
“They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for the economic affairs. Their names in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.”
George Orwell - 1984
May 19th, 2012
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.
E.M. Forster - Howards End
May 16th, 2012
Sherlock Holmes
“I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living.”
John Fante
May 15th, 2012
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway (via decembrist)
“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
Mark Twain
#48. Accidental death of an Anarchist
“Do people demand a really just system? Well, we’ll arrange it so that they’ll be satisfied with one that’s a little less unjust … They want a revolution, and we’ll give them reforms — lots of reforms; we’ll drown them in reforms. Or rather, we’ll drown them in promises of reforms, because we’ll never give them real ones either!”
Dario Fo
Nobel Prize for literature, Fo is awesome in effortless showing you the bitter truth while you are laughing so much in the middle of his farces
May 14th, 2012
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow.”
Shakespeare — Macbeth, Act V
May 10th, 2012
“I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.”
Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago
May 9th, 2012
Steinbeck
#44. One hundred years of solitude
“What does he say?” he asked.
“He’s very sad,” Ursula answered, “because he thinks that you’re going to die.”
“Tell him,” the colonel said, smiling, “that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez
Mark Twain
May 8th, 2012
“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Garcìa Màrquez, One hundred years of solitude
May 5th, 2012
“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”
Henry David Thoreau
