One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
-Saul Bellow, Herzog
Month: March 2016
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 20
Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn’t make them. Stupid people made them.
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 19
I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 18
As the years passed, she replied only: “I’m going away from here.” And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind.
-James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 17
“Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said “It’s going to rain,” would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, ‘I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’”
-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 16
“I’m afraid.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Major Major counseled him kindly. “We’re all afraid.”
“I’m not ashamed,” Yossarian said. “I’m just afraid.”
-Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 15
And then one afternoon–oh there was a fate in it: afternoon and afternoon and afternoon: do you see? the death of hope and love, the death of pride and principle, and then the death of everything.
-William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 14
“Eat, Sancho my friend,” said Don Quixote, “sustain life, which matters to you more than to me, and let me die at the hands of my thoughts and by means of my misfortunes. I, Sancho, was born to live by dying, and you to die by eating.”
-Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
…
I’d like to take a quick moment to apologize to the subscribers of The 100 Greatest Books Challenge who’ve been receiving multiple emails a day with random quotes from the Classic Quote-a-Thon. In WordPress, Schedule and Publish are, for reasons exactly no one thought through, THE SAME BUTTON, and whether that button decides to appear/function as Schedule or Publish apparently depends on WordPress’s momentary whims. Like, I will select the date for publication, and then move the cursor to Schedule, and watch in horror as the button changes to Publish in the split second it takes my finger to press down. And then I will scream mean things at my computer and decide life is no longer worth living, only to rally a few minutes later until the whole thing happens again.
Now that you know the truth, I hope you will pity rather than hate me for all the annoying emails. I am not being careless with your inbox. Indeed, I care deeply about your inbox, especially if it includes me. I am very sorry. And while I cannot promise it won’t happen again (WordPress has obviously hatched an elaborate conspiracy against me), I can promise I will continue to feel terrible for the pain I have caused.
Anyway, happy reading to those of you who still believe there are forces of good in the world, and that those forces are books and ideas and words and people rather than those conniving bastards we call machines.
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 13
Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.
-Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Classic Quote-a-Thon: Day 12
“Do you think, then, there is a limit?”
“To being in love? If there is, I haven’t found it!”
-Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
The 100 Greatest Books Challenge 