Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte Quotes

Terror made me cruel ...

A wild, wick slip she was - but, she had the bonniest eye and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish: and, after all, I believe she meant no harm; for when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she would not keep you company, and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her.

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other.

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.

He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees - my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? I shan't tell my reasons for making this inquiry; but I beseech you to explain, if you can, what I have married...

You said I killed you - haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!

If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.
I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood! But, till then--if you don't believe me, you don't know me--till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head!

Well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend--if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I'll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all...

That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least, for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

Well, never mind. That is not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he's in my soul.

Kiss me again, but don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me.

But there's this difference: one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver.

He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.

Catherine's face was just like the landscape--shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient.

God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall.

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine — If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily contained in that house-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him — Tush! He is scarcely a degree nearer than her dog, or her horse — It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love in him what he has not?

You talk of her mind being unsettled — How the devil could it be otherwise, in her frightful isolation? And that insipid, paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity! From pity and charity. He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!

Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.

You teach me how cruel you've been - cruel and false. Why do you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me--then what right had you to leave me? What right--answer me--for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart--you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you'll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on 'em looking out of his chamber window, on every rainy night since his death.

Emily Dickinson Quotes and Poems

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.

That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.

Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

A wounded deer leaps highest, I've heard the hunter tell

Beauty is not caused. It is.

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.

There's a certain slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses,
like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes--

After great pain,
a formal feeling comes.
The Nerves sit ceremonious,
like tombs.

Dwell in possibility.

Fortune befriends the bold.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me

Heart, we will forget him,
You and I, tonight!
You must forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

I am eternally grateful.. for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF
HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.

He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."

What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.

I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

No grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.

The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me."The big show is inside my head," I said.

Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Why don't you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

"I wish I had been born a bird instead," he said."I wish we had all been born birds instead."

I think yet again of my father, who struggled to become a painter after he was forced into early and unwelcome retirement by the Great Depression. He has reason to be optimistic about his new career, since the early stages of his pictures, whether still or portraits or landscapes, were full of pow. Mother, meaning to be helpful, would say of each one: "That's really wonderful, Kurt. Now all you have to do is finish it." He would then ruin it. I remember a portrait he did of his only brother, Alex, who was an insurance salesman, which he called "Special Agent". When he roughed it in, his hand and eye conspired with a few bold strokes to capture several important truths about Alex, including a hint of disappointment. Uncle Alex was a proud graduate of Harvard, who would rather have been a scholar of literature than an insurance man.When Father finished the portrait, made sure every square inch of masonite had its share of paint, Uncle Alex had disappeared entirely. We had a drunk and lustful Queen Victoria instead. This was terrible.

You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do.

You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.

Chuck Palahniuk Quotations

Your heart is my piƱata.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

I just don't want to die without a few scars.

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

Which is worse: Hell or nothing?

We just had a near-life experience!

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

Hysteria is only possible with an audience.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.

The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flipping check clears.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

Beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if she'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.

All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.

Going to spring break at Ft. Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

The weather today is an increasing trend towards denial.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Art never comes from happiness.

There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.

ee cummings quotations

"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."

“A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.”

“I imagine that yes is the only living thing.”

"For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)it's always ourselves we find in the sea."

“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.”

"Be of love (a little) more careful than of anything.”

“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”

"(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"

"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes."

"Nothing recedes like progress."

Oscar Wilde Quotes

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

A woman will flirt with anyone in the world, so long as other women are looking on.

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Quotes

Joel: I can't see anything that I don't like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.
Joel: Okay.
Clementine: Okay.

Clementine: Maybe you can find yourself a nice antique rocking chair to die in.

Joel: If only I could meet someone new. I guess my chances of that happening are somewhat diminished, seeing that I'm incapable of making eye contact with a woman I don't know.

Clementine: I apply my personality in a paste.

Clementine: What are you, nuts?
Joel: It's been suggested.

Clementine: I'm a vindictive little bitch, truth be told!

Clementine: I wish you'd stayed.
Joel: I wish I'd stayed, too. Now, I wish I'd stayed. I wish I'd done a lot of things. I wish I'd... I wish I'd stayed... I do.

Clementine: Let me show you something, come on.
Joel: I think I heard a crack.
Clementine: It's not gonna crack, or break, or... It's so thick! Show me which constellations you know.
Joel: Um, oh, I don't... know any.
Clementine: Show me which ones you know!
Joel: Okay, okay - oh! There's Osidius.
Clementine: Where?
Joel: Right there, see? Sort of a swoop and a cross, Osidius the Emphatic.
Clementine: You're full of shit, right?
Joel: Nope. Osidius, right there, swoop and cross.
Clementine: Shut the fuck up!

Clementine: Sometimes I don't think people realize how lonely it is to be a kid.

Clementine: Drink up, young man. It'll make the whole seduction part less repugnant.

Clementine: Joely What if you stay this time?
Joel: I walked out the door. There's no memory left.
Clementine: Come back and make up a goodbye at least, let's pretend we had one... Goodbye, Joel.
Joel: ...I love you...
Clementine: ...Meet me in Montauk.
Clementine: Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours.
Joel: I remember that speech really well.
Clementine: I had you pegged, didn't I?
Joel: You had the whole human race pegged.
Clementine:Hmm. Probably.
Joel: I still thought you were gonna save my life... even after that.
Clementine: Oh, I know.
Joel: It would be different, if we could just give it another go-round.
Clementine: Remember me. Try your best; maybe we can.

Joel: Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?

Joel: Sand is overrated. It's just tiny, little rocks.

Clementine: Well, I came back down stairs and you were gone.
Joel: I walked out. I walked out the door.
Clementine: Why?
Joel: I don't know. I felt like a scared little kid. I was like... it was - it was above my head. I don't know.
Clementine: You were scared?
Joel: Yeah. I thought you knew that about me. I ran back to the bonfire trying to outrun my humiliation, I think.
Clementine: Was it something I said?
Joel: Yeah. You said "So, go." with such disdain, you know?
Clementine: Oh, I'm sorry.
Joel: It's okay.

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

Dad Quoted or Quoting

"I'm an old man; I'm going to die soon. I have no more time for foolish people and foolish things. Tick tock, people!"

"I'd rather die in the streets than live in a castle."

"You're like me; it's your blessing and your curse. You see everything."

"You're like your brother-- you can make anything into a weapon."

"You know what my father used to say to me, 'If you threw all your troubles in a hat with everyone else, you'd pull yours back out in a minute.'"

"I might have been born in the dark, but it wasn't last night."

"Throw shit at the wall until it sticks."

"One horseman short of an apocalypse."

"I'm crisis management."

"My life was saved by rock n roll." (Quoted from Velvet Underground)

"A little putty, a little paint makes things what they ain't."

(about drugs) "You want to open the door, not blow it off its hinges."

"It was a small drinking town with a fishing problem."

"I never forget."

"An Irishman walks out of a bar."

"He's a professional Irishman."

"That's the Irish; they think they're the only ones here."

"One crisis at a time."

(about drugs) "You can't ride two horses at once."

"Do you know what ducks are? Ducks are what mountain climbers leave behind to mark the trail. They pile up rocks to leave a sign for the other climbers who will come after them to help them find their way. That's what my art is to me."

"I never understood suicide. If it got that bad, I'd walk out to the interstate and stick my thumb out, see where it'd take me."

"A well organized man can survive comfortably in hell."

"Hassain. This guy wanted to get himself a band of assassins. He took them to a wall garden, fed them boatloads of hashish and had all these courtesans who fucked their brains out. Then, the next morning, they were back out on the street - he convinced them they had gone to heaven, and he told them that their way back to heaven was to commit assassinations for him. The word assassin comes from the word hassain which means hashish."

"I went to the Panther demonstrations in the early 1970's at Yale University, instead of going and getting my head cracked and tear-gassed - I thought it was more interesting to listen to Allen Ginsberg read poetry in a quad somewhere up there. And afterwards, I went up and asked him if he edited his poetry, because I wrote poetry when I was younger, and he told me he edited as little as possible."

"Several years later, I was in the lobby of an auditorium at Boston College, at something called the Dharma Festival, which I no longer had the money to attend because I had bought two pints of tequila, and I was standing in the lobby drinking one of them. Allen Ginsberg came up to me and said, 'That's no way to get into heaven, Tiger.'"

"The day Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was 16, and people were giving away free tickets to see Jimmy Hendrix. And, they were a lot older than I was, and I really had no comprehension of what the assassination of Martin Luther King meant, so I went with some friends and took the 60 bus down Bloomfield Avenue to Newark, and then walked way down Broad Street to the Mosque Theater. Then, when Hendrix came on stage - everyone went to the first three rows, because that was as many people as there were at the show. He only played four or five songs, and everyone went home. The next day, the tanks were rolling down Bloomfield Avenue into Newark, and the school buses filled with black prisoners were headed up to Cauldwell Prison, and you could go up to the mountain behind Montclair and watch Newark burn."

"If you can't stand the paradox, get out of religion."

"Intent is the difference between a tool and a weapon."

S: I see the future yawning before me with nothing but death, Dad: you, Mom, Grandma. What do you do with that?
D: You dance, you dance.

Listening to Baker's Street:
S: It soars.
D: You're goddamn right it does. And when you're going up and down those hills in San Fransico...
-
S: "But you know he'll always keep moving..."
D: Not me.

"Dickless Cheney."

Daddy: Dwight Yoakam-- It's Tom Petty-- it's just country!
Andrew: It's still the blues.

S: I think it's what women ultimately do to men-- they destroy them.
Dad: They challenge them.

S: Beer, it's what's for dinner.
Daddy: Not just for breakfast, anymore.

D: You're my best friend.

S: I'm going crazy.
D: Short trip.

"It's not as bad as it seems, it's actually much worse."

"Drunk? Yes, I'm drunk! But, you, you're crazy! In the morning, I'll wake up-- and I'll be sober. But, you, you'll still be crazy!"

::answering the phone:: TOWER!

"The Irish have a saying, 'Cheer up, you'll soon be dead.'"

"Mi Corazon. Do you know what that means? My heart. Mi Corazon."

"Monos. Little monkeys. That's what they called you kids in Jersey."

"It's Stevie Nicks, honey. She's not afraid of anything that walks and talks or anything she can't see."

"I have to listen to music while I do my art. It engages that part of my mind that I need someone to babysit while I do my thing."

"He's a beautiful mistake."

"It's your mama's pajamas, it's spiders from Mars-- it's always something. But you know what? It all comes out in the wash."

Almost Famous Quotes

"I'm never as good as when you are there."

"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."

"Never take it seriously, you never get hurt. Never get hurt, you can always have fun. And if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit all your friends."

"I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it. Now go do your best. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. Goethe said that. It's not too late for you to become a person of substance, Russell."

"You'll meet them all again on their long journey to the middle."


"Please don't give him any more acid."

"Look at this: an entire generation of Cinderella's and no glass slipper."

"Don't let those swill merchants rewrite you."

"I didn't invent the rainy day, man. I just own the best umbrella."

"They make you feel cool, and hey, I met you. You are not cool."

"And then it just becomes an industry of... cool."

"I've made a decision; I'm gonna live in Morocco for one year. I need a new crowd. Do you wanna come?"

"Act One: in which she pretends she doesn't care about him…
Act Two: in which he pretends he doesn't care... and goes right for her.
Act Three: in which it all plays out the way she planned it. She'll eat him alive."

"Does anybody remember laughter?"

"When we go to Morocco, I think we should have completely different names and be completely different people."

"Let's say all of the things we never said."

"You know, I always told her not to let too many guys fall in love with her. I guess I was wrong. One of them ended up saving her life."

"I've studied the entire history of music. And for the most part, the good stuff is the popular stuff. Show me a guy who says he doesn't want to be popular, and I'll show you a scared guy. It's easy to say popularity sucks, because that allows you to forgive yourself if you suck. And I don't forgive myself. Do you?"

"This is not some apron-wearing mother you're talking to. I know about your Valhalla of Decadence, and I shouldn't have let him go. He is not ready for your world of compromised values, and diminished brain cells that you throw away like confetti. Am I speaking clearly to you?"

"Great art is about guilt and longing and, you know, love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love."

Dr. Zhivago Quotes

- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak has become my favorite book. A rather long collection, these quotes moved me so deeply, I could not shorten them.

"Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple not as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves. There were more people in the world than there have ever been since, all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being - man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over."

"The dog hated the girl, tore her stockings, growled at her, bared its teeth. It was jealous of her as if fearing that she would infect its master with something human."

"Yura devoured them with his eyes. Unseen in the half darkness, he kept staring into the circle of lamplight. The scene between the captive girl and her master was both ineffably mysterious and shamelessly frank. His heart was torn by contradictory feelings of a strength he had never experienced before.

Here was the very thing which he, Tonia, and Misha had endlessly discussed as 'vulgar,' the force which so frightened and attracted them and which they controlled so easily from a safe distance by words. And now, here it was, this force, in front of Yura's very eyes, utterly real, and yet troubled and haunting, pitilessly destructive, and complaining and calling for help - and what had become of their childish philosophy and what was Yura to do now?"

"Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for animal life.
But, all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and didn't notice it."

"Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble. It's like the headlights on a locomotive - turn them inward and you'd crash."

"And now listen carefully. You in others - this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life - your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."

"The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread crumbs thrown to fishes sink through water."

"This was the moment of spring when the earth emerges from the snow looking much as when the snow trapped it six months earlier. The wood smelled of damp and was heaped with last years leaves like an unswept room where people have been tearing up letters, bills, and receipts for years."

"He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off."

"At childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone. At this vital moment the man's part is as irrelevant as if he had never had anything to do with it, as though the whole thing had dropped from heaven. It is woman, by herself, who brings forth her progeny, and carries it off to some remote corner of existence, a quiet, safe place or a crib. Alone, in silence and humility, she feeds and rears the child…"

"It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life, everything gets mixed up. Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same things?"

"Larisa Feodorovna had realized how unhappy he felt and had no wish to upset him further by painful scenes. She tried to hear him out as calmly as she could. They were talking in one of the empty front rooms. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she was no more conscious of them than the stone statues on the house across the road were of the rain running down their faces. She kept saying softly, 'Do as you think best, don't worry about me. I'll get over it.' She was saying it sincerely, without any false magnanimity, and as she did not know she was crying she did not wipe away her tears.

At the thought that Lara might have misunderstood him, and that he had left her with a wrong impression and false hopes, he nearly turned and galloped straight back, to say what he had left unsaid and above all to take leave of her much more warmly, more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell. Controlling himself with difficulty, he continued on his way."

"The wooden houses and pavements on the outskirts of the town…He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages in a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, towards the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them. Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and the icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries. And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark."

"Speech is silver, silence is gold."

"I would say that man is made up of two parts, of God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit is marked by the achievement over many generations of an enormously slow and lengthy work. Such a work was Egypt. Greece was another. The theology of the Old Testament prophets was a third. The last in time, not yet superseded by anything else and still being accomplished by all who are inspired, is Christianity.

To show you the completely new thing it brought into the world in all its freshness - not as you know it and are used to it but more simply, more directly, I should like to go over a few extracts from the liturgy - only a very few, and abridged at that.

Most liturgical texts brings together the concepts of the Old Testament and the New Testament and put them side by side. For instance, the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah and the whole are presented as parallels to the immaculate conception and resurrection of Christ.

Such comparisons bring out, very strikingly, I think, the way in which the Old Testament is old and the Gospel is new. In a number of texts, Mary's motherhood is compared to the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance, there is once verse that begins: 'The Red Sea is the likeness of the virgin bride,' and goes on to say that 'as the sea was impenetrable after its crossing by the Israelites, the Immaculate One was incorrupt after the birth of Emmanuel.' That is to say, after the Jews crossed the Red Sea it became impassable, as before, and the Virgin after giving birth to our Lord was immaculate as before. A parallel is drawn between the two events. What kind of events are they? Both are supernatural, both are recognized as miracles. What then, was regarded as miraculous in each epoch - the ancient, primitive epoch and the later, post-Roman epoch which was far more advanced?

In the first miracle your have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by magic gestures, allowing a whole nation, countless numbers, hundreds of thousands of people, to go through, and when the last man is across the sea closes up again and submerges and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. The whole pictures in the spirit of antiquity - the elements obeying the magician, great jostling multitudes like Roman armies on the march, a people and a leader. Everything is visible, audible, overpowering.

In the second miracle you have a girl - an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world - quietly, secretly bringing forth a child, bringing forth life, bringing forth the miracle of life, the 'universal life,' as He was afterwards called. The birth of her child is not only a violation of human laws as interpreted by the scribes, since it was out of wedlock; it also contradicts the laws of nature. She gives birth not by virtue of a natural process, but by a miracle, by an inspiration. And from now on, the basis of life is to be that inspiration which the Gospel strives to make the foundation of life, contrasting the commonplace with the unique, the weekday with the holiday, and repudiating all compulsion.

What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migrations of a whole people? Why should it have this value in the eyes of heaven? - For it is through the eyes of heaven that is must be judged, it is before the face of the heavens and in the sacred light of its own uniqueness that it all takes place….Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled with the vast expanses of the universe."

"There is some doubt as to whether this does refer to the Magdalene or to one of the other Marys, but anyway, she begs our Lord:

'Unbind my debt as I unbind my hair.' It means, 'As I loosen my hair, do Thou release me from my guilt.' Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?

And later on in the liturgy for the same day there is another, more detailed passages, and this time it almost certainly refers to Mary Magdalene.

Again, she repents in a terribly tangible way over her past, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old inveterate habits. 'For the night is to me the flaring up of lust, the dark, moonless zeal of sin.' She begs Christ to accept her tears of repentance and be moved by the sincerity of her sighs, so that she may dry his most pure feet with her hair - reminding Him that in the rushing waves of her hair Eve took refuge when she was overcome with fear and shame in paradise. 'Let me kiss Thy most pure feet and water them with my tears and dry them with the hair of my head, which covered Eve and sheltered her in its rushing waves when she was afraid in the cool of the day in paradise.' And immediately after all this about her hair, she exclaims: 'Who can fathom the multitude of my sins or the depths of Thy mercy?' What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!"

"But about Varykino. Of course, to go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or without hope - it's utter madness. But why not, my love? Let's be mad, if there is nothing except madness left to us."

"Our days really are numbered. So at least let us have the advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life, being together for the last time before we are parted. We'll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we've dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us, and to our hopes and to each other. We'll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean. It's not just for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my hidden, forbidden angel, under the skies of war and turmoil, you who arose at its beginning under the peaceful skies of childhood."

"Often since then I have tried to define and give a name to the enchantment that you communicated to me that night, that faint glow, that distant echo, which later permeated my whole being and gave me a key to the understanding of everything in the world.

When you rose out of the darkness of that room, like a shadow in a school girl's dress, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood who you were, with all the tormenting intensity which responded in me: I realized that this scraggy thin little girl was charged, as with electricity, with all the femininity in the world. If I had touched you with so much as the tip of my finger, a spark would have lit up the room and either killed me on the spot or charged me for the whole of my life with magnetic waves of sorrow and longing. I was filled to the brim with tears, I cried and glowed inwardly. I was a mortally sorry for myself, a boy, and still more sorry for you, a girl. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love."

"The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbor of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and the flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, 'supposing him to be the gardener.'"

Ernest Hemingway Quotes

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a type writer and bleed."

"The first draft of anything is shit."

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence."

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred."

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."

"There is no lonelier man in death...than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."

"There's no one thing that is true. They're all true."

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."

"You make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality."

"It is always how to write truly and having found out what is true to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it."

"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."

"You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason."

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."

On the Road - Kerouac Quotes

"We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

"Our battered suitcases were were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."

"We were all thinking we'd never see one another again, and we didn't care."

"I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of men."

"It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul- which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road- calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened."

"I didn't know who he was anymore, and he knew this, and sympathized, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders."

Tennessee Williams Quotes

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."

"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go."

"All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness."

"But now I have changed my mind, or the girl who said 'no' doesn't exist anymore. She died last summer, suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside of her. No, she doesn't live now, but she left me her topaz ring set in pearls...and she said to me when she slipped it on my finger, 'Remember I died empty handed, and so make sure your hands have something in them!' I said, 'But what about pride?' She said, 'Forget about pride when it stands between you and what you must have!' And then I said, 'But what if he doesn't want me?' I don't know what she said then, I think she stopped breathing."

"Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question."

"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with."

"For time is the longest distance between two places. "

"Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person. "

"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action."

"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going."

"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."

"If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it."

"In memory everything seems to happen to music."

"Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other."

"Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you."

"Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation."

"Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself."

"Success and failure are equally disastrous."

"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you."

"To be free is to have achieved your life."

"We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it."

"We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal."

"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."

C.S. Lewis Quotes

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

"Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. "

"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not."

"You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body."

"This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people."

"To be discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be annihilation."

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

"The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle."

"I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

"For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis."

"Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality."

"'We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge--the last thing we know before things become too swift for us.'"

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing... to find the place where all the beauty came from."

"Nothing is yet in its true form."

"Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words."

"I had known Redival's tears ever since I could remember. They were not wholly feigned, nor much dearer than ditchwater.... It's likely enough she meant less mischief than she had done (she never knew how much she meant) and was now, in her fashion, sorry; but a new brooch, much more a new lover, would have had her drying her eyes and laughing in no time."

"Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"

Sylvia Plath Quotes

"The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted."

"Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker,
I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames,
nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you.
Flickering like that,
wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth."

"I smile, a budda,
all wants, desires falling away from me like rings."

"The magnolia, drunk on its own scent."

"The world is blood hot and personal."

Eddie Izzard Quotes

"If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid."

"I like my coffee like I like my women. In a plastic cup."

"What have you been reading, the gospel according to St. Bastard?"

"So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them - France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a flan in a cupboard."

"Never put a sock in a toaster."

"Performance enhancing drugs are banned in the Olympics. Ok, we canswing with that. But, performance debilitating drugs should not bebanned. Smoke a joint and win the hundred meters, fair play for you.That's pretty damn good. Unless someone's dangling a Mars bar off inthe distance."

"I am an evil giraffe, and I shall eat more leaves from this tree than prehaps I should, so that other giraffes may die."

"You know, Catholicism, we believed in the teachings of Cathol, and everything it stood for...

"You piss me off, you Salmon! You're too expensive in restaurants."

"I'm a one-man idiot."

"Squirrels always eat nuts with two hands, always two hands, 'Raar-ra-ra-yum-yum-yum.' And occasionally they stop and they go, as if they're going, 'Did I leave the gas on? No! No, I'm a fucking squirrel!'"

"If women fall over wearing heels, that's embarrassing; but if a bloke falls over wearing heels, then you have to kill yourself! End of your life!"

"Mais, la souris est en dessous la table, le chat est sur la chaise et le singe est … est … le singe est disparu!!!"

"I have wiped the file? I have wiped all the files? I have wiped the INTERNET? I don't even have a modem!"