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"I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great feat of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary."
- Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) -
"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets."
- Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) -
"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?"
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas -
"We want to show him how he may get upsides with life. As I said, either friends or the country, some” - she hesitated - “either some very dear person or some very dear place seems necessary to relieve life’s daily grey, and to show that it is grey. If possible, one should have both."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End -
"Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End -
"They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End -
"Such were Elizabeth Elliot’s sentiments and sensations; such the cases to alloy, the agitations to vary, the sameness and the elegance, the prosperity and the nothingness, of her scene of life, such the feelings to give interest to a long, uneventful residence in one country circle, to fill the vacancies which there were no habits of utility abroad, no talents or accomplishments for home, to occupy."
- Jane Austen (Persuasion) -
High ResolutionCurrently reading. Bought it this afternoon, on page 21, and loving it already.
“Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart. Her friends might be calling her name on the beach, the clambake already under way, but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better”
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"She remembered the flowing marble hair of Rodin’s Danaïde, and felt that everything was of a piece, that the dancer, and the carved woman, and the glassy lit surface of the river outside with its threaded slivers of emerald, opal, amethyst, peridot, hissing and crackling with electricity, electricity, a river of life, a river of death, were all one. It made her want to write, as things delightful and things threatening, both, made her want to write."
- A.S. Byatt (The Children’s Book) -
"He walked over the earth, noting things like a scout or a hunter - a newly broken twig, a disturbed heap of pebbles, an unusually dense clump of brambles, the slotted footprint of a fallow deer, the holes stabbed in turf by predatory beaks. He seemed to be there just - simply - to take all this in, and know it."
- A.S. Byatt (The Children’s Book)
lungs
Inês. I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever met.
