Thread: Memorable Passages

“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
― Toni Morrison

“Painter"

"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies--
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says--
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze...”
― Robert Lowell

“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . .”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

O Captain! My Captain!




O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman

“If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I will be gone from here and sing my songs/ In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,/ And carve in letters on the little trees/ The story of my love, and as the trees/ Will grow letters too will grow, to cry/ In a louder voice the story of my love.”
― Virgil

“[He]
Spoke and rose to full height, sword in air,
Then cleft the man's brow square between the temples
Cutting his head in two -- a dreadful gash
Between the cheeks all beardless. Earth resounded
Quivering at the great shock of his weight
As he went tumbling down in all his armor,
Drenched with blood and brains; in equal halves
His head hung this and that way from his shoulders.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“After a while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.”
― Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup”
― Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings

“A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board”
― D.H. Lawrence

“unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning”
― William Carlos Williams

“I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.”
― William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
― Marcel Proust

“There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said
things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that
he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.”
― Marcel Proust

“My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ”
― Samuel Johnson

“There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.”
― Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny

“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.”
― Henry James, The Art of Fiction

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“I understand too well the dreadful act
I'm going to commit, but my judgement
can't check my anger, and that incites
the greatest evils human beings do.”
― Euripides, Medea

“There is nothing worse than a bad woman, and nothing better in any way than a good one.”
― Euripides

“There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, -- or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.”
― Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

“The pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me:
she look’d down—a silence of some moments followed.”
― Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

“Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—”
― John Ashbery

“The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.”
― John Ashbery, Three Poems