Thread: Memorable Passages

“Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. ...Scarlett, always save something to fear— even as you save something to love...”

― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“The baby bat
Screamed out in fright,
'Turn on the dark,
I'm afraid of the light.”

― Shel Silverstein

“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong. ”

― George Orwell, 1984

“She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt or fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials....She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.”

― Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

“The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.”

― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.”

― Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

“Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.”

― Aesop

“We are all the fools of time and terror: Days
Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”

― George Gordon Byron

“Screw your courage to the sticking-place”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? . What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense. Once, said Don Pancracio, Monteforte Toledo dropped this riddle in my lap: a poet is lost in a city on the verge of collapse, with no money, or friends, or anyone to turn to. And of course, he neither wants nor plans to turn to anyone. For several days he roams the city and the country, eating nothing, or eating scraps. He's even stopped writing. Or he writes in his head: in other words, he hallucinates. All signs point to an imminent death. His drastic disappearance foreshadows it. And yet the poet doesn't die.”

― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.”

― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.”

― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Your voice is wild and simple.
You are untranslatable
Into any one tongue.”

― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

And then England – southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass this way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

George Orwell, 'Homage to Catalonia'.

“Thus we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.”

― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

“I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed, rather than what I wanted : and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them ; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that he has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”

― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

to know that when i die that it really is the end. btk.

It is a most profound subject...

Secretariat and the Kentucky Derby:


Sportswriter Mike Sullivan said, in admiration:


"I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. . . That was...just beauty, you know? He started in last place, which he tended to do. I was covering the second-place horse, which wound up being Sham.
It looked like Sham's race going into the last turn, I think. The thing you have to understand is that Sham was fast, a beautiful horse. He would have had the Triple Crown in another year. And it just didn't seem like there could be anything faster than that. Everybody was watching him. It was over, more or less. And all of a sudden there was this, like, just a disruption in the corner of your eye, in your peripheral vision. And then before you could make out what it was, here Secretariat came. And then Secretariat had passed him. No one had ever seen anything run like that – a lot of the old guys said the same thing. It was like he was some other animal out there."

On his way to a still-standing track record (1:59 2⁄5), Secretariat ran each quarter-mile segment faster than the one before it. The successive quarter-mile times were 25 1⁄5, 24, 23 4⁄5, 23 2⁄5, and 23. This means he was still accelerating as of the final quarter-mile of the race. No other horse had won the Derby in less than 2 minutes before, and it would not be accomplished again until Monarchos in 2001.

“It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”

― Trevanian, Shibumi

“Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion.”

― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple”

― Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game