Quote Bucket

Discussion in 'Literature' started by LARiA, Apr 18, 2012.

  1. Misty gimme kiss

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    Gladys sipped her drink. “And what happened to your boy who wanted money?” she asked me. “Did he change you, too?”

    “He was a mistake,” Lila said quickly.

    “He was,” I said, but this didn’t help, or the drink I finished. It’s one thing to forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then? That boy Adam had left a spiral scar as he tripped through my life, but you’d expect a clumsy passage from someone who showed up carrying his shoes. I looked at Lila, who couldn’t drink what was in front of her. I thought we wouldn’t have times like this, me drunk and her sober, until she was pregnant and a boy was gone from my life. But instead she was sick and he was gone from my life. “He’s dead,” I said.

    “He’s nothing,” Lila corrected me. “He’s less than nothing.”

    “You can’t be less than nothing,” I said. “Thank God. He killed himself without caring about me. He shed me like skin.” I heard the talk. You can be talking, just talk, and you wish you were conveying something at the same time, but you’re not. How could you be? “He said he felt happy whenever he looked into my eyes,” I said, “but he scarcely ever did. I said I’d hold him all night and make sure nothing happened to him, and sure enough, nothing did. I thought I’d keep him because everybody should have a true love you can’t be with, but he lay in the bathtub and got gone, all guilty over something I didn’t even know about. Six years. I thought I’d be doing this with Lila when she was pregnant, not sick. Point No Point, we always said. Point No Point or bust someday.” I stood up and rested my hand on the wrecked TV just for peace and quiet. The ceilings were mirrored, with cameras behind them probably to keep all the money safe, and still I didn’t have any. “How dare he admit there’s no point?” I said, and sat down again to drink Lila’s Old Pal. “There’s no point to drinking either, but look—I’m doing it.”
    -- Adverbs by Daniel Handler
     
  2. ButcherKnifeBetty Merlin's Housekeeper

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    -The Doctor, Dr. Who
     
  3. ButcherKnifeBetty Merlin's Housekeeper

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    - V, V for Vendetta
     
  4. Llave Superless Moderator

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    "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
    - Martin Luther King Jr.

    "Men are defined by their strength. True men are defined when they have none left."
     
  5. Misty gimme kiss

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    In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

    I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak these truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
    -- The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde
     
  6. LARiA Twilight Town Denizen

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    "If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?"
    ― Steven Wright
     
  7. Styx That's me inside your head.

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    "A man chooses; a slave obeys."
    - Andrew Ryan (BioShock)
     
  8. ButcherKnifeBetty Merlin's Housekeeper

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    "those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war."
    -Winston Churchill
     
  9. Cherry Berry Chaser

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    “If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.”

    J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
     
  10. Shera Wizard Merlin's Housekeeper

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    "Trust No One"
    -William McIntyre and some other plot characters
     
  11. LARiA Twilight Town Denizen

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    The world was likewise puzzled. He joined the Territorials—hitherto he had held off on the ground that the country can only be saved by conscription. He supported the social work even of the Church. He gave up Saturday golf in order to play foot-ball with the youths of the College Setdement in South London, and his Wednesday evenings in order to teach arithmetic and boxing to them. The railway carriage felt a little less suspicious. Hall had turned serious, what! He cut down his expenses that he might subscribe more largely to charities—to preventive charities: he would not give a halfpenny to rescue work. What with all this and what with his stockbroking, he managed to keep on the go.

    Yet he was doing a fine thing—proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn’t a God, he hadn’t a lover—the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heaven.
    -- Maurice by E.M. Forster


    (I hope Misty does not mind that I thieved her formatting; consider it a compliment on her sense of aesthetic.)
     
  12. Ars Nova Just a ghost.

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    "Life is just looking for someone who thinks your brand of crazy is adorable and sexy."
    ~ Aidan Bailey

    "It's not about channeling energy into productive things. It's about producing something with that which your energy goes to."
    ~ Justis Mills

    "A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book 'means' thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it."
    ~ James Branch Cabell

    "All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination?"
    ~ Carl Jung

    "Imagine that over the course of someone's life, they are truly capable of every conceivable action at any moment, and did indeed take each of those actions in different branching realities. Doesn't a scenario like that deaden a person's agency just as much as one where their fate is decidedly etched in stone as a single path of unavoidable decisions? Who exactly is that person who can and does take all conceivable actions, other than someone perfectly generic, who only appears to have unique predilections and motives when you examine the arbitrary path they happen to occupy?"
    ~ Aranea Serket, Homestuck

    "Spiritual has nothing to do with Christianity anyway. It has been here since the beginning of time."
    ~ Max Cavalera

    "You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
    ~ C.S. Lewis

    "Everything is nothing, with a twist."
    ~ Kurt Vonnegut

    "The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."
    ~ Niels Bohr

    "I love everything about Tokyo, even the things I hate."
    ~ Rhyth, Jet Set Radio Future
     
  13. LARiA Twilight Town Denizen

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    "People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel."
    -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    "Never trust a warm bed, a happy life. Better to tear down the house yourself before someone beats you to it."
    -- Selina Kyle

    "Despereaux stood before the Mouse Council, and he realized that he was a different mouse than he had been the last time he faced them. He had been to the dungeon and back up out of it. He knew things that they would never know; what they thought of him, he realized, did not matter, not at all."
    -- The Tale of Despereaux by Kate Dicamillo
     
  14. Ars Nova Just a ghost.

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    "The way I see it... science helps us in our struggle to understand how. But stories... Stories took care of us a lot longer than science did. Stories tell us why."
    ~ Iris Bellweather, Broodhollow

    "We are all made of the same atoms, non? There is no such thing as the object... What separates the air from the bar? The floor from the chair? The cognac from me? ...Ah, there is an answer to that one! The glass!"
    ~ Cadavre, Broodhollow
     
  15. Ghost King's Apprentice

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    Osho - "Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence."

     
    Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.
    – Elbert Hubbard
     
  16. Ars Nova Just a ghost.

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    "It's not about channeling energy into productive things. It's about producing something with that which your energy goes to." ~Justis Mills

    Posted on request :L
     
  17. Ghost King's Apprentice

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    I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
    Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

    Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.
    Mark Twain

    There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
    Ernest Hemingway
     
  18. . : tale_wind Ice to see you!

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    "Decisions determine destiny." —Thomas S. Monson

    "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." —Douglas Adams

    "Everyone can create. You don’t need money, position, or influence in order to create something of substance or beauty." —Dieter F. Uchtdorf

    "Life isn't about finding yourself; it's about creating yourself. And now, there's an app for that, too." —me

    "Magic is the stuff that science hasn't made boring yet." —my friend

    "When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change." —Avatar Aang

    "Everybody finds love in the end." —Utada Hikaru

    "We all owe our lives to sex." —one of my other friends

    "We do have a lot in common—the same earth, the same sky. Maybe if we started looking at what's the same instead of what's different...well, who knows?" —Meowth

    "Nobody important? Blimey, that's amazing. You know, in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anybody who wasn't important before." —The Doctor
     
  19. Cherry Berry Chaser

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    You is kind. You is smart. You is important.

    ~Aibileen Clark

    It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.

    ~John Green

    So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.
    ~ Robert Frost
     
  20. Ghost King's Apprentice

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    Why do you think people like reading and playing video games so much? Perhaps it is because, if just for a moment, they get to live in a different world.
    - Alex Barnett

    I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
    – Thomas A. Edison

    Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
    -Abraham Lincoln

    "Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from."

    - Jodie Foster