Perks of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Csbosky [28 Dec 2009|04:59pm] literaryquotes [beetlethebardz] I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to chose where we come from, we can still chose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we try to feel okay about them.   Some kids look at me strange in the hallways because I don't decorate my locker, and I'm the one that beat up Sean, and cried about it after he did it. I guess I'm pretty emotional.   We accept the love we think we deserve.   And in that moment, I swear, we felt infinite.   He's a wallflower.   I hope it's the kind of second side that he can listen to whenever he drives alone and feel like he belongs to something whenever he's sad. I hope it can be that for him.   I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.   Girls are weird, and I don't mean that offensively. I just can't put it any other way.   I look at people holding hands in the hallways and I try to think about how it all works. At the school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe, and I wonder how many couples will dance to "their song." In the hallways, I see the girls wearing the guys' jackets, and I think about the idea of property. And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they are.   Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.   It was the kind of kiss that I could never tell my friends about out loud. It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life.   So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.   post comment

Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [27 Dec 2009|09:36pm] literaryquotes [genius_nextdoor]        "Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in ours souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood."        "That's rather a broad idea," I remarked.        "One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature," he answered. 2 comments|post comment

Lost Girls by Alan Moore [27 Dec 2009|09:01pm] literaryquotes [mittwochselend] -->"I recall there was something very important, very fragile. But then a terrible thing happened and it got broken. Forever. Nobody could ever mend it." -Alice -->"They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women." -Bauer -->"One's memory is such a curious place. You see, there's the way things seemed, and then there is the way things were...and one is so often the total reverse of the other." -Alice ( Suggestive text behind this cut ) Probably one of the best graphic novels ever written. post comment

[27 Dec 2009|08:54pm] literaryquotes [hazyshaded]  "Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education." Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk  1 comment|post comment

Benjamin Franklin [28 Dec 2009|12:05am] literaryquotes [jcussen] Any society which would give up a little liberty to gain a little security deserves neither and loses both. 4 comments|post comment

[27 Dec 2009|10:47pm] literaryquotes [aflaminghalo] "There are the wheels, Watson. Quick, man, if you love me! And don't budge, whatever happens--whatever happens, do you hear? Don't speak! Don't move! Just listen with all your ears." -Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Dying Detective. post comment

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle [27 Dec 2009|01:39pm] literaryquotes [furius] I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 2 comments|post comment

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [27 Dec 2009|04:28pm] literaryquotes [genius_nextdoor] [ mood | lethargic ] "Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." 2 comments|post comment

[27 Dec 2009|09:01pm] literaryquotes [leavening] One knew nothing. One lived and walked about on the earth or rode through the forests, and so many things looked at one with such challenge and promise, rousing such longing: an evening star, a bluebell, a lake green with reeds, the eye of a human being or of a cow, and at times it seemed as if the very next moment something never seen but long yearned for must happen, as if a veil must drop from everything. But then it passed, and nothing happened, and the riddle was not solved, nor was the secret spell lifted, and finally one became old... and perhaps one still knew nothing, would still be waiting and listening. Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund. 5 comments|post comment

Savushun by Simin Daneshvar [27 Dec 2009|12:35pm] literaryquotes [imfinallyfound] If only the world were in the hands of women, Zari thought. Women give birth. They are creators, and they know the value of their creation, the value of endurance, patience, monotony, and being unable to do anything for oneself. Perhaps because men have never been creators, they'll take any risk to create something. If the world were in the hands of women, how could there be wars? If they take the blessings that you have away from you, what then? post comment

A Lion Among Men, Gregory Maguire [27 Dec 2009|02:06pm] literaryquotes [butterflyangels] We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn't as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness. post comment

Two O'Hara [26 Dec 2009|10:16pm] greatpoets [eugenetapdance] A Raspberry Sweater to George Montgomery It is next to my flesh, that’s why. I do what I want. And in the pale New Hampshire twilight a black bug sits in the blue, strumming its legs together. Mournful glass, and daisies closing. Hay swells in the nostrils. We shall go to the motorcycle races in Laconia and come back all calm and warm. To John Ashbery I can’t believe there’s not another world where we will sit and read new poems to each other high on a mountain in the wind. You can be Tu Fu, I’ll be Po Chu-i and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon, smiling at our ill-fitting heads as we watch snow settle on a twig. Or shall we be really gone? this is not the grass I saw in my youth! and if the moon, when it rises tonight, is empty —a bad sign, meaning ‘You go, like the blossoms.’ 2 comments|post comment

Empire Falls - Richard Russo [27 Dec 2009|01:15pm] literaryquotes [mikekobayashi] "And that's the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower." "In a way, John Voss is like Jesus - blameless, perhaps, but nevertheless the center of all the trouble... Dead? Is that what she means? She hopes not. No one could want this boy, this child who had dangled from a laundry bag inside a dark closet, not to exist. Merely for him not to exist here, because here has proven to be the wrong place. She feels like Jesus' disciples must've felt. They never wanted him crucified, of course, but what a relief it must have been when the stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb, sealing everything shut so they could go back to being fishermen, which they knew how to do, rather than fishers of men, which they didn't. No wonder they didn't recognize him later on the road to Emmaus. They didn't want to, any more than Tick wants to welcome this poor boy back into their midst." -Empire Falls - Richard Russo 2 comments|post comment

[26 Dec 2009|11:51pm] literaryquotes [atmosphere1986]   "What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past." - Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin post comment

The moon versus us ever sleeping together again -- Richard Brautigan [26 Dec 2009|11:40pm] greatpoets [aimlesswanderer] The moon versus us ever sleeping together again by Richard Brautigan I sit here, an arch-villain of romance, thinking about you. Gee, I'm sorry I made you unhappy, but there was nothing I could do about it because I have to be free. Perhaps everything would have been different if you had stayed at the table or asked me to go out with you to look at the moon, instead of getting up and leaving me alone with      her. 16 comments|post comment

Neil Gaiman - American Gods [26 Dec 2009|07:47pm] literaryquotes [nephthys_atoned] "Liberty," boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, "is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses." "Yeah?" said Shadow. "Quoting," said Wednesday. "Quoting someone French. That's who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbril. Hold your torch as high as you want to, m'dear, there's still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg." 2 comments|post comment

albert camus [26 Dec 2009|04:52pm] literaryquotes [cseresznie] "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" "An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts." "The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." 5 comments|post comment

harper lee, to kill a mocking bird [26 Dec 2009|04:50pm] literaryquotes [cseresznie] "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." 3 comments|post comment

aldous huxley [26 Dec 2009|04:48pm] literaryquotes [cseresznie] "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead." "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad." "Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you." 2 comments|post comment

aldous huxley, brave new world [26 Dec 2009|04:46pm] literaryquotes [cseresznie] Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. 2 comments|post comment

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