Favorite Literary Quotes

"The best laid plans o' mice an' men gang aft agley"

Robert Burns "Ode to a Mouse"

"If music be the food of love, play on..."

Shakespeare TWELFTH NIGHT

Updated On: 5/13/07 at 10:41 AM

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”"
-Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Estragon: (aphoristic for once). We are all born mad. Some remain so.
-Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot


18
Two brothers: one of them wants to take you apart. Two brothers: one of them wants to put you back together. It's time to choose sides now. The stitches or the devouring mouth? You want an alibi? You don't get an alibi, you get two brothers. Here are two Jeffs. Pick one. This is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them. Jeff or Jeff? Who do you want to be? You just wanted to play in your own backyard, but you don't know where your own yard is, exactly. You just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet. You have not made that place yet. You are here. You are here. You're still right here.
-Richard Siken's poem, "You Are Jeff"

Wickedgeek, are you on livejournal? Because I swear I saw those exact quotes posted in the literaryquotes community a few days ago...haha.

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Updated On: 5/14/07 at 11:14 PM

Priest mentioned my favorite, but I'll go ahead and quote the entire passage.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

And from Orwell's 1984:
"To the future or the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what's done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double think -- greetings!"

"Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind -- what then?
...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

As far as poetry, it's too much to quote, but I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee?", Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men."

Updated On: 5/14/07 at 11:30 PM

"All god does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk

"Henceforth and from now on, I decree that whenever something bad happens to me, there shall be bunnies around."
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
Christopher Moore

And nothing, not even my beloved David Sedaris, has made me laugh as hard as The Sims chapter in I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies): True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl by Laurie Notaro.

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"[The United States] was by far the richest and most powerful contry on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by theatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from airplanes.

Most other countries didn't have doodley-squat. Many of them weren't even inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn't anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on f*cking all the time.

F*cking was how babies were made."

---Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

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