Your favourite quotes

[petitevache]

From "Down Under", by Bill Bryson, which I believe he wrote about Australia to discourage people from going there.


"It isn't possible in a single lifetime to read about all the dangers that lurk under every wattle bush or ripple of water in this wondrously venomous and toothy country."

---

I began to feel a tremor of foreboding - a feeling not lightened when Sonja gave a cry of delight at the sight of a spider by our feet and said: "Hey, look, a redback!" A redback, if you don't know already, is death on eight legs.

---

"Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes."
This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I had ever been given.

---

"So you're telling me," said Alan, for whom all this was new, "that if I waded into the water now I would die?"
"In the most wretched and abject agony known to man," I replied.
"Jesus," he muttered.
"And don't pick up any of the seashells," I added, stopping him from leaning over to pick up a seashell. I explained to him about coneshells - the venomous creatures that lurk inside some of the handsomest shells, waiting for a human hand to sink their vile pincers into."
"Seashells will kill you?" he said. "They've got lethal seashells here?"

---

"My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don't leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days' provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighbourhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn't just going round in a large circle. From time to time I would come to a leafy roundabout with roads radiating off in various directions, each presenting an identical vista of antipodean suburban heaven, and I would venture down the one that looked most likely to take me to civilization, only to emerge ten minutes later at another identical roundabout. I never saw another soul on foot or anyone watering a lawn or anything like that. Very occasionally a car would glide past, pausing at each intersection, the driver looking around with a despairing expression that said: 'Now where the fuck is my house?'

---

Between the merciless sun and the isolation, outback people are not always the most gifted of communicators. We had heard of one shopkeeper who, upon being asked by a smiling visitor from Sydney where the fish were biting, stared at the man incredulously for a long moment and replied: 'In the fucking river, mate, where do you think?'


[I know this is much, but I worship the man. ]

[severinskiss]

"Muffins are for people who don't have the nads to ask for cake for breakfast!" - Kitchen Confidential

[djtoast]

Originally Posted by petitevache

"My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don't leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days' provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighbourhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn't just going round in a large circle.

Yeah, Canberra is NOT an easy place to navigate. Which is bad news if you've just stepped off a plane which you've been on for thirty hours (yes really) and have 45 minutes to get to a wedding at which you're the best man.

That's cutting it fine in a fairly major way already, but what with Canberra's bizarre layout, I eventually got to the venue with ten minutes to get showered and dressed. Zombie, much? Yep.

[xph0ria]

The two best openings in fiction here. First off, from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone

And, of course, the single greatest opening line ever, from Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I get a shiver up my back pretty much every time I read this, for some reason I think it's perfect.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Then there's the final stanza of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

I was gonna put in a quote from Cut by Sylvia Plath, but having just re-read it, I can't find a single quotation to take out, the entire piece is quotable.


*Hopes the copyright police aren't watching this thread*

[purkle]

ooh i love the raven

my fave is:

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde

[Rhythm Junkie]

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mothers death, but because he is the reason I believe in God: I am a Christian because of Owen Meany"

A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irving


"...So I built a time machine..."


What You Make It - Michael Marshall Smith

[endless psych]

There are so many! (heres a selection)

not down with the rock, not down with the roll - Andy Cairns, Therapy? (Endless psychology)

"How can you expect a warm man to understand one who is cold?" - Alexander Solzhemenitsyn

"The bomb only lives as it is falling" - Iain M Banks

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." - Leonard Cohen

"Marxism, in my view, belongs in the history of organized religion. In fact, as a rule of thumb, any concept with a person's name on it belongs to religion, not rational discourse. There aren't any physicists who call themselves Einsteinians. And the same would be true of anybody crazy enough to call themselves Chomskian. In the real world you have individuals who were in the right place at the right time, or maybe they got a good brain wave or something, and they did something interesting. But I never heard of anyone who didn't make mistakes and whose work wasn't quickly improved on by others. That means if you identify yourself as a Marxist or a Freudian or anything else, you're worshipping at someone's shrine." - Noam Chomsky

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion" - Robert Burns

"The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley;" - Robert Burns

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." - Oscar Wilde

"Genius is born--not paid." - Oscar Wilde

"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde

"I found his on the street ©" - Anon. Graffiti, Glasgow (Great Western Road 2003)

[ArtisticPenguin]

"i know this because Tyler knows this"

"Things you used to own, now they own you"

"Tyler was the pawn of the world, everybody's trash"

"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution, toward tragedy and dissolution"

"I am Joe's cold sweat"
""Fight Club""by Chuck Palahnuck



"The last I think; for, O poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend."

"It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?"

"O God!' I screamed, and 'O God!' again and again; for there before my eyes--pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death--there stood Henry Jekyll!"

"I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."

"Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end."

"Dr Jekyll n Mr Hyde"by R.L.Stevenson

[melface]

I'm a fan of some of Nietzche's quotes, even if I don't agree with absolutely every one of his beliefs.


"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. "

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

[Plus1]

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." Oscar Wilde (preface to 'The Picture of Dorian Grey')

[Obsidian]

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
- Richard Bach

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.
- Buddha

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace. -Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

[johnnie walker]

I've always love this quote by aldous huxley in the foreword of the edition of brave new world i have:

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their armies of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude. To make them love is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school-teachers."

Talking of books, ive always loved the start of Hitchhikers:

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

[Exit_W0unds]

Pretty much every single word Dylan Morran has uttered, ever. yesh.

[Obsidian]

As above, so below.
As within, so without.
- unknown circa 3000 Bc
found on the emerald tablet.

[endless psych]

People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles.