Favourite Book Quote

Adamantium

Following on from the "favourite movie quote" thread, comes the highly original favourite book quote, paragraph thread. :eek:

I'll start

World War Z by Max Brooks

Do you understand economics? I mean big­time, prewar, global capitalism. Do you get how it worked? I don’t, and anyone who says they do is full of ****. There are no rules, no scientific absolutes. You win, you lose, it’s a total crapshoot. The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” ****in’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

Sunnyisland

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

Pabzzz

‎"So I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you".

Christopher Hitchens in "Letters to a Young Contrarian"

One of the greatest minds this world will ever see.

Legend

Frank Black

"There's no use in denying it: this had been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine."

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

doomed

"Some men are born to mediocrity, some achieve mediocrity, some have mediocrity thrust upon them. Major Major Major Major had all three"

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

cabbage kid

The dilettantes who frequent Lady Tantamount's society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age. Marjorie has left her family to live with Walter; Walter is in love with the cold-hearted Lucy who devours every man in sight; the repulsive Spandrell deflowers young girls for the sake of entertainment and all the while everyone is engaged in dazzling and witty conversation.

The blurb for Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley.

latenia

“In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Plazaman

black francis wrote: »

"There's no use in denying it: this had been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine."

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Coincidentally, Bear Grylls book starts exactly the same way.


“In that book which is my memory,
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,
Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”

― Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova

SuperGrover

“He saw merchants trading, princes hunting, mourners wailing for their dead, whores offering themselves, physicians trying to help the sick, priests determining the most suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children—and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture”

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

Jacksquat

One of the guides many gems

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough." Douglas Adams, HGTTG

counterlock

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold

Best opening line of any book I've read.
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson

stimpson

counterlock wrote: »

Best opening line of any book I've read.
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson

You stopped before the best bit:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all this for the trip, but once you get locked in a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

biko

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.

People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.

The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.

SEPT 23 1989

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

The King of Moo

"Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man."

- Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men.


"The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system."

- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier.


“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London.


“Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?”

- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London.

faceman

"The End"

Not sure which book i read it in.

AngryBollix

" pound me pound me pound me "

Cytherea in a squirt porn movie

AngryBollix

"The cat sat on the mat"

Ann and Barry

Sergeant

“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”

Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

bonzodog2

“ Sometimes I wish I had a cat. All I've ever had was a head, and that the seagulls took.” .

The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

chin_grin

"Don't Panic." - Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Deus Ex Machina

"You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately"

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer.

SEPT 23 1989

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times

• “Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

Jake Chambers "The Dark Tower"

beans

"There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto"

Cormac McCarthy, 'Blood Meridian'

wendell borton

"No man can sleep more than one bed at a time, nor eat two meals at a time, nor have more than twenty-four hours in the day - no matter how much money he has. But people won't see the sense of that. They think of money alone, and don't seem to realise that money was never a bit of use to a man until he got rid of it."
The Tailor

The Tailor and Antsy - Eric Cross

dr.bollocko

stimpson wrote: »

You stopped before the best bit:

The wave speech still leaves hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bull****, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Mine would usually be a random page of on the road.

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

Conall Cernach

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening." - A Clockwork Orange.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." - The Hobbit.

Turtyturd

'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.'

-George Orwell, Animal Farm.

--Kaiser--

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days where there rode no soul save he. He's left behind the pinewood wounty and the evening sun declines beyond an endless swale and the dark falls here like a thunderclap and the cold wind sends the weeds to gnashing. The nigh sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that there numbers are no less

Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian