J. > J.'s Quotes

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  • #1
    Robert Louis Stevenson
    Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks.
    Robert Louis Stevenson

  • #2
    Vladimir Nabokov
    “While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”
    Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

  • #3
    Tom Stoppard
    “Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.”
    Tom Stoppard

  • #4
    Henry James
    “It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench, that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow.
    This was a subject on which it was, to the best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth. Such a triumph had its honour even for a man of other triumphs--a man who had reached fifty, who had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means, who had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without breathing it, and who, last but not least, had judged himself once for all.”
    Henry James

  • #6
    James Joyce
    “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
    James Joyce, Dubliners

  • #7
    Groucho Marx
    “I’ll put off reading Lolita for six more years until she turns 18.”
    Groucho Marx

  • #8
    Samuel Beckett
    “The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
    Samuel Beckett

  • #9
    Alfred Tennyson
    “A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.”
    Alfred Tennyson

  • #10
    Jorge Luis Borges
    “The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.”
    Jorge Luis Borges

  • #11
    Joseph Conrad
    “To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”
    Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  • #13
    Alfred Hitchcock
    “There is nothing so good as a burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.”
    Alfred Hitchcock

  • #14
    Raymond Chandler
    “At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”
    Raymond Chandler

  • #15
    Patricia Highsmith
    “A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity.”
    Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

  • #16
    Robert Baden-Powell
    “If it were not for the depressing heat and the urgency of the work, one could sit down and laugh to tears at the absurdity of the thing, and under the circumstances it is a little wearing. But our motto is the old west coast proverb, Softly, softly, catchee monkey; in other words, don't flurry; patience gains the day.”
    Robert Baden-Powell

  • #17
    Anthony Burgess
    “Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”
    Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

  • #18
    Franz Kafka
    “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
    Franz Kafka

  • #19
    Alfred Hitchcock
    “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
    Alfred Hitchcock

  • #20
    Lafcadio Hearn
    “There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature, I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity”
    Lafcadio Hearn

  • #21
    Josephine Tey
    “If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.”
    Josephine Tey

  • #22
    Kingsley Amis
    “Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”
    Kingsley Amis

  • #23
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    “There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
    Kazuo Ishiguro

  • #24
    Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
    “In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”
    Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

  • #25
    Georges Simenon
    “The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.”
    Georges Simenon, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

  • #26
    James M. Cain
    “I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.”
    James M. Cain

  • #27
    Gustave Flaubert
    “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
    Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

  • #28
    Gustave Flaubert
    “What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?”
    Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

  • #29
    Dashiell Hammett
    “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.”
    Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

  • #30
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
    Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  • #31
    James  Thomson
    “How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!
    How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel
    Their thick processions of supernal lights
    Around the blue vault obdurate as steel!
    And men regard with passionate awe and yearning
    The mighty marching and the golden burning,
    And think the heavens respond to what they feel.

    Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream
    Are glorified from vision as they pass
    The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;
    Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
    To restless crystals; cornice dome and column
    Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;
    Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.

    With such a living light these dead eyes shine,
    These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
    We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
    Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
    Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;
    There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,
    They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.”
    James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

  • #32
    Christopher Hitchens
    “Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.”
    Christopher Hitchens



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