Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
― Robert Benchley

“THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association—there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren’t trying too hard.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“Mr. Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey” as well as the upcoming NBC period drama “The Gilded Age,” is adapting “Doctor Thorne,” the 1858 novel by Anthony Trollope, for ITV in Britain. The novel is the third in a series of six set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire, and depicts a tumultuous engagement. Like “Downton Abbey,” the story deals with social status, seduction, and illegitimacy.”
― Anonymous

“The bishop did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrated; and that in these days one might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop; but he looked as though he would have done so, but for his apron.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Warden

“You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Warden

“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?”
― Anthony Trollope, The Warden

“The night my girlfriend discovered she wouldn’t be my only bedfellow, she was baffled. “Where I come from, you only sleep with a dog in your bed if you’re single, or your central heating is broken,” she said upon finding Whisky, my 15-pound terrier-spaniel mix, settled in comfortably for the night, her head resting daintily on my pillow.”
― Anonymous

“Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned; and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.”
― Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

“Having a comfortable allowance from his father, he could devote the whole proceeds of his curacy to violet gloves and unexceptionable neck ties.”
― Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

“Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.”
― Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

“Few men do understand the nature of a woman’s heart till years have robbed such understanding of its value.”
― Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

“but things had arranged themselves, as they often do, rather than been arranged by him.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover’s mind if she knew the whole of it.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington

“No one ever on seeing Mr Crawley took him to be a happy man, or a weak man, or an ignorant man, or a wise man.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset

“As for the liberty of the press, like every other privilege, it must be restrained within certain bounds; for if it is carried to a breach of law, religion, and charity, it becomes one of the greatest evils that ever annoyed the community. If the lowest ruffian may stab your good-name with impunity in England, will you be so uncandid as to exclaim against Italy for the practice of common assassination? To what purpose is our property secured, if our moral character is left defenceless? People”
― Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: A Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition)

“Not that there is any thing disagreeable about his person, but there is a total want of that nameless charm which captivates and controuls the inchanted spirit—at least, he appears to me to have this defect; but if he had all the engaging qualifications which a man can possess, they would be excited in vain against that constancy, which, I flatter myself, is the characteristic of my nature. No,”
― Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: A Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition)

“The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Ultimate Collection

“There is hardly any personal defect,’ replied Anne, ‘which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“truth is, I look upon both candidates in the same light; and should think myself a traitor to the constitution of my country, if I voted for either. If every elector would bring the same consideration home to his conscience, we should not have such reason to exclaim against the venality of p____ts.5 But we are all a pack of venal and corrupted rascals; so lost to all sense of honesty, and all tenderness of character, that, in a little time, I am fully persuaded, nothing will be infamous but virtue and public-spirit.”
― Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: A Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition)

“that report has influenced my opinion of his looks____You know we are the fools of prejudice. Howsoever”
― Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: A Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition)

“A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability, or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.”
― Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: A Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition)

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’ ‘I give.’ ‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“By God!’ Christopher exclaimed. ‘I loathe your whole beastly buttered-toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication.…”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV’s sham “breakthrough programs”: Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of “freshness” and “outrageousness” to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages