James > James's Quotes

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“But soon," he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text

“Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.”
― Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

“The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.”
― Helen Craig McCullough, The Tale of the Heike