Dean > Dean's Quotes

“Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

--The Sensible Thing”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories

“Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“I am a dragon. America the beautiful, like you will never know.”
― Barry Hannah, Airships

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

“Books can be burned,” croaked Black.

“They have a way of rising from the ashes,” said Andreus.”
― James Thurber, The Wonderful O

“Pippi was sure that her mother was now up in Heaven, watching her little girl through
a peephole in the sky, and Pippi often waved up at her and called, "Don't you worry about me. I'll always come out on top.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.

(on reading the Cynewulf lines about the star Earendel)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“She taught them all a song. Learned from a para on French leave from the fighting in Algeria:

Demain le noir matin,
Je fermerai la porte
Au nez des années mortes;
J’irai par les chemins.
Je mendierai ma vie
Sur la terre et sur l’onde,
Du vieux au nouveau monde . . .

He had been short and built like the island of Malta itself: rock, an inscrutable heart. She’d had only one night with him. Then he was off to the Piraeus.
Tomorrow, the black morning, I close the door in the face of the dead years. I will go on the road, bum my way over land and sea, from the old to the new world. . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“I who never knew what it was the broom tree meant now wonder to find the road to Sonohara led me so far from my way.”
― Murasaki Shikubu, The Tale of Genji

“Rain in a foreign city is different from rain in a place you know. I can’t explain this, while snow is the same everywhere.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“No - the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything's holy - everything, even me.”
― John Steinbeck

“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

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“The setting sun that lights the tips

Of TV's giant paperclips

Upon the roof;

The shadow of the doorknob that

At sundown is a baseball bat

Upon the door,

The cardinal that likes to sit

And make chip-wit, chip-wit, chip-wit

Upon the tree;

The empty little swing that swings

Under the tree: these are the things

That break my heart.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
― Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson