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Word Talk & Play
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Share a quote from what you're reading...
"Sex without mating is always lies. Humans cannot smell lies. Sad.""Unlike more primitive peoples, intellectual, well-educated humans just pretended the things they didn't understand didn't exist."
--Faith Hunter, Skinwalker
That is a loaded quote, I think. I've been trying to decide which of two ways it could be interpreted. May take a peek at the book synopsis later...
Reggia, if you're referring to message 102, that's actually two different quotes, from different parts of the same book. They're not related to each other in any other way, but I thought they were both interesting.
Oh, okay... but that first one. It seems that it could be speaking of either sex without love OR it could be taken as an anti-contraception argument.
Hmmm! Well, the "speaker" in the first quote is a mountain lion (yes, you read that correctly!), albeit a somewhat unusual mountain lion. In the context, I took it as a reference to sex without a commitment to pair up as mates for life, the way a pair of mountain lions would. Of course, when mountain lions mate, it always results in baby mountain lions; but I didn't think that aspect of it was what was in view here, and I'm not sure this particular mountain lion knows enough about contraception to have any position against it. :-)
Lol, no, one wouldn't expect lions to have a position, er, opinion on that. However, among animals, pairing up/mating is more equated with procreation rather than love but then again -- this is fiction, right? ;-)
Yes, Reggia, this series is definitely fiction! :-)
"'Ever the man in men!' I said between my teeth. 'Let a woman know her proper place: let her milk and sew and spin and bake and bear children, not look beyond her threshold or the command of her lord and master! Bah! I spit on you all! There is no man alive who can face me with weapons and live, and before I die, I'll prove it to the world.... I'll live as I please and die as God wills, but if I'm not fit to be a man's comrade, at least I'll be no man's mistress.'"--Robert E. Howard, "Sword Woman"
"I think human beings have the potential to rise to sainthood or to sink lower than any vermin. Animals, on the other hand, are invariably true to their nature --and nature has placed them at our mercy. It's up to those human beings with conscience to seek to protect our fellow creatures from the members of our species who have no mercy."--John Mayer, "The Pain Lab"
...very much enjoyed the quote! (and I agree with it)
Thanks, Reggia. I agree with it 100%, too!
"I sometimes think the world will end before I ever find him in time. Or the sky would fall, as he would say."...
"What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives."
--Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel
This is a re-read; I love this book. Very mystical in places, and beautiful descriptions.
Tria wrote: ..."Try to avoid men with knives."Definitely good advice! :)
...and I like the other portion, too... "finish growing up; most people never do." LOL, good one, Tria! This continues to be one of my favorite threads -- love to see the tidbits and quotables shared here!
"'I'm a man, nobody special.' But you are, Talgra thought. Everyone is."--Dave Colman-Reese, "Memories of the Sea"
A few quotes from the book I just finished, The Last Stratiote by LeAnn Neal Reilly:"Sharp scent of hot blood
blooms beneath darkening skies.
Justice rends March night."
"As Viktor Frankl said about the Nazis, you'll never own what's inside me. There I'm always free."
"I won't become one of them. I won't. I won't fight fire with fire."
"You know what they say. Whatever men can do, women can do better; backwards, and in high heels."
"It's only common sense, you brick-skulled tub! You obstinate--""I'll be back soon."
"...obstinate, uh, something...something...biting and witty and thoroughly convincing! Hey, if you leave now, you'll miss me being thoroughly convincing!"
--The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
A full stomach, a well-chewed toy, a soft couch--through a dog's eyes, that was a true glory that couldn't be matched, the only heaven in existence.--All Seeing Eye by Rob Thurman, pg. 123
"She didn't want to just be a wife. Yes, there were important responsibilities that went with the role, but it seemed to her also to be the female equivalent of being a husband. A man didn't have to settle for just being a husband, did he?"--Iron Bloom by Billy Wong
Two more quotes from Billy Wong's Iron Bloom:"You can't just go with the flow, you've got to fight for what you believe in! Or else everything that's bad will stay that way."
"She hadn't done a good thing, but she'd done what passed for the right thing. And in this world, she supposed the difference wasn't so great. There needed to be warriors who fought for right, or wrong would prevail, and that would be worse than justified strife."
"And sure, I should pity as well as condemn him, though our ways in the world were so different, knowing as I do his story; which knowledge, methinks, would often lead us to let alone God's prerogative --judgment, and hold by man's privilege --pity."--Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by Richard Doddridge Blackmore
"For it strikes me that of all human dealings, satire is the very lowest, and most mean and common. It is the equivalent in words, for what bullying is in deeds; and no more bespeaks a clever man, than the other does a brave one. These two wretched tricks exalt a fool in his own low esteem, but never in his neighbour's; for the deep common sense of our nature tells that no man of a genial heart, or of any special mind, can take pride in either. And though a good man may commit the one fault or the other, now and then, by way of outlet, he is sure to have compunctions soon, and to scorn himself more than the sufferer."--Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by Richard Doddridge Blackmore
"But those who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving 'Man' whom they have not.""We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please."
"Here it will be enough to say that the Heavenly Society is also an earthly society. Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions. If ever the book which I am not going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of 'the World' will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Molech."
"No doubt there are really pathological conditions which make the temptation to these states abnormally hard or even impossible to resist for particular people. Send those people to the doctors by all means. But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself will admit that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man.... greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney."
--The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis
That mention of Humpty Dumpty brings something vague to mind; I think there is something more to him (those words) that I've meant to look up.Four Loves has been in my "to read" pile for awhile... saw my son-in-law reading it as well. Thanks for the great quote, I think I'll be reading this sooner than later. :-)
You're welcome, Reggia! I'll be interested in your thoughts on that book whenever you finish it.
"Today, many American Christians seem to mix up church and state. They believe the community of genuine believers in America is the people of God --both in heaven and on earth. But the nation of America isn't the people of God; we don't live in a theocracy. The sooner Christians realize this, the sooner the church can make a deeper impact as salt and light in society."--Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, by Paul Copan.
"'Now get along with you. Play ball with Belle, and don't throw too hard. Remember, she's only a girl.' Holding Belle by the hand... Sam went off, and Deborah thought: What a daft thing to say! Only a girl. When she'd proved, and went on proving almost every day of her life, that she --only a girl-- was as good as most men, and better than many."--The Haunting of Gad's Hall, by Norah Lofts.
"My grandmother... had often said that self-pity was the most destructive emotion.""In any case my belief or lack of it doesn't affect the existence of anything. I might not believe that this is Saturday --but it'd still be Saturday for most people."
--The Haunting of Gad's Hall, by Norah Lofts.
I'm beginning to wish we had a LIKE button in this thread... enjoyed that one -- thanks so much for taking the time to share!
"'...somewhere along the line, people decided that Art is Serious and that means you can't use it for escape or pleasure. It has to show sophisticated readers what the world really looks like, you know, ugly, broken and mean. And pointless.... When you finish a serious novel, you're older, wiser, and sadder. Naturally, most people don't read to be edified. They want a little hope and some conviction that there's meaning in what they're going through. Adventure and romance and comedy all depend on hope and conviction. So of course more people buy their books at the supermarket than the high-end bookstore....'I often think about that conversation. Why are stories and poetry soul food? There's no soul in most of what I read. To paraphrase the bard, just sound and fury signifying nothing.
I contemplate what the ancients would think of modern storytelling. The gods were omnipresent in their tales. What would they think of stories that had no gods? Are we really wiser than they are?"
--Saint Sebastian's Head, by LeAnn Neal Reilly.
For me, the philosophy described in the first part of the quote embodies the intellectual, spiritual and moral bankruptcy of what passes for "high brow" literature today. That picture of the world is believed by its proponents to represent the "real" and confer "wisdom," but the Psalmist would call it the height of folly.
It also reveals the truth behind the pretense by the modern critical establishment that they're merely recognizing "literary quality" in their verdicts on which books and authors to praise to the skies and which ones to ignore or belittle. In reality, their verdicts have nothing to do with literary quality, seriousness of purpose, depth of meaning or skill in artistic craftsmanship. Instead, they're knee-jerk applications of an ideological litmus test based on a worldview of nihilism and relativism that only became the state religion of the cultural "elites" in very recent times. According to their view, the entire literary and artistic patrimony of the human race, all of which is based on a conviction of hope and meaning, would have to be dismissed as "low-brow," even if they aren't honest enough to publicly admit it. And that fact alone justifies discerning readers in ignoring their pompous pronouncements as so much wind, and recognizing literary excellence where we see it, in the tradition of the classics that went before.
"Even though he'd been honest from the start, his affection and respect hadn't prevented her hurt. He'd regretted it, regretted adding more pain to a world filled with darkness when all he wanted to do was spread light. If he'd hurt Renee, who'd set herself up, how much more would he hurt a woman that he'd allowed himself to be prematurely intimate with? Was it worth it to quench is body's lusts? Did it really matter that he held back when most other men wouldn't? It did. It mattered to him, and that's who he had to live with. He wouldn't die of need. It wasn't air and water and food. It was a gift of his spirit that he didn't want to degrade through casual use."--Saint Sebastian's Head, by LeAnn Neal Reilly.
"'How did you know Mihlhauser was going to cheat?''I didn't... but I always do. Fighting isn't a game; it's about winning. And sometimes,' I added, thinking of a drooling baby, 'it's really important to win.'" --"Tales from the Slushpile" by Margaret Ball
"I wouldn't think much of a youngster who never felt an urge to kick the God of Things As They Are in his fat belly. It's too bad that most people lose it as they get old and fat themselves. The Establishment is often unendurably smug and stupid; the hands it folds so piously are often bloodstained.And yet...and yet... it's the only thing between us and the Dark Ages that'd have to intervene before another and probably worse Establishment could arise to restore order. And don't kid yourself that none would. Freedom is a fine thing until it becomes somebody else's freedom to enter your house, kill, rob, rape and enslave the people you care about. Then you'll accept any man on horseback who promises to bring some predictability back into life, and you yourself will give him his saber and knout.
Therefore isn't our best bet to preserve this thing we've got? However imperfectly, it does function; and it's ours, it shaped us, we may not understand it any too well but surely we understand it better than something untried and alien. With a lot of hard work, hard thinking, hard-nosed good will, we can improve it.
You will not, repeat not, get improvement from wild-blue-yonder theorists who'd take us in one leap outside the whole realm of our painfully acquired experience; or from dogmatists mouthing the catch-words of reform movements that accomplished something two generations or two centuries ago; or from college sophomores convinced they have the answer to every social problem over which men like Hammurabi, Moses, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Burke, Lincoln, a thousand others broke their heads and their hearts."
--Operation Chaos, by Poul Anderson
"I know that the Church holds that animals have no souls, that God created them things for man's use. St Francis thought otherwise; it is recorded that he preached to birds and called his humble mount 'Brother Donkey.' The whole thing is debatable, but nobody who has loved or been loved by an animal can entirely evade the thought that perhaps those who live close to us, give us their affection and their trust, might be something more than senseless tools."--Crown of Aloes, by Norah Lofts
"Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat." - Death with interruptions by Jose Saramago
"I've discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now. Not to be forever regretting the past, or anticipating the future; but to get the most that you can out of this very instant.... I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose all sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not."--Daddy-Long-Legs, by Jean Webster
"When a good person dies he goes to Paris," Oscar Wilde
Two excellent quotes -- thank you for sharing Werner and Nina. The first brought to mind a cartoon in one of my children's readers a long time ago, there were two birds (a mother and her offspring) perched on high wires above a busy town watching cars and people going to and fro... when the young bird said to its mother, "Where are they all going?" And the mother replied, "Nowhere, they're just going."
I'm kinda on a French kick right now, and just adored the Wilde quote. It will go into my French notebook which is mostly language and expressions but occasional tidbits as well.
Wilde Quote was in the book, "Kitchen Chinese," by Ann Mah
"The adult world was a distant planet inhabited by aliens. We understood so little of it." "Five Quarters of the Orange," by Joanne Harris.
"We could see other fires --great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires-- all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry. Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don't know why that should be, I only know that it is."--Stephen King, Joyland
"Maybe, he thought, it was those on the fringe of any society who always had a raw deal, saw the faults of that society more clearly. Those who lived and flourished within it would see only the benefits and knowing no other way of life, would accept it and regard it as the right way to live."--E. M. Swift-Hook, The Fated Sky
"Most men are easy to control. But women, with their deep loyalties, know how to cover their intentions with smiles. They may be slow to aim the arrow, but when they let it fly, they'll hit the heart every time."--Heather Day Gilbert, Forest Child.
"Saints in heaven --how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime --ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of the cesspools of iniquity...."--Jack London, Martin Eden
“What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?”
Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country
Sinclair Lewis“More and more, as I think about history, I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.”It Can't Happen Here
"I sometimes think they were bound to end, those great establishments, out of their own unwieldiness and waste. And perhaps because, under all the glitter and splendour, there was something rotten, something that made human beings of small account, and wealth of too much.""I'd watched bear-baiting before... but on this evening something happened to me. I stopped being Maude Reed, a spectator up in the stands, and entered into the feelings of the bear. I may be wrong, but I think learning to read had had an effect on me. When you read you must get out of your own skin and into the skin of the people you are reading about, that is the only way to enjoy it."
"...she had achieved what all Christians should, but rarely do, do, the power to look upon death as an incident, not as the end."
--Norah Lofts, The Town House
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Books mentioned in this topic
The Department of Sensitive Crimes (other topics)Time and Again (other topics)
Life of Pi (other topics)
All Quiet on the Western Front (other topics)
The Birds' Christmas Carol (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Sinclair Lewis (other topics)Ben Aaronovitch (other topics)
Stieg Larsson (other topics)
"You were Indiana Jones, Han Solo and Batman combined."
--Rob Thurman, Doubletake, pg 226