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[I'm reading an edition in English] 'But after that we must guess the riddles, if we are to choose our course rightly,' answered Aragorn.
'Maybe there is no right choice,' said Gimli.

It would be difficult to find in Asia an uglier or more degraded looking race than [Goan mestizos]. The forehead is low and flat, the eyes small, quick, and restless; there is a mixture of sensuality and cunning about the region of the mouth, and a development of the lower part of the face which are truly unprepossessing, not to say revolting.

If you don't desire anuthing, the world is without appeal, it loses its beauty. You lack for everything, yet nothing now triggers the need to devour, to incorporate, to make the beautiful object one's own.

Maigret had the polite smile of a guest who is forced by his hostess to have a second helping of a dish he detests.

There remained about domestic politics something resistant, recondite, some occult irreconcilability that kept all news of it just below my attention level.

Seek for the Sword that was broken:
In Imladris it dwells;
There shall be counsels taken
Stronger than Morgul spells.
There shall be shown a token
That Doom is near at hand,
For Isildur's Bane shall waken,
And the Halfling forth shall stand.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

The only way to live the inextricable while escaping damnation is to extract oneself from "History," to remain self-sufficient and petrify oneself, without hope and without illusion. That is what Faulknerian Negroes do.

To point out and to hide a secret or a bit of knowledge (that is, to postpone its discovery): this is a great part of Faulkner's project and the motif around which his writing is organized.

He stood there while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like honey poured in sunlight, evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights, in the sun.

Town, the world, began to appear as a black cul-de-sac; a place in which he must walk forever more, his whole body cringing and flinching from whispering eyes when he had passed, and when in midmorning he reached the house he sought, the prospect of facing Temple [Drake] was more than he could bear.

He better get on to where he's going, where his women folks can take care of him.

[Julie Forbes] had been created a moment ago. There was no childhood, no past, nothing. I thought of a joke about the mortuaries in California; they supply human ashes to cannibals in the South Seas, who make them flesh by adding water. Instant people, like instant coffee.

Los Angeles is not a city, but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes.

Many Spaniards are willing to admit that they have always had one of the worst administrations in the world. The manner in which this statement is made sometimes perplexes the foreign observer., for the gesture and tone of voice are such that one is led to believe that the Spaniard is actually boasting of his poor government throughout history.

[Spanish liberals] could see that their prostrate country had passed through the enlightenment without being enlightened, had passed through the period of the French Revolution without being reformed, and was passing now through the industrial revolution without being industrialized.

Spain clearly had been left behind by the rest of Europe. Doggedly she had clung to her dream of a Catholic Europe; sternly she had maintained a Catholic Spain; inefficiently she had governed her empire overseas, and ineptly she had wasted her last resources on stupid battles, immoral philanderings, and the building up of the most crowded priesthood on earth. Everybody in Spain was zealous in the avoidance of work.

You are as the yellow leaf.
The messengers of death are at hand.
You are to travel far away.
What will you take with you?

In a way the Beat Generation is a gathering together of all the available models and myths of freedom in America that had existed heretofore, namely: Whitman, John Muir, Thoreau, and the American bum. We put them together and opened them out again, and it became like a literary motif, and then we added some Buddhism to it.

The security for nuclear facilities was always contracted out. The contractors in turn hired locally and supplied their hires with minimum rounds of ammunition. Meaning, you got multimillion dollar state-of-the-art security systems being operated by downsized sheriff's deputies with maybe enough ammo to take down a coyote.

Yet I doubt that [my mother's] happiness with the Russian was ever perfect. Often they quarreled over each other's drinking. These were pointless contentions, since they were both of them maggoty drunk much of the time, but when it came to counting empty bottles, Mother would win the argument, because she drank and disposed of bottles in secret.

"I sure would have liked to have a touch tonight but nothing ... F— poverty, f— it! Hold on, look at that," he added, indicating someone passing in a custom-built car. "He's having fun! Does it seem right that that guy is all dressed up, loaded, going around with that gorgeous [dame], and we got nothing? Those crooks! But the good life will end! That flag will change."

Borgata degli Angeli was deserted at that hour, and between the big boxes of the apartment blocks, built in even rows, four dirt roads covered with garbage could be seen and, above, the cloudless sky where the small moon was slowly setting.

"They stole my shoes," Riccetto yelled again. "And the money too!" he said sticking his hands in his pockets. Although je was still practically asleep, Caciotta, too, looked in his pockets: there wasn't even a lira, and his sunglasses had disappeared.

The war had produced a strangely sentimental maturity in us. It arose from our thinking of life as something that would end abruptly in our twenties; we never even considered the possibility of there being anything beyond those few remaining years. Life struck us as being a strangely volatile thing.

For all that, it was a supreme delight I felt as I walked leaning on his arm. Perhaps because of my frail constitution, I usually felt a premonition of evil mixed in with every joy; but on this occasion I felt nothing but the fierce, intense sensation of his arm: it seemed to be transmitted from his arm to mine and, once having gained entry, to spread out until it flooded my entire body.

Jerome K Jerome: Shakespeare was not like that. When he had got all those people dead in the last scene in Hamlet, he struck a flourish with his pen, and said to himself: 'There! that ought to bring 'em in!'

I went downstairs to Gower Street, up to Sunset, and across Sunset to the Bank of America, where I cashed my check . I walked out with a new sensation, a feeling of bitter joy. Down Sunset half a block was a used car lot. I found a second-hand Plymouth for $300 and drove away. I was a new person, a successful Hollywood writer, without even writing a line. The future was limitless.

Mind you, that happens in almost every investigation. There's a moment when the engine's turning over without connecting, you don't know where to go next. Then something happens, something quite minor, often, that you don't at first consider important.

So what? Guys are useful sometimes, even if you're not really into them. It's like masturbating, but better, 'cos you have to do less of the work. Just think of a man as a dildo with a really big base.