Quotes from my favorite books

[Rev. Rye]

Here are three quotes each from some of my favourite books:

"Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute."
"It has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'"
" I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."
_____The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
" If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard."
"It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
__________The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

"Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed."
"Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say."
"All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors."
_________The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"
" We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."
" In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. "
_____________Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

"And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?""
"What's happening here? What's going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: "Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out!...Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born...Born? Get sheep over side...women and children to armored car...orders from Captain Zeep.""
"All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along."
_________Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter Thompson)

"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure."
"Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter."
"I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't."
___________The Stranger (Albert Camus)

"When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. "
"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
"Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to. Really, there is not much to say. He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life."
____________A History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

"“Betty took him for a walk in the zoo and he was amused by her evident belief in the curative power of animals. She seemed to think that it must steady him to look at a buffalo.”
"He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.”
"“At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.”
____________Miss Lonelyhearts (Nathanael West)

"She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play."
"Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!"
"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. And that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. And that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. And that nobody is wished to see my dead body. And that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. And that no flours be planted on my grave. And that no man remember me. "
____________Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy)

Maybe I should add a few more triads from other novels in a later post.