Great quotes in literature

From A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.
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Just a little plug for children's literature that can blow a kid's mind. :)
 
War and peace- book nine- chapter I
From the close of the year 1811 intensified arming and concentrating of the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces- millions of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army- moved from the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.
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"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." -- Sherlock Holmes in Part 1 Chapter 1 of A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
 
"A man in the blue-grey jail uniform came along between the
cells reading numbers. He stopped in front of mine and unlocked
the door and gave me the hard stare they think they have to
wear on their pans for ever and for ever and for ever. I'm a cop,
brother, I'm tough, watch your step, brother, or we'll fix you up
so you'll crawl on your hands and knees, brother, snap out of it,
brother, let's get a load of the truth, brother, let's go, and let's not
forget we're tough guys, we're cops, and we do what we like
with punks like you."

Raymond Chandler
 
A tale of two cities - Charles Dickens


"If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night,

'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?"
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Two quotes from Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince" although this book as it is a philosophical novel( a book about a mad love affaire, Plato and Shakespeare) has nothing but passages that worth to be quoted.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. It is at once one of the ugliest and one of the most pardonable. In fact, in relation to its badness it is probably the most pardonable. Zeus, who smiles at lovers' oaths, must also condone their pangs and the venom which these pangs engender.Some Frenchman said that jealousy was born with love, but did not always die with love. I am not sure whether this is true. I would think that where there is jealousy there is love.
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[...]
The idea that one recovers from being in love is, of course, by definition ( by my definition anyway) excluded from the state of love. Besides, one does not always recover.
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"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

"100 years of soltitute"

"Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All."

Alexcander Pope, "The Dunciad".
 
"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n" ---Satan in "Paradise Lost" I: 263 by Milton(I first learned about this quote from the Star Trek episode called the "Space Seed" starring Ricardo Montalban as Khan)

"Most people who pass through this world wish for nothing better than worldly success: the only heaven they think about is on earth." ---- Lady Holy Church in "Piers the Ploughman" I: 7-9 by William Langland(from the translation by J.F. Goodridge). Once I became an atheist, this applied to me. Atheism liberated me from the belief that extremely selfless behavior would benefit me in the end. [edited to add: Now that I think about it, it applied to me even when I was a Christian.]
 
"And this[i.e. the Thames] also, " said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places on the earth."......."I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago[I have not included the middle part to make the quote shorter] Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga - perhaps too much dice, you know - coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed around him, - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men." - Marlow in "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad.
 
"and Olaf on what once were knees
does almost ceaselessly repeat
there is some ◊◊◊◊ I will not eat"

e.e. cummings
 
"Good hunting!" said Phao, as though Akela were still alive, and then over his bitten shoulder to the others: "Howl, dogs! A Wolf has died to-night!"
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-The Second Jungle Book (Death of Akela), Rudyard Kipling

Always brings tears to my eyes.

One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.
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-Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love , Robert A. Heinlein

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, withou a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
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-Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein

And a personal favorite, though slightly off topic...

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
-Søren Kierkegaard
 
" Gosh, what big words you know, Mister. I mean "Doctor"".
"Mister is correct. On this campus it is swank to assume that everybody holds a doctorate. Even I have one, Oh.. Do you know what that stands for?"
"Doesn't everybody? I have a Ph.D too. "Piled Higher and Deeper".
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Robert Heinlein, The Number of the Beast.
 
"The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

(First line of "The Go-Between", L. P. Hartley.)



"In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea."

("A Forsaken Garden", Swinburne.)
 
Mr Manifesto said:
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kahn, daruber muB mann schweigen", Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
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"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." [Rough translation: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.]

Some may claim that Wittgenstein waited far too long to say that. :-) It comes at the end of his book.

Actually I don't believe that there's a sharp line between what we can say (have the capability to say) and what we can't, certainly not one that we can know precisely ahead of time. Most of us speak and write not because we have something to say but in hopes of saying something. We give it a try, starting at best with a vague notion of what we "can" say. Only afterwards, when we've submitted what we've said to rigorous analysis, do we know to what degree we succeeded (and in some cases it will still be a matter of personal opinion).

I would add a literary quotation of my own, but to quote Bartleby, "I would prefer not to." (Also I'm an American, so all the books that I've read have already been mentioned. ;-).
 
"Lord Emsworth, that amiable yet bone-headed peer, stood at his window drooping like a wet sock."

P.G. Wodehouse, 'The Crime Wave at Blandings Castle'

'My name is Psmith. The 'p' is silent, as in ptarmigan and pneumonia.'

P.G. Wodehouse, 'Leave it to Psmith'
 
The Erasmus line and the name Psmith remind me of this one:

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." [Logan Pearsall Smith]
 
"We...speak...with tongues of steel rather than of flesh."

Chessmen of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs
(How a Warrior from the nation of Gathol would 'converse' with their enemies.)
 
Do Comics count?

If so, here's my favourite quote from The Sandman:


"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the Emperor remains an Emperor."

-- The Sandman "The Kindly Ones"
 
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