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Quote Me A Piece Of Writing That You Really, Really Love :)

"Sensitive persons can certainly have mood disorders, but should not be mistaken for being chronically depressed only because of a pessimistic view of the future of the world or of their own abilities (a pessimism which may well be accurate, as in the case of depressive realism). Likewise they do not have an anxiety disorder merely because they worry more than the nonsensitive, and they do not have a personality disorder (avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive, etc.) merely because their unusualness has been present throughout their lives as an impediment to the cheerful, resilient functioning expected of most people most of the time.... They cannot shut out the world’s achingly subtle, fleeting beauty or its inexplicable cruelty and suffering. They must find their own meaning in it." -- Elaine N. Aron

and

http://luis.impa.br/chaplin.html

and

http://www.monologuearchive.com/s/shakespeare_001.html
 
"With these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thus speaketh justice UNTO ME: "Men are not equal."

And neither shall they become so! What would be my love to the Superman, if I spake otherwise?

On a thousand bridges and piers shall they throng to the future, and always shall there be more war and inequality among them: thus doth my great love make me speak!

Inventors of figures and phantoms shall they be in their hostilities; and with those figures and phantoms shall they yet fight with each other the supreme fight!"
- Friedrich Nietzsche
 
"The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.
"Upon my word," they will shout at you, "it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall . . . and so on, and so on."
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head agianst it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply, because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength."

-Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky; Notes from Underground
 
"i was a trap for transgressors,
but healing for all who repented transgression;
prudence for the simple,
and a sustained purpose for all those of fearful heart."


dead sea scroll
the thanksgiving psalms II:8
 
He laid emeralds in her eyes,
But I'd already tried
a braclet made of gold
And scarlet thread around her wrist.
Everything was wrong
so we sang sentimental songs
"oh how seldom we belong, but how elegant her kiss."

we painted crooked lines
but danced in perfect time
to a love so much refined,
we know not what it is.
so like a dullen wine we pour
into a grief we'd known before,
but never quite like this,
never quite like this.

All i know now is regret.
it follows like a silhouette
of a cobblestone behind me.
she has nothing left to say
except to innocently ask,
her voice delicate as glass.
"do you see me when we pass?"
But i continue on my way.

-aaron weiss


And to reflect is to regret
Throwing it all away
And apathy my one way street
It took so much from me
Separated by this divide I created through my fears
And in your tears you tried to show
Blind eyes and tell deaf ears

If we can make it through the landslide standing
We'll lift each other up to see the bliss on the horizon
Been looking in from the outside lately
I've seen who I used to be and it's not me

And we can keep healing
And we can keep holding on

I just want to take you where our time won't waste anymore
Through the mountains on the water we'll stay engulfed in one another
And when I can wake up to see the sunrise in you eyes
Then we'll finally be free and I'll know I've made it home

-john henry
 
I saw the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false Azure in the windowpane:
I was the smudge of the ashen fluff -
and I lived on and flew on, in the reflected sky

And from the inside, too, Id duplicate myself,
my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, Id let dark glass,
hang all the furniture above the grass.

Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire
A Poem In For Cantos
cantos 1


thanks leggomyego!
;)
 
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!

from Poe's "A Dream Within A Dream".
 
happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling,
chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on
their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide
of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous
Anna Livia.
He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
_Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoqiq!

from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
 
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Written 1877; published 1918.

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.​

And "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy. 1900/1901.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.​

Amazing sounds. I hope I have respected the visual layouts of the poems with at least modest fidelity.
 
Ecclesiasticus Chapter 34
1st patagraph

The hopes of a man void of understanding are vain and false: and dreams lift up fools. Whoso regardeth dreams is like him that catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind. The vision of dreams is the resemblance of one thing to another, even as the likeness of a face to a face. Of an unclean thing what can be cleansed? and from that thing which is false what truth can come? Divinations, and soothsayings, and dreams, are vain: and the heart fancieth, as a woman's heart in travail If they be not sent from the most High in thy visitation, set not thy heart upon them. For dreams have deceived many, and they have failed that put their trust in them. The law shall be found perfect without lies: and wisdom is perfection to a faithful mouth.
 
This is a sweet thread. I love knowing what words and what concepts other BLers find meaningful.

It was in the clove of seasons, summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born, that the ibis lit in the bleeding tree. The first sentence of Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst is beautiful, imo.

However, there is one piece of writing that I inevitably come back to over and over again.
What a piece of work is man?
How noble in reason
How infinite in faculties,
In form and moving
How express and admirable,
In action
How like an angel
In apprehension how like a God!


I know, it's the only time I'm ever on Hamlet's side. Those lines fall off my tongue in slow motion. The words say so much to me about humanity's possibilities.
 
the current status of nothing, is present reflection of something ~

so wild is the wind, be what shapes the flow.

:)
 
"But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus" - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.
I've only dabbled over Finnegans Wake, but I fell in love with this line. Joyce's ingenuity with puns and word flow are what makes me interested in literature more and more.

I have more, but not off the top of my head.

EDIT: OH! OH! I know another one!

"Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?" - Faulkner
I've only ever read 'The Sound and the Fury' by Faulkner, but I loved it so much. It was so passionate, I felt.
 
Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.

WILLIAM CONGREVE, Love for Love

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence.

LORD BYRON, Don Juan

It is the plain women who know about love; the beautiful women are too busy being fascinating.

KATHARINE HEPBURN, Evan Esar's 20,000 Quips & Quotes

The plainest man who pays attention to women, will sometimes succeed as well as the handsomest man who does not.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

SIGMUND FREUD, Ernest Jones' Sigmund Freud: Life and Work

A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.

HENRIK IBSEN, From Ibsen's Workshop

"Woman" is my slave name; feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity altogether.

ANN SNITOW, "A Gender Diary," Conflicts in Feminism

There is in every true woman's heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.

WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch Book

Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work ... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.

BARBRA STREISAND, People Magazine, May 31, 1993

Every woman should have four pets in her life. A mink in her closet, a jaguar in her garage, a tiger in her bed, and a jackass who pays for everything.

PARIS HILTON

If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.

MARIA EDGEWORTH, Mademoiselle Panache

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra

For I cannot think that GOD Almighty ever made them [women] so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves.

DANIEL DEFOE, The Education of Women

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.

OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.

WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch Book

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter

When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Little Women

What happens is that, as with drugs, he needs a stronger shot each time, and women are just women. The consumption of one woman is the consumption of all. You can’t double the dose.

IAN FLEMING, John Pearson's The Life of Ian Fleming

Every world has faults
This one has too many
Unattainable Female Objects.

DAVID JONATHAN NEWMAN, "U.F.O.," The Light Looks Another Way

Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, letter to Steve Richmond, Nov. 1971

Woman was God's second mistake.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Antichrist

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.

TONI MORRISON, Newsweek, Mar. 30, 1981

You won't regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.

BERNARD CORNWELL, The Winter King

Lone women, like to empty houses, perish.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and Leander

Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.

MARGARET SANGER, "Morality and Birth Control," Birth Control Review, Feb-Mar., 1918

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Jane Eyre

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss

In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

No matter what a woman looks like, if she's confident, she's sexy.

PARIS HILTON

I, Woman, am that wonder-breathing rose
That blossoms in the garden of the King.

ELSA BARKER, The Mystic Rose

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede

I know little of women. But I've heard dread tales.

HAROLD PINTER, Moonlight

O woman, perfect woman! what distraction
Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!

JOHN FLETCHER, Monsieur Thomas

In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, Gene Shalit's Great Hollywood Wit

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

HOWARD ZINN, A People's History of the United States

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow,
A herb most bruised is woman.

EURIPIDES, Medea

The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.

SIGMUND FREUD, The Question of Lay Analysis

Woman's mind
Oft' shifts her passions, like th'inconstant wind;
Sudden she rages, like the troubled main,
Now sinks the storm, and all is calm again.

JOHN GAY, Dione

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Table Talk, July 23, 1827

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

JOHN GRAY, Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus

I'm supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them.

FRANK SINATRA, quoted in The Way You Wear Your Hat

Woman ... is the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of herself.

PAULINE RÉAGE, introduction, The Image

From birth to eighteen, a girl needs good parents, from eighteen to thirty-five she needs good looks, from thirty-five to fifty-five she needs a good personality, and from fifty-five on she needs cash.

SOPHIE TUCKER, Women Who Date Too Much

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it's educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they're going to fall behind.

BARACK OBAMA, Ladies' Home Journal, Sep. 2008

As all-consuming as a young girl's fancies were ... a woman's desires could be twice as dangerous.

TERESA MEDEIROS, The Vampire Who Loved Me

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.... The truth is that male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

JIMMY CARTER, "Losing My Religion for Equality"

A woman calls it giving you a piece of her mind, but our experience has been that she generally winds up by giving you the whole dad-burned thing.

ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES, Poems and Paragraphs

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women ... merely adored.

OSCAR WILDE, The Ideal Husband

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich

It seems to me as a woman's face doesna want flowers; it's almost like a flower itself.... It's like when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want t' hear bells tinkling and interfering wi' the sound.

GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede

Miracle woman ...
Your mouth is wine, and all your tender flesh
An easeful meadow for my weariness.

DONALD EVANS, "For the Haunting of Mauna"

If a woman shows too often the Medusa's head, she must not be astonished if her lover is turned into stone.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk

Wretched
Women!
When you are wholly lovely
Man cannot forget either of his two afflictions,
Soul, or body!

MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT, "Ode in the New Mode"

Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Man-like, but different sex; so lovely fair
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained,
And in her looks; which from that time infus'd
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspir'd
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
She disappear'd, and left me dark; I wak'd
To find her, or for her ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures abjure:
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn'd
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable: On she came,
Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice; nor uninform'd
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites:
Grace was in her steps, heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.

JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

Modern women are just bombarded. There's nothing but media telling us we're all supposed to be great cooks, have great style, be great in bed, be the best mothers, speak seven languages, and be able to understand derivatives. And we don't really have women we're modeling after, so we're all looking for how to do this.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS, Good Housekeeping, Oct. 2010

Though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me. In my case such an expression as "to be fallen for" or even "to be loved" is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was "looked after."

OSAMU DAZAI, No Longer Human

Never mix your women.

CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke

Women's eyes have pierced more hearts than ever did the bullets of war.

WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs

Woman is the only creature in nature that hunts down its hunters and devours the prey alive.

ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims

The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge.

GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
 
When I was born I was black,
When I grew up I was black,
When I'm sick I'm black,
When I go in the sun I'm black
When I'm cold I'm black,
When I die I'll be black.
But you sir...
When you're born you're pink
When you grow up you're white
When you're sick, you're green
When you go in the sun you turn red
When you're cold you turn blue
And when you die you turn purple
And yet you have the nerve to call me coloured


i don't know the author.
 
The last lines of this novel have always resonated with me...

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
 
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come

- William Wordsworth
 
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