Favorite Quotes 

 Karl Marx (1818~1883): “We have adopted religion as an opiate to soothe the pain of existence.”

 Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann(1875 ~1955)

Here I sit, a doubter, not because I have believed nothing, but because I consider everything possible.

When you are young in the flesh, morning revealed to you that your most ardent happiness was deception and illusion. You will have to grow very old in order to learn that, by way of compensation, your bitterest suffering was also deception and illusion. Thus life’s benefits were always held in check by its drawbacks and its drawbacks compensated for , by its benefits, so that in purely mathematical terms the result was naught and nothing, but in practical terms, it is the wisdom of balance and of middling perfection – in light of which neither jubilation nor curses were in order, but rather contentment. For perfection did not consist of one-sided amassing benefits, just as life would be impossible if it is naught but drawbacks. Instead, life was made up of the mutual cancellation of benefits and drawbacks, resulting in nothing which was to say, contentment.

To be frank, we are dismayed at the grudging brevity of an account that does so little justice to life’s bitter and exacting particularity as our source does here, and seldom have we been more acutely aware than in this instance of how unfair laconic abridgment is to truth. Not that anyone should think we are indifferent to the censure that, whether spoken or perhaps left unspoken out of our courtesy, hangs in the air concerning our entire account.  … Would such a haughty (proud) woman, then, speak that way tradition has her speak? And yet, she did speak that way, spoke those very words, spoke them repeatedly once her pride had been fully broken by passion. … But tradition neglects to add how long a time passed during which she would rather have bitten off her tongue than to have spoken them. .. But can we say that the woman within whom all this takes place is responsible for it? Does she do it out of deviltry perhaps? Does she even know of it, that is, other than through the torment of her passion, which then reveals itself in external charms?

As we peer back into the past, how brief is our own life compared to the world’s great depths of time. And yet, when scanning private and intimate matters, our eye floats dreamily back into youthful distance and loses itself just as it does when directed to the grand scale of human life- for it perceives the unity of one repeated in the order.

 

The toilers of the sea by Victor Hugo(1802 ~ 1885)

 Penetrate into the remote fastnesses where the mountains offer the greatest solitude and the forests the greatest silence; Choose, let us say, Andernach and its surroundings; visit the obscure and impassive Laacher See, so unknown that it is almost mysterious. No tranquility can be found more august than this; universal life is here in all its religious serenity; no disturbances; everywhere the profound order of nature's great disorder; walk with a softened heart in this wilderness; it is as voluptuous as autumn; wander about at random; leave behind you the ruined abbey, lose yourself in the moving peace of the ravines, amid the song of birds and rustle of leaves; drink fresh spring water in your cupped hand; walk, meditate, forget.

The solitude produces men of talents or idiots… The thinker wills what happens, the dreamer accepts it. Solitude adds a quality to simple people, and gives them a certain complication. They become imbued unconsciously, with a sacred awe. The shadowy area in which Gilliatt’s mind constantly dwelt was composed, in almost equal parts, of two elements, both of them obscure but very different from each other: within him ignorance and weakness; without, mystery and immensity. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will momentarily reveal the invisible and then close up again. Such visions sometimes have a transfiguring effect, turning a camel driver into a Mohammed, a goat girl into a Joan of Arc. Solitude brings out a certain amount of sublime exaltation. At certain places and at certain times to look at the sea is a dangerous poison; as is, sometimes, to look at a woman. If you can manage a boat, you can manage a woman. They both ruled by the moon and the wind.

Tolerant people are sometimes intolerant, as moderate people are sometimes violent in their opinions.

The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro(1954 ~)

One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better and be grateful. The evening's the best part of the day. I should cease looking back so much. I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of the day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause of pride and contentment.

Introduction by Michael Cunningham to "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann"

A novel in its earliest form, before it begins to be rendered into language, is a cloud of sorts that hovers over the writer's head, a mystery born with clues to its own meanings but also, at its heart, insoluble. One hopes- a novel is inevitably an expression of unreasonable hopes- that the finished book will contain not only characters and scenes but a certain larger truth, though that truth, whatever it may be, is impossible to express fully in words. It has to do with the fact that writer and reader both know, beneath the level of active consciousness, something about being alive and being mortal, and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us. We are creatures whose innate knowledge exceeds that which can be articulated. Although language is enormously powerful, it is concrete, and so it can't help but miniaturize, to a certain extent, that which we simply know. All the writers I respect want to write a book so penetrating and thorough, so compassionate and unrelenting, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the spectacle of life itself. And all writers I respect seem to know (though no one likes to talk about it) that our efforts are doomed from the outset. Life is bigger than literature.

 "The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot
"(T)here is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens
to get on a wrong scent, and sagacity persuaded that men usually act
and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in
view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game. Plotting
covetousness and deliberate contrivance in order to compass a selfish
end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they
demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners
to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our
neighbors without taking so much trouble: we can do it by lazy
acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we
hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralised by small
extravagances, by maladroit flatteries and clumsily improvised
insinuations."

"All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to
the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the
mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and
that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all
the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing
insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular
representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment
solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice
by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting
patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure
themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a
hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense
enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human."

"Out of Africa" by Isak Dinesen
"The lack of prejudice in the Natives is a striking thing, for you
expect to find dark taboos in the primitive people. It is due, I
believe, to their acquaintance with a variety of races and tribes, and
to the lively human intercourse that was brought from East Africa,
first by the old traders of ivory and slaves, and in our days by the
settlers and big-game hunters....
There was a young Kikuyu by the name of Kitau, who came in from the
Kikuyu Reserve and took service with me. He was a meditative boy, an
observant, attentive servant and I liked him well. After three months
he one day asked me to give him a letter of recommendation to my old
friend Sheik Ali bin Salim, the Lewali of the Coast, at Mombasa, for
he had seen him in my house and now, he said, he wished to go and work
for him. I did not want Kitau to leave just when he had learned the
routine of the house, and I said to him that I would rather raise his
pay. No, he said he was not leaving to get any higher pay, but he
could not stay.  He told me that he had made up his mind, up in the
Reserve, that he would become either a Christian or a Mohammedan, only
he did not know which. For this reason he had come and worked for me,
since I was a Christian, and he had stayed for three months in my
house to see the testurde - the ways and habits, - of the Christians.
From me he would go for three months to Sheik Ali in Mombasa and study
the testurde of the Mohammedans; then he would decide. I believe that
even an Archbishop, when he had had these facts laid before him,
would have said, or at least have thought, as I said; "Good God,
Kitau, you might have told me that when you came here."
 

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy(1828-1910)

One must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy.

"If there is a God and future life there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth but have lived and shall live forever, there in the whole," said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky.

He (Prince Andrew) saw that high everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield; something that was best within him suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful in his soul. It vanished as soon as he returned to the customary conditions of his life, but he knew that this feeling which he didn't know how to develop, existed within him. His meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew's life. Though outwardly he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a new life.

Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1935~)

All that was the matter with her was nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness.

The real troubles in the world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women.

Snow Falling on Cedars by Jay Carr

I say... as an older man I am prone to ponder matters in the light of death in a way that you are not. I am like a traveler descended from Mars who looks down in astonishment at what passes here. And what I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation. What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty. We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears. And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this.

The Unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera (1929~)

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person in the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each other.

One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1928 ~)

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. The revelation... that is possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light...rescue Reveca from her slough of misery, not out of hatred or out of love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude.

The past is a lie and memory has no return... every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas(1802~1870)

Dante said, "I was reflecting upon the enormous degree of intelligence and ability you must have employed to reach the high perfection to which you have attained; if you thus surpass all mankind while but a prisoner, what would you not have accomplished free?  Abbe replied, "Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies, it needs trouble and difficulty and danger to hollow out various mysterious and hidden mines of human intelligence."

To learn is to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other. Philosophy is reducible to no rules by which it can be learned; it is amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven.

All earthly ills yield to two all-potent remedies, time and silence.

Have you never experienced for anyone that sudden and irresistible sympathy which made you feel as if the object of it had been your old and familiar friend, though, in reality, it was the first time you had ever met? Nay, further, have you never endeavored to recall the time, place, former intercourses; and failing this attempt, have almost believed that your spirits must have held converse with each other in some state of being anterior to the present, and that you are only now occupied in a reminiscence of the past?

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die that we may appreciate the enjoyment of life. All human wisdom is contained in these two words "wait and hope."

Les miserable by Victor Hugo(1802 ~ 1885)

Cities produce ferocious men because they produce corrupt men. Mountains, the forest, and the sea make men savage; they develop fierceness but usually without destroying the human.

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though that may be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment. The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material amelioration. Knowledge is a viaticum, thought is of primary necessity, not only grain but truth is nourishment. Through fasting from knowledge and wisdom, reason becomes emaciated. As with stomachs, we should pity mind that does not eat. If there is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread it is hunger for light.

There was joy everywhere around me, the depths of my soul is still black. It is not enough to be happy; we must be satisfied with ourselves.

The sincerity of uncleanness pleases us, and is a relief to the soul. When a man has spent his time on earth enduring the spectacle of the ground airs assumed by reasons of state, oaths, political wisdom, human justice, professional honesty, the necessities of position, incorruptible robes, it is a consolation to enter a sewer and see the slime that befits it.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (1955~)

“We did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones we are confined to.”

“The novels were our escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the universities and the morality squads in the street.”

“His mother read a story to him (Nabokov) about a boy who disappeared one day into the painting above his bed and this became young Vladimir’s wish as he prayed every night. As you imagine us in that room, you must also understand our desire for this dangerous vanishing act. The more we withdrew into our sanctuary, the more we became alienated from our day-to-day life.”

The following two paragraphs are descriptions of the girls in her class.

“Implicit in almost all their descriptions was the way they saw themselves in the context of an outside reality that prevented them from defining themselves clearly and separately.”

“These students, like the rest of their generation, were different from my generation in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of like, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.”

“What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.

Dreams are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

(H)ow similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby’s. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?”

 

Thirteen Moons by Charles Fraser

Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don’t watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from your except the possibility of jolting and unforwarned memory spring out of dark, rushing over your with the velocity of heartbreak. Even when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time. … A bedtime drink would be helpful. At some point in life, everybody needs medication to get by. A little something to ease the pain, smooth the path forward. … Memory is about the only intoxicant left.