"Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to plague you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart."
— “Pride and Prejudice”, Jane Austen
"My mind was more agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow."
— “Pride and Prejudice”, Jane Austen
"Paper outlives stone and brick."
— “The Fatal Shore”, Robert Hughes
"OF COURSE Australia was marked for glory, some wag said (and the saying would be repeated for generations), for its people had been chosen by the finest judges in England."
— “The Fatal Shore”, Robert Hughes
"You’re such a big Scott Fitzgerald fan … wasn’t he the one who said you shouldn’t trust anybody who calls himself an ordinary man? You lent me the book!” said Naoko with a mischievous smile."
— “Norwegian Wood”, Haruki Murakami
"
Tanner flashed a smile. ‘Juries love me, Nick. I’m one of them.’
‘You’re the opposite of one of them, Tanner.’
‘Reverse that: They’d like to think they’re one of me.’
"— “Gone Girl”, Gillian Flynn
"He’s just that kind of a man. You cannot do anything about it - it’s easy to change a mountain or a river but not a man’s nature."
— “Ocean of Words”, Ha Jin
"
When our men finished singing, without a request from the army side, the militia started another song, which was also a quotation from Chairman Mao:
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
So they sang.
"— “Ocean of Words”, Ha Jin
"I was quite stunned by the cement-machine prose. (ie a writer labouring a point over and over again)."
— “Great Books”, David Denby
"
Lear himself casts off his old manner, his sanity, his clothes; it is a process, violent beyond belief, of unravelling, unhousing, and undressing, until the king is out in a storm with his few remaining loyal subjects and, for the first time in his life, senses what poor and miserable people must suffer:
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.”
—
“Great Books”, David Denby
A bit more than living on the dole for a week…
"There is no putting off anything that mattered, for Jews do not really believe in an afterlife. As David Ben-Gurion, the lion of Israel, once put it, “For a Jew, hell is to be mediocre on earth."
— “Great Books”, David Denby
"Franz Kafka said that he wanted works of literature that would affect us as ‘a catastrophe,’ works that would break up ‘the frozen sea’ within us."
— “Great Books”, David Denby
"Montaigne observed that ‘every man if his wishes and desires through life were chronicled would deserve hanging ten times over’."
— “On Warne”, Gideon Haigh
"I don’t know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them."
— “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” - Max Brooks
"That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after. —Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (New King James translation)"
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come
By those who will come after. —Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (New King James translation)"
— Quoted in “The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction” - Nate Silver
