Post a random quote from a book you're reading

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Redxk
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23 Jun 2019, 6:50 pm

^ :!:



IsabellaLinton
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23 Jun 2019, 6:56 pm

^

Story of my life. :(

I'd hazard to say she, Charlotte and Patrick were on the spectrum although I know we aren't allowed to speculate!



IsabellaLinton
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24 Jun 2019, 8:53 am

When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often seek relief in poetry - and often find it, too ... Now I fly to it again, with greater avidity than ever, because I seem to need it more.

Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë (1847)



kraftiekortie
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24 Jun 2019, 9:12 am

And they say psychological insights started with Freud.....



IsabellaLinton
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29 Jun 2019, 11:36 am

Selina lived in the world of her mind. Facebook and mobile phones were not for her. Her universe had been shaped by the literature and art of the past, and her fascination with the Brontës extended to the Victorian period in general. Superficial conventions meant little in her life. She had an air of self-sufficiency, and the aura of a person living in the world of her imagination, benevolent yet somewhat detached from the one around her.

I later visited her exquisite little house. Apart from a few concessions it was a 19th Century bubble, furnished with antiques, the walls hung with posters and paintings by Millais and Waterhouse. She summarised what the Brontës meant to her with imagery involving fabric, colour and texture: "It's as if they are a highly-coloured thread woven into my life that will never be broken, through which I have met all of the people I love most."


( I'm blushing! :wink: :heart: 8O )

Down the Belliard Steps: Discovering the Brontës in Brussels, Helen MacEwan (2012)



traven
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01 Jul 2019, 12:53 am

"Cependant qu’à trois pieds dessous, moi papa, ruisselant d’asticots et bien plus infect qu’un kilo d’étrons de 14 juillet pourrira fantastiquement de toute sa viande déçue... En-graisser les sillons du laboureur anonyme c’est le véritable avenir du véritable soldat ! Ah ! camarade ! Ce monde n’est je vous l’assure qu’une immense entreprise à se foutre du monde ! Vous êtes jeune. Que ces minutes sagaces vous comptent pour des années ! Écoutez-moi bien, camarade, et ne le laissez plus passer sans bien vous pénétrer de son importance, ce signe capital dont resplendissent toutes les hypocrisies meurtrières de notre Société : “L’attendrissement sur le sort, sur la condition du miteux...”

"Je vous le dis, petits bonshommes, couillons de la vie, battus, rançonnés, transpirants de toujours, je vous préviens, quand les grands de ce monde se mettent à vous aimer, c’est qu’ils vont vous tourner en saucissons de bataille... " Les philosophes, ce sont eux, notez-le encore pendant que nous y sommes, qui ont com-mencé par raconter des histoires au bon peuple... Lui qui ne connaissait que le catéchisme ! Ils se sont mis, proclamèrent-ils, à l’éduquer... Ah ! ils en avaient des vérités à lui révéler ! et des belles ! Et des pas fatiguées ! Qui brillaient ! Qu’on en restait tout ébloui ! C’est ça ! qu’il a commencé par dire, le bon peuple, c’est bien ça ! C’est tout à fait ça ! Mourons tous pour ça ! Il ne demande jamais qu’à mourir le peuple ! Il est ainsi. “Vive Diderot !” qu’ils ont gueulé et puis “Bravo Voltaire !” En voilà au moins des philosophes ! Et vive aussi Carnot qui organise si bien les victoires ! Et vive tout le monde ! Voilà au moins des gars qui ne le laissent pas crever dans l’ignorance et le fétichisme le bon peuple ! Ils lui montrent eux les routes de la Liberté ! Ils l’émancipent ! Ça n’a pas traîné ! Que tout le monde d’abord sache lire les journaux ! C’est le salut ! Nom de Dieu ! Et en vitesse ! Plus d’illettrés ! Il en faut plus ! Rien que des soldats citoyens ! Qui votent ! Qui lisent ! Et qui se battent ! Et qui marchent ! Et qui envoient des baisers ! À ce régime-là, bientôt il fut fin mûr le bon peuple. Alors n’est-ce pas l’enthousiasme d’être libéré il faut bien que ça serve à quelque chose ? Danton n’était pas éloquent pour les prunes. Par quelques coups de gueule si bien sentis, qu’on les entend encore, il vous l’a mobilisé en un tour de main le bon peuple ! Et ce fut le premier départ des premiers bataillons d’émancipés frénétiques ! Des premiers couillons voteurs et drapeautiques qu’emmena le Dumouriez se faire trouer dans les Flandres !"

tl,dr:
"I tell you, little fellows, fools of life, beaten, ransomed, sweaty forever, I warn you, when the great of this world begin to love you, it is that they will turn you into sausages of battle ..."



Prometheus18
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01 Jul 2019, 5:05 am

IsabellaLinton wrote:
Selina lived in the world of her mind. Facebook and mobile phones were not for her. Her universe had been shaped by the literature and art of the past, and her fascination with the Brontës extended to the Victorian period in general. Superficial conventions meant little in her life. She had an air of self-sufficiency, and the aura of a person living in the world of her imagination, benevolent yet somewhat detached from the one around her.

I later visited her exquisite little house. Apart from a few concessions it was a 19th Century bubble, furnished with antiques, the walls hung with posters and paintings by Millais and Waterhouse. She summarised what the Brontës meant to her with imagery involving fabric, colour and texture: "It's as if they are a highly-coloured thread woven into my life that will never be broken, through which I have met all of the people I love most."


( I'm blushing! :wink: :heart: 8O )

Down the Belliard Steps: Discovering the Brontës in Brussels, Helen MacEwan (2012)


What a remarkable woman!



IsabellaLinton
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26 Jul 2019, 1:24 pm

The two Jenkins sons became chaplains in Brussels like their father. In later years, they would entertain residents of the city with tales of those excruciating Brontë sisters. They had no small talk. Emily never bothered to converse with people who did not interest her; she never opened her mouth. Charlotte was slightly more sociable but painfully shy. She had a habit of wheeling gradually round on her chair, away from the person speaking, until her face was entirely hidden from their view.

The Brontës in Brussels, Helen MacEwan, 2018

:heart: (((Team Brontë))) :heart:



BenderRodriguez
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26 Jul 2019, 1:39 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
And they say psychological insights started with Freud.....

Out of curiosity, who said that? I thought people like Shakespeare and William Blake or Dante were already known for that, not even mentioning Dostoevsky.

The ancient world also had some great ones but I imagine they're a lot less known these days...


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kraftiekortie
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26 Jul 2019, 1:43 pm

I've known people who say that Freud "started" psychology.

Obviously, all he did was "start" Psychoanalysis.



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26 Jul 2019, 1:46 pm

Prometheus18 wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.

Peter Hitchens - Abolition of Britain, 1999, quoting Mr Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death.


There has recently been a thread asking "what's so bad" about Huxley's Brave New World and I mentioned there finding it scarier than 1984. The way I would have expressed it would be that oppression will always exist, and people will always fight it, but you cannot fight against willing slavery.

Your quote is making the same point more eloquently.


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26 Jul 2019, 1:48 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
I've known people who say that Freud "started" psychology.

Obviously, all he did was "start" Psychoanalysis.


Thank you, I misunderstood. As a discipline better known to the public, yes, of course!


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26 Jul 2019, 2:02 pm

Stalin could not help thinking that although people called him the wisest of the wise, they had still not given him his full due. Their enthusiasm, he felt, was superficial and they did not truly appreciate the extent of his genius. He had lately been obsessed with the idea of making one major contribution to learning, of leaving his indelible stamp on something else besides philosophy or history. He could not help feeling envious when he read those passages in The Dialectic of Nature about zero and minus one squared. But despite long sessions with Kiselyov's Algebra or Sokolov's Advanced Physics, he found nothing to inspire him. [...]

It would, of course, have made a bigger splash to have refuted that counter-revolutionary theory of Relativity, or wave mechanics, but he was so busy with affairs of state that there just hadn't been time.
[...]

He began to write: 'Whatever national language of the Soviet Union we may take - Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Tartar, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Turkmen... (hell, he was finding it more and more difficult to stop himself from reeling off great lists like this. It impressed the reader and made it harder for him to answer back)... it is obvious. ...' H'm. Here he had better put in something that was obvious.
But what was obvious? Nothing was obvious... It was all very hard going.
[...]

There was no one to advise him, he was alone in the world, like all great philosophers. If only Kant or Spinoza were still alive, or anyone of that calibre, even if they were bourgeois.





The midnight musings of a seventy year-old Josef Stalin in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle. I was roaring with laughter for ten minutes reading the above passage in a coffee shop the other day. The most scathing and hilarious analysis of Stalin's mediocrity and psychological pathologies ever written.



Prometheus18
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26 Jul 2019, 2:23 pm

BenderRodriguez wrote:
Prometheus18 wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.

Peter Hitchens - Abolition of Britain, 1999, quoting Mr Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death.


There has recently been a thread asking "what's so bad" about Huxley's Brave New World and I mentioned there finding it scarier than 1984. The way I would have expressed it would be that oppression will always exist, and people will always fight it, but you cannot fight against willing slavery.

Your quote is making the same point more eloquently.

I don't even bother opening silly, attention-seeking threads like those, but you're spot on in thinking that Huxley's was the more frightening and more durable dystopia. He was also a much better prophet. Hitchens has written about this a number of times. Orwell's great failure was in assuming that sensual pleasures are a threat to would-be modern-day tyrants, just because in more impoverished times they had previously been held to be so. Huxley's genius, conversely, was in realising how powerful the sensual pleasures were as tools of control in a world that was economically prosperous enough to provide them to all.



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26 Jul 2019, 2:24 pm

Elves are often considered flighty or frivolous, and this is the case when they do not believe a matter to be of import. They concern themselves with the natural beauty around them, dancing and frolicking, playing and singing unless necessity dictates otherwise. Because elves love nature, they are not fond of ships or mines, but of growing things and the lands under the sky. They do not make friends easily, but a friend or enemy is never forgotten. Their humor is clever, as are their songs and poetry. Elves are brave but never foolhardy. They feast, but eat sparingly, drink mead and wine, but seldom become drunk from excesses. While they find well-wrought jewelry a pleasure to behold, they are not overly interested in money or gain. Magic fascinates elves, however, and if they have a weakness it lies in this desire. If elves tend towards haughtiness and arrogance at times, they are not inclined to regard their friends and associates as anything other than equals.

-- Dungeon Masters Guide, 1st Edition (Revised December 1979), page 16


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26 Jul 2019, 3:44 pm

The Tomb of Horrors: Somewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary. It is filled with rich treasures both precious and magical, but in addition to the aforementioned guardians, there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt. (Be warned that tales told have it that this being possesses powers which make him nearly undefeatable!) Accounts relate that it is quite unlikely that any adventurers will ever find the chamber where the demilich Acererak lingers, for the passages and rooms of the Tomb are fraught with terrible traps, poison gases, and magical protections. Furthermore, the demi-lich has so well hidden his lair, that even those who avoid the pitfalls will not be likely to locate their true goal. So only large and well-prepared parties of the bravest and strongest should even consider the attempt, and if they do locate the Tomb, they must be prepared to fail. Any expedition must be composed of characters of high level and varied class. They must have magical protections and weapons, and equip themselves with every sort of device possible to insure their survival.

-- AD&D Adventure Module S1: Tomb of Horrors (copyright 1978, 1981, TSR, Inc.), page 4


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