Post a random quote from a book you're reading

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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.

“I am not an angel, and I will not be one until I die. I will be myself.”

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847).

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I'm not currently reading Jane Eyre, but I'm posting in honour of Charlotte's 203rd birthday.
Charlotte is an angel now. Rest in peace.

Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.


Excerpt from "The Prisoner", Emily Brontë (undated)

Dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of re-assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after effects have to be encountered at their worst.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence (1928)

For all of us who struggle with trauma.
#Freedom09

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die

"You wouldn't hit me if I was a man!"
"Of course I wouldn't hit you if you were a man!"

In all we do and hear, and see,
Is restless Toil and Vanity,
While yet the rolling earth abides,
Men come and go like ocean tides;
And ere one generation dies,
Another in its place shall rise,
That, sinking soon into the grave,
Others succeed, like wave on wave.

Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas
Anne Brontë

Rebecca [...] was pressed into a variety of workshops and classes, as part of our Developmental and Cognitive Drive. [...]

It didn't work with Rebecca, it didn't work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done, futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives.

We paid far too much attention to the defects of our patients, as Rebecca was the first to tell me, and far too little into what was intact and preserved. To use another piece of jargon, we were too concerned with 'defectology' [...]

Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - 1985

^^ Some of his prose has some pretty cringeworthy language from its time, and by his own admission both neurology and his own ideas progressed since the writing of the book, but I've never read any other "expert" on neurological conditions who has such compassion for his patient's well-being as experienced by them insofar as he can imagine it, and he's always conscious of the limitations of that imagining. When I first discovered him, I was astounded that case histories could be so poignant and moving.

An addendum to a '01 Mar 2019, 11:23 am' entry made on this thread

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/852 ... human-race

Emily could be paralysed by timidity when in the company of people she did not know. It has been said that sometimes when people spoke to her she would stand in complete silence, unable to speak or move.

From In Search of Anne Brontë, Nick Holland, 2016