literature quotes

AWAKE! FEAR! FIRE! FOES! AWAKE!
FEAR! FIRE! FOES!
AWAKE! AWAKE!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt
of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He
brought death into the world.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace--
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
-- Justin Richardson.

Let me take you a button-hole lower.
-- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost"

When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.
-- Roger Zelazny, "Doorways in the Sand"

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.
-- Wm. Shakespeare

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories,
his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the
worst, and so grow gently old all down the unchanging days and die one
day like any other day, only shorter.
-- Samuel Beckett, "Malone Dies"

“... all the modern inconveniences ...”
-- Mark Twain

He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream too.
-- Lewis Carroll

Big book, big bore.
-- Callimachus

A is for Apple.
-- Hester Pryne

Every cloud engenders not a storm.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"

I think we are in Rats' Alley where the dead men lost their bones.
-- T.S. Eliot

Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
-- William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"

Steady movement is more important than speed, much of the time. So long
as there is a regular progression of stimuli to get your mental hooks
into, there is room for lateral movement. Once this begins, its rate is
a matter of discretion.
-- Corwin, Prince of Amber

Big book, big bore.
-- Callimachus

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is
nothing but cabbage with a college education.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

A hundred years from now it is very likely that [of Twain's works] "The
Jumping Frog" alone will be remembered.
-- Harry Thurston Peck (Editor of "The Bookman"), January 1901.

At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement,
especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously
-- I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.
-- John Keats

A kind of Batman of contemporary letters.
-- Philip Larkin on Anthony Burgess

Truth is the most valuable thing we have -- so let us economize it.
-- Mark Twain

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred
to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never
claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circum-
stances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit.
Silence, though, could. It was in the days of the rains that their prayers
went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of
prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri,
goddess of the Night. The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through
the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the
Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze
rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday.
Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique...
-- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light"

A is for Apple.
-- Hester Pryne

Anyone who has had a bull by the tail knows five or six more things
than someone who hasn't.
-- Mark Twain

A kind of Batman of contemporary letters.
-- Philip Larkin on Anthony Burgess

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is
particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself,
to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit
me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
-- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I
will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all
Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they
teach. Oh, tell me that I may sponge away the writing on this stone!
-- Charles Dickens

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace--
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
-- Justin Richardson.

“Elves and Dragons!" I says to him. ”Cabbages and potatoes are better
for you and me."
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.
-- Mark Twain