- "The Good Guys will win. The consciousness now being forged will hang, tempered and true, in the utility closet alongside old and faithful tools like Mercy and Equality and Will Rogers."- Ken Kesey
- "On the night of November 14th, two men broke into a quiet farmhouse in Kansas and murdered an entire family. Why did they do that? Two worlds exist in this country: the quiet conservative life and the life of those two men: the underbelly, the criminally violent. Those two worlds converged that bloody night." - Capote (film)
- "The book I'm writing will restore him to the realm of humanity. This is the book I was always meant to write." - Capote (film)
- "Every busy city needs an island of peace." - "City Island" (film)
- "Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal." - Augusten Burroughs, "Running with Scissors"
- "What the hedgehog was singing is not evidence." - Watership Down
- "Uncle Willie was in the pantry, doing weird and wonderful things." - The Philadelphia Story
- "Awww... this is one of those days that the pages of history teach us are best spent lying in bed." - Uncle Willie, The Philadelphia Story
- "the girl from the fiction department... was looking at him... She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life... She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated... All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead." - Orwell, "1984" (via "The Girl from the Fiction Department" by Hilary Spurling)
- "She had the look of someone always struggling to go beyond herself, to escape from her social background, the convent where she was educated, into some pagan paradise of artists and "genuises" which would save her." - Stephen Spender on Sonia Brownell/Orwell (via "The Girl from the Fiction Department" by Hilary Spurling)
- "discipline... less interested in sex than in the danger which a private emotion threatens to their system. Two children who love each other create a world they cannot enter and their whole object is to control, utterly, every thought and feeling. Friendship must be healthy, i.e. boring, or it must be stamped out, but priests, like all totalitarians, forget that their methods can be adopted by the enemy. The intelligence they are training for one war can be used for another." - Sonia Brownell/Orwell reflecting on her Catholic school education; inspiration for 1984 (via "The Girl from the Fiction Department" by Hilary Spurling)
- "It is also Perfectionism, the belief in Romantic Love, in 'Mr. Right' etc., but above all it is the inability to accept anything imperfect ie human in the person one loves which on the reverse side of the coin is an inability to accept limitations in one's own personality." - Sonia Brownell/Orwell (via "The Girl from the Fiction Department" by Hilary Spurling)
- (On Gandhi's claim that "as a good Hindu, he would see his wife and child starve soon than give them chicken broth") - "The attitude is perhaps a noble one, but... it is inhuman. The essence of humanity is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point that it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." - George Orwell (via "The Girl from the Fiction Department" by Hilary Spurling)
- "'He said he would get better if I married him,' she told me twenty years later, 'so, you see,I had no other choice.'" - Hilary Spurling, "The Girl from the Fiction Department"
- Véra - Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: see quote list in archives
- Zombicorns - John Green: see quote list in archives
jun 7 2011 ∞
mar 13 2012 +
mar 13 2012 +