quotes
"He did not seek out an exclusive relationship (possession, jealousy, scenes); nor did he seek out a generalized, communal relationship; what he wanted was, each time, a privileged relationship, marked by a perceptible difference, brought to the condition of a kind of absolutely singular affective inflection, like that of a voice with an incomparable timbre; and paradoxically, he saw no obstacle in multiplying this privileged relationship: nothing but privileges, in short; the sphere of friendship was thus populated by dual relations (whence a great wasting of time: he had to see his friends one at a time: resistance to the group, to the circle, to the crowd). What was wanted was a plural equality, without in-difference."
- Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes
"'But I never looked like that!' – How do you know? What is the 'you' you might or might not look like? Where do you find it – by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? you are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images."
- Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes
"One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: 'I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.' Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it."
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
"Unlike you, I have no faith, only a suitcaseful of beliefs that sustain me. Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same."
- Letters of E.B. White
"I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move."
- Travels With Charley
"One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson – paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty."
- Brave New World
Klaatu: I am fearful when fear is substituted for reason.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still
"Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!"
- Sartor Resartus
"Britain, Britain, Britain. Why would you ever want to leave? Anybody who goes on holiday abroad is a traitor! I bloody love it here! Bloody love it! We produce the best films, the finest cuisines and our dogs are relatively rabies free. And this is all thanks to the peoples of Britain. Let us look at them in this program in which we now look at them now. Boom, boom, shake the room!"
- Tom Baker, Little Britain
"Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, – deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, – a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell… and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know."
- Lafcadio Hearn, "Mosquitoes"
"But ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. the terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public."
- Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography
"It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
- Justice O'Connor, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
"I know this is an awkward time to say this, but I wish I knew you better."
- Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us…. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
- Franz Kafka
"There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
"Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window."
- Everything Is Illuminated
"We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?"
- Everything Is Illuminated
"I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."
- Everything Is Illuminated
"AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?"
- Everything Is Illuminated
"I'm wondering whether I can explain," said Lee. "Where there is no likeness of experience it's very difficult. I understand you were not born in America."
"No, in Ireland."
"And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing."
"If you cut your queue, dressed and talked like other people?"
"No. I tried it. To the so-called whites I was still a Chinese, but an untrustworthy one; and at the same time my Chinese friends steered clear of me. I had to give it up."
- Lee and Samuel Hamilton, East of Eden
"'…They said I looked like a foreign devil; they said I spoke like a foreign devil. I made mistakes in manners, and I didn't know delicacies that had grown up since my father left. They wouldn't have me. You can believe it or not – I'm less foreign here than I was in China.'"
- Lee, East of Eden
Frank: And I broke the first rule of being a detective. I assumed that Zeke Lafeld was homosexual.
Tim: Well, it's what people do, Frank. It's human nature.
Frank: Yes, it is human nature to kill someone simply because their sexual orientation is different.
Tim: People get afraid. Threatened.
Frank: People? That's you and me, Tim. Grown-ups. Why is it that children don't care about such things?
Tim: As adults we get socialized. We learn to behave.
Frank: No, no, no. We learn to hate.
- Homicide: Life on the Steet, "Hate Crimes"
Tim: So does the violence make them stupid or does the stupidity lead to violence?
Munch: Well, that’s chicken and egg semantics. The important point is that we win certain cases because our brains are repositories for intelligence and their brains are day-old banana pudding.
- Homicide: Life on the Steet, "Pit Bull Sessions"
"She records that a man told her an educated woman is unattractive, since there are so few, to which she responded that an ignorant man was even less attractive, since there are so many."
- my AP Euro textbook re: Christine de Pisan.