favourite quotations (apropos ... )

[Verbivore]

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

[Verbivore]

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Small Wonder, 'Knowing our Place'. pp. 37-39.

[Verbivore]

In a cankerous alley pocked with puddles and pimpled with piles of mouldering rubbish I picked my way between cramped old tenements, enquiring at this inn and that.

"Travelling light" - from the Peter Plunkett (Patrick) Pinney Narratives

[Verbivore]

The historian Macaulay on 'virtue':

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must take a stand against vice. We must teach libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is in truth, a sort of whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised ... . At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heartbroken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more.

[Verbivore]

Guilty or not guilty is a question not of fact, but of morals: the prisoner who pleads 'not guilty' is not alleging that he did this or did not do that: he is affirming that what he did does not involve any guilt on his part.

Shaw, George Bernard (on Oscar Wilde’s plea of 'not guilty').

[Verbivore]

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue.

Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde.

[Verbivore]

But a fixation with sin is no different from a fixation with virtue. Sex and purity are equally likely to consume the mind wholly.

Keneally, Thomas. Towards Asmara.

[Verbivore]

On the Archbishop of Dublin’s declaration that homosexuality was a 'disorder', David Norris, a gay rights campaigner in Ireland, stated:

I accept that the Archbishop is an expert on angels but he knows nothing at all about fairies.

[Pete]

Slow down - I can't keep up with you, Vv.

[Verbivore]

The Romans had their slaves and Christians.
The Church had its witches and heretics.
The Moslems had infidels and crusaders.
The Germans had the gypsies and the Jews.
The Yanks their niggers and commies.
Now we’ve got the junkies and the queers.
How would our rulers have ever done their job without that universal necessity—the eternal scapegoat.

Source unknown.

[Pete]

Aug 18, 2008 9:46:35 GMT Verbivore said:

The Romans had their slaves and Christians.
The Church had its witches and heretics.
The Moslems had infidels and crusaders.
The Germans had the gypsies and the Jews.
The Yanks their niggers and commies.
Now we’ve got the junkies and the queers.
How would our rulers have ever done their job without that universal necessity—the eternal scapegoat.

Source unknown.

I once spent time on a kibbutz with people from a wide range of nationalities and ethnicities. It was very odd hearing the same jokes told about different nationalities and ethnicities: The Irish jokes that the English told were told by New Yorkers about Polish Americans, by Germans about Danes, etc.

[Verbivore]

There are docile men and women in this world by the millions, and some of them are damn fine people. But there are others whose hands ache to hold the throttle of their own lives ... .

King, Stephen. ‘The Breathing Method’, Different Seasons.

[Verbivore]

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Billie Holliday (1956), re her experience as a black woman trying to make her living.

[Paul Doherty]

Some very good stuff there.

[Verbivore]

Aug 18, 2008 11:06:08 GMT Paul Doherty said:

Some very good stuff there.

As you've no doubt gathered from the quotations I've posted, my reading is rather catholic in subject and style. But the one thing all my (voluntary) reading must have in common is delightful use of language. Give me the ordinary story well told, the ordinary idea well expressed, rather than the good tale told or written poorly. Language, and its clever / amusing / uplifting / inspiring use, is doubtless the greatest love of my entire life (men and cars notwithstanding ).

Of course, if I can have great stories and brilliant ideas expressed in wonderful language, that is a bonus.