"A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move." ~from WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy
“A preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness.” ~Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience
“A priest's life is spent between question and answer-- or between a question and the attempt to answer it. The question is the summary of the spiritual life.” ~Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt from Everyman's Library
"All for one, one for all, that is our motto." ~The Three Musketeers (1844) by Alexandre Dumas, père ("Tous pour un, un pour tous, c'est notre devise" ~"Les Trois Mousquetaires)
Dumas's most popular novel has long been a favorite with children, and its swashbuckling heroes are well known from many a film and TV adaptation. Set in 17th-century France, this tale of the adventures of D'Artagnan and the three musketeers is the finest example of its author's brilliantly inventive storytelling genius. (Everyman's Library)
“And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.” ~Richard Yates, The Easter Parade from Everyman's Library
"And even if you cannot make your life the way you want it,
this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can: don't cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.
"Don't cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome."
~"As Much As You Can" by Constantine P. Cavafy from Everyman's Library
(Constantine P. Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents, on this day in 1863.)
“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” ~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses from Everyman's Library
"But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife." ~from MADAME BOVARY by Gustave Flaubert (Everyman's Library)
“Death was a blessing, so great, so deep that we can fathom it only at those moments, like this one now, when we are reprieved from it. It was the return home from long, unspeakably painful wanderings, the correction of a great error, the loosening of tormenting chains, the removal of barriers---it set a horrible accident to rights again.” ~from BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann
"Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them." ~Bram Stoker, excerpt from DRACULA (Everyman's Library)
"English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next." ~Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown from Everyman's Library
"Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them." -from "The Prince" (1513), by Niccolò Machiavelli ❀ [Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was born in Florence, Republic of Florence on this day in 1469.] from Everyman's Library
"Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around." ~from "Quelques mots d'introduction," Salon de 1845 (May 1845), by Charles Baudelaire (Everyman's Library)
“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.” ~George Eliot, Adam Bebe from Everyman's Library
"For, although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you can keep him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people." ~from Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens from Everyman's Library
“For you know that I myself am a labyrinth, where one easily gets lost.” ~Charles Perrault (author of Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood)
"Happiness is a hard master–particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth." ~The Controller from BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
"Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?" ~from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain from Everyman's Library
"He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving. Till gradually he became desperate, lost his understanding, was plunged in a revolt that knew no bounds." ~from THE RAINBOW, by D.H. Lawrence (Everyman's Library)
“He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense... They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.” ~Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin from Everyman's Library
"He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain." ~from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) by Mark Twain from Everyman's Library
“He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.” ~Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, Everyman's Library
"I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I'm used to not being taken seriously, but only the 'light-hearted' Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the 'deeper' Anne is too weak. If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she's called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. Before I realize it, she's disappeared." ~Anne Frank's final diary entry (August 1, 1944) from THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me!” ~from "Dracula" By Bram Stoke
"I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco." ~from "Old World Landowners" (1835) by Nikolai Gogol (Everyman's Library)
"I don't adopt any one's ideas; I have my own." ~Bazarov from "Father and Sons" (1862) by Ivan Turgenev, Everyman's Library
(Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born into a family of Russian land-owners in Oryol, Russia, on this day in 1818.)
"I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content." ~
Walt Whitman from Everyman's Library
(Walt Whitman was born 195 years ago today in 1819 in West Hills, Huntington, Long Island, New York.)
“I have seen you only in my dreams: each night you have come to me, wearing my ring, and have kissed me once on the lips - and my heart has gone out to you across the darkness…But in this magic castle I have waited for you: the time to speak of love is not yet.” ~Roger Lancelyn Green, “King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table: Sir Percivale of Wales” from Everyman's Library
"I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath." ~from THE MADMAN: His Parables and Poems (1918) by Khalil Gibran
“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.” ~Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior from Everyman's Library
“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” ~from GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens
"I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game." -Amory Blaine from THIS SIDE OF PARADISE by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.” ~Italo Calvino from "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” ~Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden from Everyman's Library (Frances Hodgson Burnett's celebration of the kingdom of earth takes place in a secret garden, where the orphaned Mary Lennox and the invalid boy, Colin, are magically restored to health and well-being by Nature's mysterious living force.)
"In me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on." ~from "Molloy" (1951) by Samuel Barclay Beckett from Everyman's Library
(Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland on this day in 1906. Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and is best-known for his play "Waiting for Godot.")
"Indeed it may be broadly stated that, with the single exception of gold-fish, of all animals kept for the recreation of mankind the horse is alone capable of exciting a passion that shall be absolutely hopeless." ~from "Chu Chu" by Bret Harte
"Indeed no one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre, who hath never seen it in distress." ~Tom Jones by Henry Fielding from Everyman's Library
“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
~from "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates
“It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions - like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn.” ~Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin from Everyman's Library
(Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in imperial Russia during the 1820s, Pushkin's novel in verse follows the emotions and destiny of three men - Onegin the bored fop, Lensky the minor elegiast, and a stylized Pushkin himself - and the fates and affections of three women - Tatyana the provincial beauty, her sister Olga, and Pushkin's mercurial Muse. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it also portrays a large cast of other characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and it shows him attempting to transform himself from romantic poet into realistic novelist.)
"It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty." ~Alexandre Dumas, père, The Three Musketeers from Everyman's Library
"Let all the world witness how many different means Fortune employs when she wishes to destroy a man." --from "The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
“Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.” ~from "The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz" by By Hector Berlioz
"Marilla, isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?" "I'll warrant you'll make plenty in it," said Marilla. "I never saw your beat for making mistakes, Anne." "Yes, and well I know it," admitted Anne mournfully." ~ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, by Lucy Maud Montgomery from
Everyman's Library (An eleven-year-old orphan, Anne Shirley, comes to help out on a farm on Prince Edward Island and wins the hearts of everyone at Avonlea—a story so popular that it spawned eight sequels after its initial publication in 1908, and has sold millions of copies in paperback.)
“My cruel fate hath warr'd with me in vain
Life, glory, worth, and all unmeasur'd skill
Beauty and grace, themselves in me fulfill
That many I surpass, and to the best attain.”
~Benvenuto Cellini from Everyman's Library
“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.” ~Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (Everyman's Library)
“My friends are my estate.” ~Emily Dickinson from Everyman's Library
“Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.”
―from SONS AND LOVERS DH Lawrence (Everyman's Library)
"No doubt you are right, my best of friends, there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men—and God knows why they are so fashioned—did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity." ~from "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." -from Nathaniel Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER, first published on this day in 1850 from Everyman's Library
“No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.” ~Herodotus from Everyman's Library
(Herodotus is not only the father of the art and the science of historical writing but also one of the Western tradition's most compelling storytellers. In tales such as that of Gyges—who murders Candaules, the king of Lydia, and unsurps his throne and his marriage bed, thereby bringing on, generations later, war with the Persians—he laid bare the intricate human entanglements at the core of great historical events. In his love for the stranger, more marvelous facts of the world, he infused his magnificent history with a continuous awareness of the mythic and the wonderful.)
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's [...]" ~from THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) by H.G. Wells
“Nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know." ~Aeschylus, The Oresteia (Everyman's Library)
“Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.” ~James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner from Everyman's Library.
"Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air." ~from "Babette's Feast" by Isak Dinesen
"One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever." ~Dr. Seward of Lucy Westenra from "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, born on this day in 1847 (Everyman's Library)
“Out of all these creatures you see around me, so docile, so innocent, and so gentle, well, my child, there is scarcely one, scarcely a single one, that I could not turn into a wild animal; a strange metamorphosis to which one is all the more susceptible the younger one enters religion and the less one knows of life in society. These words may surprise you: may God preserve you from ever finding out how true they are. Sister Suzanne, the good nun is the one who brings with her into the cloister some great sin to expiate." ~from Memoirs of a Nun by Denis Diderot
[
Memoirs of a Nun, which began as a joke and grew into a masterpiece, was one of the loudest salvos fired in the continuing battles between the clergy and the intelligentsia which defined so much of eighteenth-century French history. Diderot's story of a novice held in a convent against her will and forced to undergo curious spiritual and sexual trials displays all the brilliance, icy wit, and worldliness of the Enlightenment at its best.“The feelings resembled memories; but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened.” ~from "Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth by Leo Tolstoy
“Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.” ~Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (Everyman's Library: Novelist Christina Stead died at Balmain Hospital, Sydney, on this day in 1983, aged 80.)
“Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.” ~from SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.” ~The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, born on this day in 1943
"So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me--a long, long road without a goal." ~Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children from Everyman's Library
“The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.” ~from THE MAKIOKA SISTERS by Junichiro Tanizak
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.” ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich from Everyman's Library
"The 'enlightenment ' was not always very'enlightened , in1792'they' murdered thousands upon thousands of men, women: and children in the vendee area simply because they clung to their catholic faith.also why do we presuppose all members of the clergy were non- intellectual ; and all 'members ' of the new ruling class were not only always right but to a man highly intellectually gifted." ~Maureen Meyfarth (Everyman's Library]
“The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal; because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” ~Achilles from "The Iliad" by Homer from Everyman's Library
"The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are." ~from THE REPUBLIC by Plato
“The lost glove is happy.” ~Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire from Everyman's Library
“The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck. ” ~Hector Berlioz from Everyman's Library
"The sad truth was that all of them found anything that did not concern their own country fit only for mockery and laughter. To them such matters were as remote from reality as if they had been happening on Mars; and therefore fit only for schoolboy puns and witty riposte." ~from "They Were Divided" by Miklós Bánffy
(The celebrated TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY by Count Miklós Bánffy is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in Hungary, Bánffy’s novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical acclaim and appear here for the first time in hardcover. They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, the second and third novels in the trilogy, continue the story of the two aristocratic cousins introduced in They Were Counted as they navigate a dissolute society teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Count Balint Abády, a liberal politician who defends his homeland’s downtrodden Romanian peasants, loses his beautiful lover, Adrienne, who is married to a sinister and dangerously insane man, while his cousin László loses himself in reckless and self-destructive addictions. Meanwhile, no one seems to notice the gathering clouds that are threatening the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that will soon lead to the brutal dismemberment of their country. Set amid magnificent scenery of wild forests, snowcapped mountains, and ancient castles, THE TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY combines a Proustian nostalgia for a lost world, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.)
“The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil?” ~Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White from Everyman's Library
“The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.” ~from HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
“There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain.” ~Aeschylus, The Oresteia
from Everyman's Library
[One of the founding documents of Western culture and the only surviving ancient Greek trilogy, the Oresteia of Aeschylus is one of the great tragedies of all time. The three plays of the Oresteia portray the bloody events that follow the victorious return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War, at the start of which he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to secure divine favor.]
“Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.” ~Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe from Everyman's Library
[English journalist, essayist, political tract writer, and novelist Daniel Defoe died this date in 1731. He was interred in Bunhill Fields, London, where a monument was erected to his memory in 1870. (Defoe is known to have used at least 198 pen names.)]
“There isn’t one kind of happiness, there’s all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.” ~from OFFSHORE by Penelope Fitzgerald
"Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief." ~Mr. Knightley to Mrs. Weston from EMMA by Jane Austen
"We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures." ~Victor Frankenstein from FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley
“We men are wretched things, and the gods who have no cares themselves have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives." ~Homer from THE ILIAD (Everyman's Library)
“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.” ~from MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot (Everyman's Library)
"We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break." ~from THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe
"What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way — human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it." ~from "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" (1959) by Yukio Mishima
"When I die Dublin will be written in my heart." ~James Joyce from Everyman's Library
“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.” ~from "The Makioka Sisters" By Junichiro Tanizaki
“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” ~One Hundred Years of Solitude, RIP Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) from Everyman's Library
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