Nathan Bransford - The Forums

"God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves." Anne Rice - Interview With the Vampire

Technically, this is the movie version quote. They pared down some of Anne's wordiness ... but all the words are hers.

"Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have!"
--Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, JK Rowling
Anything that woman writes is gold, of course. Literally and figuratively.

"He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes."
--Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

And if we're doing plays...
"I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, if it were not for that I have bad dreams."
--"Hamlet", Shakespeare, o'course

"Everything you need can be taken from you. Remember this, nieces. Everything you hold dear, it can be taken from you." Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce

"It's a good old world, but there's some hard things in it." Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

"The public shall ever be at war with the private." Michael Ondaajte, The English Patient

"Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle" Michael Ondaatje quoting another writer, Anne Wilkinson, from The English Patient

“Life, however, was yet in my possession, with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.”
–Charlotte Bronte wrote this line for her novel Jane Eyre

My favorite also comes from Jane Eyre:

"I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly."
-Mr. Rochester

Tolsty Anna Karenina

Levin's point of view: after returning to his country home from the big city, having endured a depressing romantic failure, and entering the familiar atmosphere of his study.......

> All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him; "No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you are going to be the same as you've always been: with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."<

I read this novel some 30+ years ago, the remembrance of these words, in an attempt to reply to your post, takes me back to the days of being a skinny, hairy legged, red-neck son of a white trash father. I am still on the run but good books,good stories, gave me the breath to escape all the traces of my life that seemed to clutch me, and to say to me; No you're not.......

"Our naked bodies started glowing, and the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me, and with every young fiber and cell I wanted to hold on to it for another breath. A clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?"

Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

"Isn't it pretty to think so."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

Along with just about every other line from Pride and Prejudice.

david 222 wrote:Tolsty Anna Karenina

Levin's point of view: after returning to his country home from the big city, having endured a depressing romantic failure, and entering the familiar atmosphere of his study.......

> All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him; "No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you are going to be the same as you've always been: with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."<

I read this novel some 30+ years ago, the remembrance of these words, in an attempt to reply to your post, takes me back to the days of being a skinny, hairy legged, red-neck son of a white trash father. I am still on the run but good books,good stories, gave me the breath to escape all the traces of my life that seemed to clutch me, and to say to me; No you're not.......

Everything you wrote here is amazing. That quote...so universal. Although in our youth you and I were completely opposite, the quote fits both of us just right I guess.

"When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me." - Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey

It is the last line in the first chapter and the only reason I kept reading after what had been a pretty lackluster excuse for a first chapter despite some lovely writing. It was drowning in backstory about unsympathetic characters, 90% tell to 10% show (that's my guesstimate, anyway), with just a smattering of interesting information about the various courtesan houses. Then, as the child heroine is about to be tossed to the plot lions, the author slid in this line that jerked the picture into (bitter) focus, set the tone for the whole novel, and kinda just said, "See, I had a point to all that meandering. You better keep reading." I'm glad I did.

basically everything in THE GREAT GATSBY, but especially this:

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

With my all time favorite Wrede quote and a suitable one from Watership Downs...I have nothing to say. You all have covered it.

"Never make promises in the dark. Always wait until dawn."
-Laura Resnick, In Legend Born

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good.”
-- Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged sounds like a good book.