Memorable Book Quotes Part 5

Excerpt from "Hermione on Simulacra"

"I am the heaven of fixed stars."

Excerpt from "Song"

"In married dark these fevers learn
Alternate loss; the bodies, worn
Indefinite, attend together
Night's pleasure and the press of weather."

Excerpt from "Learning a Dead Language"

"What you remember saves you. To remember
Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never
Has fallen silent. So your learning is,
From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself
Is memorable, what passion may be heard
When there is nothing for you to say."

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."

"'Atticus, he was real nice.'
'Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.'"

"People in their right minds never take pride in their talents."

"'I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "You're undeserving; so you can't have it." Buy my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.'"

"'I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle class morality.'"

"'The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated.'"

"Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing them to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it."

"She possessed the hopeful, hopeless courage of the poor, which is perhaps the most appealing of all human qualities; and I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me."

"People don't want other people to be people. They throw names over them and lock them in"

"Their song was not of battle or women as most soldiers' songs are, but a true slingers' song. Insofar as I heard it that day, it ran thus:

'When I was a lad, my mother said,
"You dry your tears and go to bed;
I know my son will travel far,
Born beneath a shooting star."

'In after years, my father said,
As he pulled my hair and knocked my head,
"They mustn't whimper at a scar,
Who're born beneath a shooting star."

'A mage I met, and the mage he said,
"I see for you a future red,
Fire and riot, raid and war,
O born beneath a shooting star."

'A shepherd I met, and the shepherd said,
"We sheep must go where we are led,
To Dawn-Gate where the angels are,
Following the shooting star."'

"And so on, verse after verse, some cryptic (as it seemed to me), some merely comic, some clearly assembled purely for the sake of the rhymes, which were repeated again and again."

"...we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present."

"The tale I read to little Severian said that the universe was but a long word of the Increate's. We, then, are the syllables of that word. But the speaking of any word is futile unless there are other words, words that are not spoken. If a beast has but one cry, the cry tells nothing; and even the wind has a multitude of voices, so that those who sit indoors may hear it and know if the weather is tumultuous or mild. The powers we call dark seem to me to be the words the Increate did not speak, if the Increate exists at all; and these words must be maintained in a quasi-existence, if the other word, the word spoken, is to be distinguished. What is not said can be more important--but what is said is more important."

"Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain."

"'Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted mirror sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that goes racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain, for the universe is leaving us behind...'"

"Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?"

"We need time to lose interest in things."

"One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke fore Nick. Should does not apply. You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave. Which is all very well. Context is all; or is it ripeness? One or the other."

"At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened."

"For romantic young people like he is, the world always looks best at a distance; and a prison where one's allowed to order one's own dinner is not at all bad."

"Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities."

"He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone, or experiencing a new sensation."

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If I ever get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!"

"There were absences in my life which were a comfort, then were was a presence that ruined me."

"There are seven windows in the Queen's bedroom in the Citadel that is the center of the City that is on the lake island called the Hub in the middle of the world.
Two of the seven windows face the tower stones and are dark; two overlook inner courtyards; two face the complex lanes that wind between the high, blank-faced mansions of the Protectorate; and the seventh, facing the steep Street of the Birdsellers and, beyond, a crack in the ring of the mountains across the lake, is always filled at night with stars. When wind speaks in the mountains, it whispers in this window, and makes the fine brown bed hangings dance."

"We head into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don't say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime--in the meantime, we're not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits. Some planets are said to be as hot and dry as the Sahara, others as icy as the poles or tropical as the Brazilian jungle. We're humanitarian and noble, we've no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That's another falsity. We're not searching for anything except people. We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image..."

"...and his grey brains wandered the heavens as clouds."

"He had persuaded the Vicar, whom he had met at an episcopal tea party, that biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it's human. A form of religion, said the Vicar. A form of ancestor worship, said Cropper. Or more. What are the Gospels but a series of varying attempts at the art of biography?"

"He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."

"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."

"A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

"...there seemed to be this difference between the language of words. It didn't seem possible, in the language of music, to lie."

"Everywhere you looked: sex. He could think of nothing else. He'd sit at the dinner table, talking about whatever (or, more likely, listening), and the taste of the sauce on his tongue became one with the taste of Boa an hour before when they'd made love, a taste that might be overwhelmed, all at once, by a spasm of total pleasure right there at the dinner table that would stiffen his spine and immobilize his mind. He would look at Boa (or, just as often, at Alethea) and his imagination would begin to rev until it had gone out of control, until there was nothing in his head but the image, immense and undifferentiated, of their copulation. Not even theirs, really, but a cosmic abstraction, a disembodied, blissful rhythm that even the flames of the candles obeyed.
It was the same when they would listen to music. He had read, in some book of advice lent him by Mrs. Boismortier, that it was a bad idea to listen to too many records. The way to discover what any piece of music was about was to perform it yourself, or lacking that, to hear it performed live. The habit of listening to records was a form of self-abuse. But, ah, there is something to be said for the habit. Lord God, such music as they listened to that week! Such pleasures as they shared! Such flurries of fingers, such cadences and cadenzas, such amazing transitions to such sighs and smiles and secret sympathies suddenly made plain as in the most brilliant and luminous of mirrors!
It dawned on him that this is what being in love was all about. This was why people made such a fuss over it. Why they said it made the world go round. It did! He stood with Boa on the roof of Worry's tower and watched the sun rise above the green body of the earth and felt himself to be, with her, ineffably, part of a single process that began in that faraway furnace that burned atoms into energy. He could not have explained how this was so, nor could he hold on for more than a moment to his highest sense of that enveloping Love, the moment when he felt needles of light piercing his and Boa's separate flesh, knitting their bodies like two threads into the intricate skein of that summer's profusions. It was only a single moment, and it went.
But every time they made love it was as though they were moving toward that moment again, slowly at first, then suddenly it would be there again in its immense, arisen majesty within them, and still the delirium swelled as they moved from height to effortless height, exalted, exulting, exiles from earth, set free from gravity and the laws of motion. It was heaven, and they had the keys. How could they have kept themselves from returning, even supposing they had wanted to?"

Excerpt from "Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?"

"Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air."

Excerpt from "Snow Geese"

"The geese
flew on.
I have never
seen them again.

Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly."

"All roads lead to Amber."

"I enjoy slaughtering beasts," he said, "and I think of my relatives constantly."

"I had to find me a place, a place resembling another place - one which no longer existed. I located the path. I took it."

"Amber casts an infinity of shadows, and my Avalon had cast many of its own, because of my presence there. I might be known on many earths that I had never trod, for shadows of myself had walked them, mimicking imperfectly my deeds and my thoughts."

"Things we are used to, small in themselves perhaps, are never easy to do without, but we suffer rail pain at their absence only when the occasion itself is significant."

"...it is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent."

"The absent man is always wrong..."

"...a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from."

Excerpt from "For Now"

"Tell me what you see vanishing and I
Will tell you who you are"

"Separation"

"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."

Excerpt from "The Singer"

"Take up water

And lay it on your eyes saying
Hail clarity

From now on nothing
Will appear the same

And pass through
Leaving your salt behind."

Excerpts from "The Widow"

"There is no season
That requires us"

"You grieve
Not that heaven does not exist but
That it exists without us"

"Everything that does not need you is real"

Excerpt from "To the Rain"

"touch me this time
let me love what I cannot know
as the man born blind may love color
until all that he loves
fills him with color"