for Katie,
Sep. 6th, 2007 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
minxySo ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
katie_m does these fantastic posts she calls quote dumps every once in a while, and they are just fascinating for the nuggets of wisdom that fandom produces. At some point, the folder of ideas and quotes and prompts that I keep for rainy days where I need a title or a ficathon prompt or inspiration or something aquired the title of 'quotedump' in homage, though they are usually literature or non-fiction based. I don't read enough meta to collect cool fandom quotes like Katie does. But she told me to post! She did!
So.
If you've ever received a prompt from me, discussed fic titles or seen those long, fabulous lists of prompts we all contributed to at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
choc_fic, samcarter_gen or apocalypse_kree, you may very well recognize some of these:
My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.
-Toni Morrison, Beloved
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock
-Charles Bukowski, The Crunch
I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
-Albert Einstein
Listen, even lovers have still lives,
have whole months when they hang
together like moths on an unlit
light bulb, waiting for the bulb to light
-Edward Hirsch, Still Life: An Argument
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken
to take one whole heart home.
-Rumi
I felt the breath of God go cold on my skin.
-Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Like a bridge he'll come between us.
-Orson Scott Card
The men did not complain because to complain implied a hope that things could change. The women complained about the men and dragged them to bed when they passed out on the couch, took their shoes off. Hesitating, kissing their cheeks. People love in strange ways.
-The Center of Winter, Marya Hornbacher
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this.
-Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders, across the stars...
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age — why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
- Alfred Tennyson, Maud
Umbra: the earth’s darker, cone shaped shadow as it extends into space. Penumbra: the lighter shadow edging it.
I realize that it would be foolish to think that just because we've learned so much, just because the topic of homosexuality has been so greatly expanded and enriched in the last 15 years, there aren't somehow people still making the same dumb assumptions, or playing out the same stereotypes that they always did, or being as head-scratchingly subconsciously homophobic as people always have been. –orca_girl
A voice said, Look me in the stars and tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars were not too much to pay for birth.
--Robert Frost
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.
--Kenneth Graham
But one day, the things that made you free start to keep you down.
--Jardine Libaire
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occured to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
-- Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
“Every shout shook the night and spread out endlessly, only to contract again like a black coal, and with the rising and the falling of the melody their hearts trembled and almost stopped, flying faster than lightning to distant places and then returning. The men, who had mastered sorrow to the point of addiction, had mastered silence with the same perfection. If a breath sounded, coarse and grief stricken, to break the silence, it lent the silence an earthy, murky color and seemed improper, and the man who had breathed might look searchingly at the others, anxious and apologetic, speaking without words. Pain reached the point of agony, and sorrow prevailed over everything.”
-- Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif (trans: Peter Theroux)
"Between exploit and recompense lay only four days, which in most histories would comprise but an elipsis between words, a quartet of periods, thus: .... - but which, if through close reading we magnify them into spheres, prove to contain in each case a huddle of twenty-four grey subterranean hours like orphaned mice; and in the flesh of every hour a swarm of useless moments like ants whose queen has perished; and within each moment an uncountable multitude of instants resembling starpointed syllables shaken out of words - "
--Europe Central, William T. Vollmann
I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It's feeble to be an object.
--Kathryn Dunn, Geek Love
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
--John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Because he's got to have men of courage, that's why. If he knew how to plan a proper campaign what would he be needing men of courage for? Ordinary ones would do. It's always the same; whenever there's a load of special virtues around it means something stinks.
--Bertholt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
"There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them; because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed you somewhere.”
--Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Like you...I counted the shooting stars of a winter
night and my head was dizzy with all
of them calling one by one:
Look for us again.
--Carl Sandburg, from Smoke and Steel (1922.)
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs
should relax and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."—André Malraux
The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
--Samuel Johnson
Give me a bowl of wine,
In this I bury all unkindness.
--William Shakespeare (Brutus in Julius Caesar)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clark
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
--Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Don't you try to out-wierd me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
--Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams
We are made of water anyway,
I can feel it in the yielding
of your flesh, though sometimes
I think that you are sand,
moving slowly, slowly
from under me.
-- Linda Pastan, Erosion
The Lady's Second Song
William Butler Yeats
What sort of man is coming
To lie between your feet?
What matter, we are but women.
Wash; make your body sweet;
I have cupboards of dried fragrance.
I can strew the sheet.
The Lord have mercy upon us.
He shall love my soul as though
Body were not at all,
He shall love your body
Untroubled by the soul,
Love cram love's two divisions
Yet keep his substance whole.
The Lord have mercy upon us.
Soul must learn a love that is
proper to my breast,
Limbs a Love in common
With every noble beast.
If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?
The Lord have mercy upon us.
"So now we know why Communism *really* fell: too top-heavy & not real clear on that center-of-gravity bit." Gabe, viewing statues outside Budapest.
"I know people are really into cultural identity and stuff, but not all cultural sharing is bad. I mean, dude. Shower curtains." Ryan, about his room in Amsterdam.
“Men fall in love with a womanly woman” Lux soap advertisement, 1931
“Cut and dried notions of conduct are commensurate with moral slackness.” –Henrik Ibsen.
"Things are only impossible until they're not." – Picard (Star Trek)
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes."
--Dan Simmons, "Rise of Endymion," 1997
Steal, borrow, copy, be inspired by, or guess-where-I-submitted-that-prompt at will.
katie_m does these fantastic posts she calls quote dumps every once in a while, and they are just fascinating for the nuggets of wisdom that fandom produces. At some point, the folder of ideas and quotes and prompts that I keep for rainy days where I need a title or a ficathon prompt or inspiration or something aquired the title of 'quotedump' in homage, though they are usually literature or non-fiction based. I don't read enough meta to collect cool fandom quotes like Katie does. But she told me to post! She did! So.
If you've ever received a prompt from me, discussed fic titles or seen those long, fabulous lists of prompts we all contributed to at
choc_fic, samcarter_gen or apocalypse_kree, you may very well recognize some of these:My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember.
-Toni Morrison, Beloved
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock
-Charles Bukowski, The Crunch
I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
-Albert Einstein
Listen, even lovers have still lives,
have whole months when they hang
together like moths on an unlit
light bulb, waiting for the bulb to light
-Edward Hirsch, Still Life: An Argument
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken
to take one whole heart home.
-Rumi
I felt the breath of God go cold on my skin.
-Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Like a bridge he'll come between us.
-Orson Scott Card
The men did not complain because to complain implied a hope that things could change. The women complained about the men and dragged them to bed when they passed out on the couch, took their shoes off. Hesitating, kissing their cheeks. People love in strange ways.
-The Center of Winter, Marya Hornbacher
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this.
-Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders, across the stars...
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age — why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
- Alfred Tennyson, Maud
Umbra: the earth’s darker, cone shaped shadow as it extends into space. Penumbra: the lighter shadow edging it.
I realize that it would be foolish to think that just because we've learned so much, just because the topic of homosexuality has been so greatly expanded and enriched in the last 15 years, there aren't somehow people still making the same dumb assumptions, or playing out the same stereotypes that they always did, or being as head-scratchingly subconsciously homophobic as people always have been. –orca_girl
A voice said, Look me in the stars and tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars were not too much to pay for birth.
--Robert Frost
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats.
--Kenneth Graham
But one day, the things that made you free start to keep you down.
--Jardine Libaire
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occured to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
-- Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
“Every shout shook the night and spread out endlessly, only to contract again like a black coal, and with the rising and the falling of the melody their hearts trembled and almost stopped, flying faster than lightning to distant places and then returning. The men, who had mastered sorrow to the point of addiction, had mastered silence with the same perfection. If a breath sounded, coarse and grief stricken, to break the silence, it lent the silence an earthy, murky color and seemed improper, and the man who had breathed might look searchingly at the others, anxious and apologetic, speaking without words. Pain reached the point of agony, and sorrow prevailed over everything.”
-- Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif (trans: Peter Theroux)
"Between exploit and recompense lay only four days, which in most histories would comprise but an elipsis between words, a quartet of periods, thus: .... - but which, if through close reading we magnify them into spheres, prove to contain in each case a huddle of twenty-four grey subterranean hours like orphaned mice; and in the flesh of every hour a swarm of useless moments like ants whose queen has perished; and within each moment an uncountable multitude of instants resembling starpointed syllables shaken out of words - "
--Europe Central, William T. Vollmann
I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It's feeble to be an object.
--Kathryn Dunn, Geek Love
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
--John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Because he's got to have men of courage, that's why. If he knew how to plan a proper campaign what would he be needing men of courage for? Ordinary ones would do. It's always the same; whenever there's a load of special virtues around it means something stinks.
--Bertholt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
"There will be days when you'll look at your hands and you'll want to take something and smash every bone in them; because they'll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can't find that chance, and you can't bear your living body because it has failed you somewhere.”
--Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Like you...I counted the shooting stars of a winter
night and my head was dizzy with all
of them calling one by one:
Look for us again.
--Carl Sandburg, from Smoke and Steel (1922.)
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs
should relax and get used to the idea." - Robert A. Heinlein
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."—André Malraux
The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
--Samuel Johnson
Give me a bowl of wine,
In this I bury all unkindness.
--William Shakespeare (Brutus in Julius Caesar)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clark
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
--Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Don't you try to out-wierd me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
--Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams
We are made of water anyway,
I can feel it in the yielding
of your flesh, though sometimes
I think that you are sand,
moving slowly, slowly
from under me.
-- Linda Pastan, Erosion
The Lady's Second Song
William Butler Yeats
What sort of man is coming
To lie between your feet?
What matter, we are but women.
Wash; make your body sweet;
I have cupboards of dried fragrance.
I can strew the sheet.
The Lord have mercy upon us.
He shall love my soul as though
Body were not at all,
He shall love your body
Untroubled by the soul,
Love cram love's two divisions
Yet keep his substance whole.
The Lord have mercy upon us.
Soul must learn a love that is
proper to my breast,
Limbs a Love in common
With every noble beast.
If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?
The Lord have mercy upon us.
"So now we know why Communism *really* fell: too top-heavy & not real clear on that center-of-gravity bit." Gabe, viewing statues outside Budapest.
"I know people are really into cultural identity and stuff, but not all cultural sharing is bad. I mean, dude. Shower curtains." Ryan, about his room in Amsterdam.
“Men fall in love with a womanly woman” Lux soap advertisement, 1931
“Cut and dried notions of conduct are commensurate with moral slackness.” –Henrik Ibsen.
"Things are only impossible until they're not." – Picard (Star Trek)
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes."
--Dan Simmons, "Rise of Endymion," 1997
Steal, borrow, copy, be inspired by, or guess-where-I-submitted-that-prompt at will.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 10:04 pm (UTC)Anyway, yay quotes!
no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 04:33 am (UTC)Actually, this bears testament to my near complete inability to collect fandom quotes. Unlike Katie, too, this list has been compiling and editing itself for the last few years rather than months, so it could well have been a year or more ago that we had that particular homophobia wank.
Still, you're holding your own with Mr. Einstein.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 04:34 am (UTC)Though, it could totally be slashy. Huh. That's interesting.
Yay quotes! I do love them. Now I can start a new file, and won't it be interesting to see what ends up on it?
no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-07 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 05:05 pm (UTC)*notes in new Quote Dump 2 file*
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 05:14 pm (UTC)The point being that I don't think I'll get to reading them today, but there's something really beautiful about having poetry regularly sent to my flist.
I'm glad you endorse the poems there; sometimes literature and quote communities can be hit or miss. It means a lot that you love this one.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 06:33 pm (UTC)And I firmly endorse fucking off at work and writing. (Me, I'm fucking off from writing. Heh. I'm watching poker coverage instead. It's research.)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 08:49 pm (UTC)...I think the Boy Who situation is probably contributing to my inability to focus on experiments. I'm all about daydreaming and words and images and relationships between people.
And because I'm totally Fucking Off At Work, I shall tell you that I kind of hate those relationship conversations in which you have to tell, not show, what you feel for someone. I realize that they are completely necessary in any relationship, but there are some times where I'm sitting there thinking that if I were writing this story, I would totally edit out this completely expositional conversation. I am loving how much the thing with this boy so far is all showing, not telling. I'm just loving that. I hope at some point things are explicitly stated (intentions and all that), but right now, I am as sure as I need to be about it all.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-10 09:43 pm (UTC)(hooray for The Boy Who, though!)