50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Category: Quite Quotable (Page 12 of 23)

November 27, 2017 /

“I’d never understood how closely things are connected to one another. And it isn’t just the zodiac I’m talking about. We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we’ve just played, it’s perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 20, 2017 /

“Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn’t notice a girl like me . . . yet not only had this man bothered to speak to me, he’d actually spoken kindly. He’d addressed me in a way that suggested I might be a young woman of standing—the daughter of a good friend, perhaps. For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness—a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters. The noise and hubbub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 16, 2017 /

“I couldn’t help feeling, the more I looked at her, that she was like a tree that has begun to lose its leaves. I was so shocked by the whole effect that I think I must have taken a step back, or let out a gasp, or in some way given her some hint of my feelings, for all at once she said to me, in that raspy voice of hers:

‘What are you looking at!’

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am. I was looking at your kimono,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.’

This must have been the right answer—if there was a right answer—because she let out something of a laugh, though it sounded like a cough.

‘So you like it, do you?’ she said, continuing to cough, or laugh, I couldn’t tell which. ‘Do you have any idea what it cost?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘More than you did, that’s for certain.'”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 13, 2017 /

“As a historian, I have always regarded memoirs as source material. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world. It must differ from biography in that a memoirist can never achieve the perspective that a biographer possesses as a matter of course. Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us—so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.”

—from the “Translator’s Note” prefacing Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 6, 2017 /

“”When you stopped believing in God . . . did you stop believing in good and evil?’
‘No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.'”

—from The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

November 2, 2017 /

“Will considered what to do. When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.”

—from The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

October 26, 2017 /

“‘There are two great powers . . . and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

—from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Quite Quotable #30.2

October 23, 2017 /

“‘Dark matter is what my research team is looking for. No one knows what it is. There’s more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, that’s the point. We can see the stars and the galaxies and the things that shine, but for it all to hang together and not fly apart, there needs to be a lot more of it—to make gravity work, you see. But no one can detect it. So there are lots of different research projects trying to find out what it is, and this is one of them. . . . We think it’s some kind of elementary particle. Something quite different from anything discovered so far. But the particles are very hard to detect.'”

—from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

October 16, 2017 /

“‘We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not . . . or die of despair.'”

—from The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

October 12, 2017 /

“‘You en’t gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there’s more to us than gyptian language. There’s deeps in us and strong currents. We’re water people all through, and you en’t, you’re a fire person. What you’re most like is marsh fire, that’s the place you have in the gyptian scheme; you got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that’s what you are child.'”

—from The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

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