Quotes
From KstructIB
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[edit] The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Page 7 "Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."
Page 8 "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."
Page 9 "The Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe"
Page 9 "I was…a pathfinder, an original settler."
Page 10 "To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size."
Page 12 "It was a body (Tom’s) capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body."
Page 18 "’Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?’"
Page 18 "The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved." — Tom
Page 18 "[us whites] who are the dominant race" — Tom
Page 22 "I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated!" — Daisy
Page 26 "This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat…"
Page 32 "everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it"
Page 47 "What realism! Knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?"
Page 48 "I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound."
Page 63 "I’ll tell you God’s truth" — Gatsby
Page 92 "The rich get richer and the poor get — children."
Page 92 "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — no through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion…"
Page 95 "The truth was that Jay Gatsby…sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."
Page 95 "He was a son of God…and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."
Page 100-101 "It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."
Page 106 "Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!" — Gatsby
Page 107 "when he…wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God."
Page 108 "his [Gatsby] career as Trimalchio was over."
Page 113 "What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? Cried Daisy, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"
Page 115 "Her voice is full of money"
Page 118 "It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."
Page 142 "He had committed himself to the following of a grail."
Page 142 "Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor"
Page 146 "’They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’"
Page 147 "his incorruptible dream" (vs. Gatsby’s corruption)
Page 155-156 "I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone."
Page 170 "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"
Page 171 "I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
Page 167 "After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eye’s power of correction."
Page 172 "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And on fine morning - / So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
[edit] The Limits of Wonder - Richard Lehan
Page 30 "When one lost that sense of life or promise…then life lost its sense of wonder, its splendor, its romantic promise."
Page 31 "It is Gatsby who endows her [Daisy] with a meaning that she could in no way embody."
Page 32 "God has withdrawn from this world and is replaced by the commercial billboard with the blind eyes of T.J.Eckleburg…"
Page 33 "This is a blind world because there is no source of moral vision"
Page 38 "Modern man not only loses God, but he loses the means of finding a substitute for God, by which Fitzgerald meant the means of incarnating his life with a sense of wonder."
Page 50 "Behind the idea of the East is a sense of fixed money, of institutional power, of class differences, of the anonymity of the megalopolis. Behind the idea of the West is a sense of mobility, of new opportunity, of a personal and human scale."
Page 72 "’The whole idea of Gatsby’, Fitzgerald said, ‘is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.’"
Page 73 "Gatsby is reclaimed by the living dead, by George Wilson, the agent of the valley of ashes as well as the agent of Gatsby’s death."
Page 74 "Daisy’s very name suggests something perishable"
Page 84 "…Faustian man find himself longing for the unattainable; has no sense of his limits……While Faustian man lingers into the modern, he is transformed by the Enlightenment, which brings with it a sense of the empirical and the need for quantitative measurement. Under such influence, the sense of the infinite gives way to cold reason, science, and technology."
Page 101 "Nick realizes that romantic expectation, no matter how intensely conceived, cannot function independently of social reality."
Page 103 "ultimately the moral center — like so much that is seen in this novel — comes to us slightly blurred."
Page 109 "he [Nick] leaves us with…the nowhere hero, the Gatsby figure who stands between a dead past and an unrealizable future."
Page 110 "In Gatsby Fitzgerald showed a certain cultural materialism (embodied in Tom Buchanan) exhausting a romantic energy (embodied in Gatsby) leaving us a physical residue (embodied by George and Myrtle Wilson and the Valley of Ashes).
Page 123 "[Wilson] tells us, ‘God sees everything’, and then proceeds to kill the wrong person."
Page 123 "The [moral] center cannot hold, and romantic possibility gives way to a corrupt reality."
An Instant in the Wind - André Brink
Page 12 "This no one can take away from us, not even ourselves."
Page 14 "Such a long journey ahead for you and me. Oh God, oh God."
Page 15 "Who are you? Who am I?"
Page 15 "It is not a question of imagination, but of faith."
Page 20 "flesh is much too uncertain and unpredictable for your scientific precision; too indecent and too terrible." (Elizabeth)
Page 39 "Don’t you think people are landscapes too to be explored" (Elizabeth to Larsson)
Page 41 "What’s wrong with a woman anyway? Is it something to be ashamed of?" (Elizabeth)
Page 45 "But there is still the child. For his sake I must get back to the Cape." (Elizabeth)
Page 49 "Is that me? ... And if it’s me - who am I?" (Elizabeth)
Page 51 "Amongst the trees of the garden I hid myself because I was naked" (Elizabeth)
Page 56 "You’re too white for the truth" (Adam)
Page 59 "knowledge of death, that’s the inevitable start"
Page 65 "But this once I refuse to obey them, I shall break free. This once I’ll trek into my own wilderness" (Elizabeth)
Page 68 "One is always betrayed." (Thoughts of Elizabeth)
Page 68 "Forgive me, I’m only a woman. You [God] made me one" (Elizabeth - after she accuses God in her dream to have taken her child away from her.)
Page 68 "It’s not a cruel land, just apathetic. It takes from you what is redundant: wagon and oxen, guide and husband and child, camp and shelter, conversation, help, imagined security, preparation and presumption, clothes. Whittling you down to yourself." (Elizabeth)
Page 84 "And civilization is history?" (Adam)
Page 91 "I’m a human being. And I want to live with people again." (Adam)
Page 108 "She wants to ask: Who are you?" (Elizabeth)
Page 109 "World provisionally without end."
Page 134 "those two wagons....planting the beacons of civilization on their destructive way."
Page 146 "Every time, in going on, there is something of the first venture: a question of faith."
Page 158 "I have traveled farther into myself and nothing can ever be quite the same again" (Elizabeth)
Page 178 "I love you, here is my life, I’m holding yours in security: here is my hand, take it, let’s jump into the abyss, whatever happens; even if we fall to death, let it at least be hand in hand."
Page 206 "God is the emptiness of an endless sky."
Page 248 "The only certainty, here, was the moist sounds of the sea."
Page 249 "this secret unexplored interior" (Elizabeth)
Page 249 "Who are you? I have never known anyone better, yet you are altogether strange to me."
Page 250 "One has to learn to live with betrayal"
[edit] La Chat 1990 Interview With Brink — André Brink
"the Immorality Act…made any kind of a love relationship between whites and blacks impossible."
"I wanted to write a novel with a simple outline, as clear as the backbone of a fish"
"the whole experience which places a burden of responsibility on the actors in that situation not to resort to an imaginary solution to their problems but to enter the future really believing that something worthwhile, something significant, something sensible, can come out of it."
"one is not always conscious of exactly everything one writes"
"one [Adam and Elizabeth in this case] has a kind of social consciousness and responsibility, so they have to return to human society"
"she possibly — it isn’t certain — betrays him because she cannot do otherwise in that society;"
"to them [Adam and Elizabeth] it [nature] is a kind of mother which shelters them, which feeds them, which prepares them for the future."
"a journey through a landscape of the mind"
[edit] Tar Baby - Toni Morrison
"…all of whom knew their true and ancient properties"
Page 6 "There he saw the stars and exchanged stares with the moon, but he could see very little of the land, which was just as well because he was gazing at the shore of an island that, three hundred years ago, had struck slaves blind the moment they saw it."
Page 7 "The men had already folded the earth where there had been no fold and hollowed her where there had been no hollow."
Page 11 "He [Valerian] hauls everybody down to the equator to grow Northern flowers?" (Margaret)
Page 12 "He [Valerian] read only mail these days, having given up books because the language in them had changed so much — stained with rivulets of disorder and meaninglessness."
Page 37 "She stirred milk into the chocolate paste and chuckled." (Ondine)
Page 43 "that mother/sister/she" (Jadine’s dreams)
Page 57 "although the theme of her defense in the argument was that Ondine (if not all colored people) was just as good as they were, she didn’t believe it." (about Margaret)
Page 76 "‘Sunday,’ he [Valerian] was saying with the bell-full voice of ownership"
Page 82 "literally a nigger in the woodpile" (Margaret on Son)
Page 85 "…not dreaming something she was supposed to be dreaming" (about Margaret)
Page 88 "Giving your son a whole human being for a Christmas present / … / Now he’ll [Michael] own him, I suspect. What money can’t buy." (Ondine)
Page 113 "the small dark dogs galloping on silver feet." (metaphor for Jadine’s sexual passion)
Page 121 "Rape? Why you little white girls always think somebody’s trying to rape you?" "Then why don’t you settle down and stop acting like it [acting white]" (Son to Jadine)
Page 126 "Doesn’t he know the difference between one Black and another or does he think we’re all…" (Jadine)
Page 129 "He looked like a gorilla" (Margaret)"Jadine’s neck prickled at the description. She had volunteered nigger — but not gorilla."
Page 139 "He’d [Son] had seven documented identities and before that a few undocumented ones, so he barely remembered he real original name himself."
Page 147 "The candy was named after me. I was named after an emperor." (Valerian)
Page 184 "The women hanging from the trees were quiet now, but arrogant — mindful as they were of their value, their exceptional femaleness; knowing as they did that the first world of the world have been built with their sacred properties"
Page 203 "the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him [Valerian] to grow old in regal comfort;" (Son in a stream of consciousness)
Page 204-205 "That was the sole lesson of their world: how to make waste, how to make machines that made more waste. /…/it would drown them one day,"
Page 206 "The man who respected industry looked over a gulf at the man who prized fraternity."
Page 208 "I may be a cook, Mr. Street, but I’m a person too." (Ondine)
Page 222 "smiling to think of what the leaden waves of the Atlantic had become in the hands of civilization. The triumph of ingenuity that had transferred the bored treachery of the sea into a playful gush of water that did exactly what it was told." (Son in about the tub)
Page 245 "He [Valerian] had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know."
Page 265 "He’s a person not a white man." (Jadine on Valerian)
Page 269 "She [Jadine]…demanded clarity, precision, very specific solutions to open-ended problems,"
Page 277 "she [Jadine] was grateful to be far away from his [Son] original-dime ways, his white-folks-flack-folks primitivism."
Page 285 "This place dislocates everything."
Page 308 "She has forgotten her ancient properties." (Thérèse about Jadine)
[edit] Down From The Mountaintop — M. Walker
"Morrison’s characters pay the price of living self-absorbed lives, isolated from roots and cultural traditions."
"What Jadine has become is a woman cut off from her personal past, from her cultural heritage, and from history."
"Self-indulgent and determined to live in the present, without concern for the welfare of others" (on Jadine)
"Brooding over the lives of the characters in this novel is a sense of unreality, of living in suspended time, as each is waiting for something to happen."
"Michael, who like Godot never comes"
"The characters are held in limbo by their indifference to the outside world and their preoccupation with the unfinished business of the past."
[edit] Toni Morrison — Linden Peach
Page 5"Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he [T.M.’s father] believed that harmony could never exist between the races."
Page 77 "It [Tar Baby] incorporates a wide range of perspectives through its use of myths and concepts whose meaning have undergone change in different periods and cultural contexts."
Page 86 "the conclusion of this novel possibly serves only to make the reader more aware of how much in the text is deferred."
Page 92 "islands…have a significant association in Western culture as ‘places of transformation’."
Page 92 "In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended."
