Category Archives: Reading

A Selection of Quotes from Frequently Banned Books, Part One

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  • “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”-Candide, Voltaire
  • “He look’d a little disorder’d, when he said this, but I did not apprehend anything from it at the time, believing as it us’d to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.”-Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
  • “There ain’t so sin and their ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”-The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

[Alternative Muses] Writerly Style: George Bernard Shaw Demonstrates How to Wear a Suit

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 George Bernard Shaw wore suits almost as well as he wrote plays. Case in point:

George Bernard Shaw, 1909

George Bernard Shaw, 1909.

The hat is a nice touch.

George Bernard Shaw, 1914

George Bernard Shaw, 1914.

Hmm. This looks familiar.

George Bernard Shaw, 1946

George Bernard Shaw, 1946.

Jaunty at 90.

The Eighth of September by Pablo Neruda

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The Eighth of September by Pablo Neruda

This day, Today, was a brimming glass.
This day, Today, was an immense wave.
This day was all the Earth.
This day, the storm-driven ocean
lifted us up in a kiss
so exalted we trembled
at the lightning flash
and bound as one, fell,
and drowned, without being unbound.
This day our bodies grew
stretched out to Earth’s limits,
orbited there, melded there
to one globe of wax, or a meteor’s flame.
A strange door opened, between us,
and someone, with no face as yet,
waited for us there.