Quote of the Day

Lady Bracknell: Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.
Algernon: I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.
Lady Bracknell: That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

LOLCAT of the Day

Quote of the Day

Benedict And, I pray thee now, tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?

Beatrice For them all together; which maintained so politic a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?

Benedict ‘Suffer love,’ a good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Beatrice In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart! If you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates.

Benedict Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Quote of the Day

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure, and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality to me, or than I am to them?

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Quote of the Day

I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried; and every particle and utensil labeled to my will: as, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one shin, and so forth.
- Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

Book Club Voting

So I am hypothetically part of a book club and today I am presenting books for the club to choose from for September's read. These are their options:

The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston
Length: 209 pages
Probably best compared to The Joy Luck Club, although I was not fond of that at all, and I really love this book. It is fictionalized Chinese memoirs interspersed with the myth of Fa Mulan. Really, really great to read and to analyse. Some great prose and imagery.

Franny & Zooey
JD Salinger
Length: 202 pages
VERY different from Catcher in the Rye – actually reminds me very much of the Royal Tenenbaums in terms of tone/style. Lots of cursing (like Catcher in the Rye), but one of my favorite books. Quick read.

Quote of the Day

Excerpt from Chapter 10 of "A Little Princess" by Frances Hodgson Burnett

One of these nights, when [Sara] came up to the attic cold and hungry, with a tempest raging in her young breast, Emily's stare seemed so vacant, her sawdust legs and arms so inexpressive, that Sara lost all control over herself. There was nobody but Emily-- no one in the world. And there she sat.

"I shall die presently," she said at first.

Emily simply stared.

"I can't bear this," said the poor child, trembling. "I know I shall die. I'm cold; I'm wet; I'm starving to death. I've walked a thousand miles today, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until night. And because I could not find that last thing the cook sent me for, they would not give me any supper. Some men laughed at me because my old shoes made me slip down in the mud. I'm covered with mud now. And they laughed. Do you hear?"

She looked at the staring glass eyes and complacent face, and suddenly a sort of heartbroken rage seized her. She lifted her little savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair, bursting into a passion of sobbing--Sara who never cried.

"You are nothing but a DOLL!" she cried. "Nothing but a doll-- doll--doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust. You never had a heart. Nothing could ever make you feel. You are a DOLL!"

Emily lay on the floor, with her legs ignominiously doubled up over her head, and a new flat place on the end of her nose; but she was calm, even dignified. Sara hid her face in her arms. The rats in the wall began to fight and bite each other and squeak and scramble. Melchisedec was chastising some of his family.

Sara's sobs gradually quieted themselves. It was so unlike her to break down that she was surprised at herself. After a while she raised her face and looked at Emily, who seemed to be gazing at her round the side of one angle, and, somehow, by this time actually with a kind of glassy-eyed sympathy. Sara bent and picked her up. Remorse overtook her. She even smiled at herself a very little smile.

"You can't help being a doll," she said with a resigned sigh, "any more than Lavinia and Jessie can help not having any sense. We are not all made alike. Perhaps you do your sawdust best." And she kissed her and shook her clothes straight, and put her back upon her chair.

Quote of the Day

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.
- Atticus Finch ("To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee)

Quote of the Day

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
- Willa Cather, "My Antonia"

Quote of the Day

We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down!
Charles Dickens (Aunt Trotwood, David Copperfield)

Books Part 2

1. One book that changed your life

Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

2. One book that you have read more than once

Middlemarch by George Eliot

3. One book you would want on a desert island

The Book of Mormon

4. One book that made you laugh out loud

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

5. One book that made you cry

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

6. One book you wish had been written

anything more from JD Salinger

7. One book you wish had never been written

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

8. One book you are currently reading

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

9. One book you have been meaning to read

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

books books books books books

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus

Current Reads:

Life of Pi
Confederacy of Dunces
Preach My Gospel
The Mayor of Casterbridge

When I read a book I to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham