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Glompbot
23-10-2004, 05:35 PM
I know I'm not the only one who has a txt file of book quotes.

I'd like to read some that other people have found.

Here are mine:

"Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as your please. Then in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines that you have imagined on the world's face.

"Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the eath that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to."

- Robin Hobb's The Tawny Man series

How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?

Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. 'Plenty more fish in the sea,' they'll say, or 'You're better off without them,' or 'Do you want some more of these potato chips?' They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.

Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

- Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith

"The biggest chink in your female armour. The largest hole in your defences. The one thing you cannot and dare not absolutely guard against, for your nature must remain as it is for all your planning to come to frutition. You dare not change it. Still, it is hard when your own female nature betrays you into believing the ones who abuse you need you or love you or have some natural right to do what they do"

- The gate to womens country by Sheri S Tepper


There is more than one type of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

- The handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood

I've got more, but I can't seem to find them at this time.

Glompbot
23-10-2004, 06:17 PM
Another one from the book I am currently reading:

A lot of people seem to think computers are just machines, like vacuums or the VCR. They're wrong. Right from the start, from the jumped-up abacuses of the Amiga and the Apple II, we've had a different relationship with computers. You knew right away that this was something that had rights. If your washing machine stops working or the TV goes on the fritz then you get it repaired or take it to the dump. These are pieces of old, transparent tech. They have no magic any more. If a computer messes you around, however, you're never really sure whose fault it is. You're implicated. You feel vunerable. It's like the difference between a pencil and a car. A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There's only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model (too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rustbucket most of us got for our first ride, it's more complex. There's coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There's that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None means it's broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship with it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be dealth with. Which is how you've come to know people, after all: not by the things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.

- The Lonely Dead - Michael Marshall.

Something Fast
25-10-2004, 01:10 AM
III,4: Choose ye an island!
III,5: Fortify it!
III,6: Dung it about with enginery of war!
-The Book Of the Law

I just thought that sounds really silly.
Hehehehe. Dung it about. Hehehe.