Your fave book quote...

[scotty]

is that from 'the once and future king' or whatever that merlin book is called?

Naw

[emilystrange]

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its Outer Walls.

[markfiend]

well i dunno. it made me think of the great Salmon of Llew.

Oh right. Sorry. But no, I know what it's from.

A much bigger fish than a salmon.

[paint it black]

well i dunno. it made me think of the great Salmon of Llew.

Oh right. Sorry. But no, I know what it's from.

A much bigger fish than a salmon.

da dum da dum da dum da da da

the book is much racier than the film isn't it been eons since i read it

[scotty]

da dum da dum da dum da da da

the book is much racier than the film isn't it been eons since i read it

It is , I may have read it again!

[Perki]

"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport.'"

The opening sentence of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

[EvilBastard]

"The great Fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail"

"Jaws", Peter Benchley. Freakin' great book, way better than the fillum.

"Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious."

[nick the stripper]

A curse. Been in the family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands - the lymph glands, that is, of course - when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonations I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion - just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bobo, we called her - who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink...

Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum...

Quoted from Queer by William S. Burroughs.

[JansenClone]

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

Next meet up... I will make the next meet up...

[timsinister]

Vimes pounded through the fog after the fleeing figure. It wasn't quite so fast as him, despite the twinges in his legs and one or two warning stabs from his left knee, but whenever he came close to it some muffled pedestrian got in the way, or a cart pulled out of a cross street. This always happens in any police chase anywhere. A heavily laden lorry will always pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit. If vehicles aren't involved, then it'll be a man with a rack of garments. Or two men with a large sheet of glass. There's probably some kind of secret society behind this.

From Feet of Clay, appealing directly to my love of Fourth-Wall Humour. We could probably fill the thread with Master Pratchett's writings.

[lazarus corporation]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

(Neuromancer, by William Gibson)

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia.

(Introduction to Crash, by J G Ballard)

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

(Not from a book but from an interview with Charles Bukowski)

[canon docre]

Wow. Great readings so far.

Here's an excerpt from my favourite book of this year:

I first met Nico in November 1981 in a now-defunct Oxford nightclub, playing to an audience of amphetamined undergraduates hyped-up on the Velvet Underground myth and enjoying their brief fling with Bohemian lowlife before taking up their careers in advertising. She seemed both amused and bemused by her celebrity. Once again the promiscuous attentions of the pop world had settled upon her, identifying her as the precursor to a tortured nihilism then fashionable amongst the young.
In the cramped dressing-room, while poetically thin young men hung upon her every word and Nico lookalikes with pale lipstick stared relentlessly at their “Warhol Superstar�, hoping to discern the secrets of her charisma, she rummaged through her cavernous shoulder bag with increasing desperation. The little wrapper of heroin she’d spent so much of the day trying to obtain had disappeard.

It's written by the keyboard player of Nicos last tour, James Young.

[scotty]

I liked the speach in Trainspotting, but I much prefer the"Alternative" version

Choose Hibs, choose Leith, choose not winning the cup for over 105 years, choose Gareth Evans, choose a disabled fan’s carer running on to the park for a sly kick at Stuart Dougal, choose £2.99 for 3 litres, choose the smell wafting from the Seafield sewage works over the Links each morning, choose loosing to a bunch of Lithuanian waiters in the Inter Tattie cup, choose entering the Inter tattie cup in the first place, choose Jocky Scott, choose dirty needles, choose not selling out the biggest match in your club's history, choose having the worst derby record in the entire world, choose Amadou Konte, choose making a big deal about being “the first to wear the green� like it actually matters, choose being one day away from being closed down by your biggest rivals, choose looking like you ran out of peroxide half way through, choose being ‘classy’ when 96% of your your support is made up of chavs, choose singing songs poking fun at refugees, choose trying to kid people into believing that you’ve always played good football when the truth is that you’ve been absolutely shyte for 30 years, choose the Leith San Giro, choose thinking your players age slower than Peter Pan, choose going on and on and on and incessantly on about a game that occurred before most of you were born, choose the Loch Inn, choose getting humped 5-1 by some Ukranian team whose name nobody can pronounce, choose hiring an open-top bus for a cup final against a diddy team and then proceeding to lose the match, choose losing 30,000 ‘fans’ on the way home from said cup final, choose thinking Portobello beach is the Copacabana and Easter Road is the Maracana, choose going 2 goals up after 92 minutes of a New Years day derby match and still not winning, choose your derby rivals having won more derby matches at your (crap) ground than you have, choose to go on and on about once beating Real Madrid in a friendly match, choose running on the park for a sly kick at Andy Goram, choose Salamander Street, choose Derek Riorden, choose going 22 games in a row without beating your biggest rivals, choose making a big deal about a scoreboard that worked for a month, choose Alex Miller, choose incessantly going on about how some shady Russian is going to sell Tynecastle and shut Hearts down only to look on in horror as he invests heavily in the team, writes off millions of pounds of debt and builds a new main stand, choose Alec McLeish, choose Burberry caps, skiddy pants and shell-suits, choose having a squint mohawk, choose thinking that ‘Sunshine on Leith’ is not dreadful, choose hero worshipping Ivan "headless chicken"/"run Forest run" Sproule, choose to get relegated the week before your biggest rivals win the Scottish Cup, choose John Robertson scoring 27 goals against you, choose Wayne Foster actually scoring a goal against you and putting you out of the cup into the bargain, choose Blobby Williamson, choose hiring a manager with a monkeys head, choose worshipping and buying a decanter for a manager who only won one match, choose defending your club captain for urinating in a charity shop doorway after a team night out at a strip club, choose thinking that the term ‘yam’ is even slightly offensive or amusing in any way, shape, or form, choose an inferiority complex, choose Tam McManus, choose buckfast in the morning, choose being the most ungracious losers in Christendom, choose the cow-shed, choose going out of business when Celtic nicked all your players, choose running on to the pitch to celebrate your first derby win in 10 years only to be chased off again by the visiting support, choose living in the shadows of your neighbours for 131 years and forever knowing that YOU WILL ALWAYS BE THE WEE TEAM, choose the Proclaimers, choose John Leslie, choose Hibs.

[Arch Deviant]

"You ain't gonna send him to school? There's nothing he's gonna learn there but how to get along with other kids under completely weird conditions.... Had my way, no kid would learn an abstract word till they was ten years old. Wouldn't get their minds so gummed up."

-- Smiling Jack in Stone Junction by Jim Dodge

[nick the stripper]

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia.

(Introduction to Crash, by J G Ballard)

I forgot all about that one.

What is not supposed to be my concern ! First and foremost, the good cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. ''Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!"

Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns - they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.

You have much profound information to give about God, and have for thousands of years "searched the depths of the Godhead," and looked into its heart, so that you can doubtless tell us how God himself attends to "God's cause," which we are called to serve. And you do not conceal the Lord's doings, either. Now, what is his cause? Has he, as is demanded of us, made an alien cause, the cause of truth or love, his own? You are shocked by this misunderstanding, and you instruct us that God's cause is indeed the cause of truth and love, but that this cause cannot be called alien to him, because God is himself truth and love; you are shocked by the assumption that God could be like us poor worms in furthering an alien cause as his own. "Should God take up the cause of truth if he were not himself truth?" He cares only for his cause, but, because he is all in all, therefore all is his cause! But we, we are not all in all, and our cause is altogether little and contemptible; therefore we must "serve a higher cause." - Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause.

How is it with mankind, whose cause we are to make our own? Is its cause that of another, and does mankind serve a higher cause? No, mankind looks only at itself, mankind will promote the interests of mankind only, mankind is its own cause. That it may develop, it causes nations and individuals to wear themselves out in its service, and, when they have accomplished what mankind needs, it throws them on the dung-heap of history in gratitude. Is not mankind's cause - a purely egoistic cause?

I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

They all have an admirable time of it when they receive zealous homage. Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to "its bloom"! The individuals have died "for the great cause of the nation," and the nation sends some words of thanks after them and - has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism.

But only look at that Sultan who cares so lovingly for his people. Is he not pure unselfishness itself, and does he not hourly sacrifice himself for his people? Oh, yes, for "his people." Just try it; show yourself not as his, but as your own; for breaking away from his egoism you will take a trip to jail. The Sultan has set his cause on nothing but himself; he is to himself all in all, he is to himself the only one, and tolerates nobody who would dare not to be one of "his people."

And will you not learn by these brilliant examples that the egoist gets on best? I for my part take a lesson from them, and propose, instead of further unselfishly serving those great egoists, rather to be the egoist myself.

God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one.

If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my "emptiness." I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the "good cause" must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is - unique, as I am unique.

Nothing is more to me than myself!

(Introduction to The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner.)

[nick the stripper]

While reading through the thread, I was surprised to find no one had posted this fantastic sentence:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to kick in.

[paint it black]

While reading through the thread, I was surprised to find no one had posted this fantastic sentence:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to kick in.

too obvious

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.

and so it goes

[paint it black]

`You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
`And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--

never left me since i was six and now it is my time to pass it on

[Big Si]

While reading through the thread, I was surprised to find no one had posted this fantastic sentence:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to kick in.

http://www.fearnloathing.com/

Almost beat me to it as it's the same book....

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole multi colored collection of uppers, downers, laughers, screamers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.

And the bit about throwing the radio into the bath while it's playing Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit

[Planet Dave]

'You'll never win anything with kids'

(okay it was on the telly first, but it's in a book too )

Either that or...

'Is there anyone in this rout with authority to treat with me, or wit to understand me?'

[9while9]

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
Philip K. Dick

The thread's not that much better then "who has the best avatar".

[Arch Deviant]

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.

and so it goes

That would just be 'An Unfortunate Series of Events'

[sarah_orange]

An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

tp. the hogfather

[markfiend]

`You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
`And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--

never left me since i was six and now it is my time to pass it on

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one CAN'T
believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen.
'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things
before breakfast.'

[Izzy HaveMercy]

Can we quote from non-fiction, Master Iz?

Doesn't say anywhere in the Manual that you can't, Claire

IZ.