Risen Above The Ink

These are book quotes which define the essence of my being. #JackLondon #HenryDavidThoreau #LeoTolstoy #FriedrichNietzsche #CharlesDickens

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“Since then I’ve had a terrible fondness for asses.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, (p. 56)

*Prince Myshkin’s account from noticing excellent qualities among donkeys in Switzerland.

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And in his madness prays for storms, As though in storms he might find peace.

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) The concluding lines of “The Sail” (1832)

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I had never once reflected that these people had their loves, desires, and regrets just as I had. Our garden, our copses, our fields, which I had known so long, had suddenly become new and beautiful in my eyes. It was not for nothing that he said that in life there is only one certain happiness - living for others.

Leo Tolstoy “Family Happiness” (p. 18)

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I grasped all the self-sacrifice and devotion of this loving nature, felt all that I owed to her, and learned to love her more than ever. He taught me to look at our people - peasants, house-serfs, and serf-girls - quite differently from how I had done.

Leo Tolstoy "Family Happiness" (p. 18)

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My soul he did not know, because he loved it, because at this very time it was growing and developing, and there I could deceive him, and I did deceive him.

Leo Tolstoy "Family Happiness" (p. 17)

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My former depression had completely gone, and was replaced by the dreamy spring melancholy of vague hopes and desires.

Leo Tolstoy "Family Happiness" (p. 11)

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Before the end of the winter this sense of depression and loneliness, of boredom, in fact, became so intense that I hardly left my room, did not open the piano, and did not look at a book.

Leo Tolstoy "Family Happiness" (p. 5)

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There seemed to be a feeling of death in the house: the gloom and horror of death were still in the air.

Leo Tolstoy "Family Happiness" (p. 5)

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What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau "Walden"

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But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break in and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Henry David Thoreau "Walden"

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I wondered all these years among a world of women, seeking you.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 163)

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We can only measure the unknown only by the known.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 150)

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At such moments I felt strangely alone with God, alone with him and watching the chaos of his wrath.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 127)

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I had no fear of death.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 124)

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It struck me that he was joyous, in a ferocious sort of way; that he was glad there was an impeding struggle; that he was thrilled and upborne with knowledge that one of the great moments of living, when the tide surges up in flood, was upon him.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 120)

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I had learned to look more closely at life as it was lived, to recognize that there were such things as facts in the world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea and to place certain values on the concrete and objective phases of existence.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 118)

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Life had been unfair to him. It had played him a scurvy trick when it fashioned him into the thing he was, and it had played him scurvy tricks ever since.

Jack London "The Sea Wolf" (p. 94)