wijsgerige wolken

[wijsgerigewolken]

Death is a lot of shit, he thought. It comes to you in small fragments that hardly show where it has entered. It comes, sometimes, atrociously. It can come from unboiled water; an un-pulled-up mosquito boot, or it can come with the great, white-hot, clanging roar we have lived with. It comes in small cracking whispers that precede the noise of the automatic weapon. It can come with the smoke-emitting arc of the grenade, or the sharp, cracking drop of the mortar.

Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees (p. 169)

[wijsgerigewolken]

Taxes, like death, are unavoidable.

Tax by Design. (p.20)

[wijsgerigewolken]

No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.

Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

[wijsgerigewolken]

But you will have a better time. Even with remorse you will have a better time.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms (p.133)

[wijsgerigewolken]

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

[wijsgerigewolken]

If you would face me, seek me out and I shall allow it. But heed the zealot's lesson well- when the weak court death, they find it.

Grigori, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen

[wijsgerigewolken]

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (p.25)

[wijsgerigewolken]

I believe there is only one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. (p.391)

[wijsgerigewolken]

Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. (p.288)

[wijsgerigewolken]

And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly - well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and grovelled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. (p.268)

[wijsgerigewolken]

It was some more human nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders; they were playing mob, and had achieved a succes which promised to be a good deal more serious than they had bargained for.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. (p.284)

[fuckyeahfranzkafka]

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.” -Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

[wijsgerigewolken]

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. (p.255)

[wijsgerigewolken]

At such a time it seems natural and good of me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. (p.125)

[wijsgerigewolken]

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden. (p.9)

[wijsgerigewolken]

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. (p.204)

[wijsgerigewolken]

It is so much the essence of any one of my ideas to be a content of my consciousness, that any idea someone else has is, just as such, different from mine.

Frege, Thought