“The Poet does not flee from reality; she expands it in her flight.”
— Olaf Bull,
(my translation).
Posts filed in Quote of the day
An attempt at establishing an institution. Not a very successful one, though, as I don’t always have the time to find a nice little quote to post, but I try to do so every day that I have access to a computer and the Internet.
The mission
So true
“I have profound admiration for myself. Is this ‘vanity’? The point is debatable.”
— Twisk the Fairy,
Lyonesse III: Madouc, by Jack Vance, page 635.
Security precautions
“We stood in the center of a football field-size dome that the Consu had constructed not an hour before. Of course, we humans could not be allowed to touch Consu ground, or be anywhere a Consu might tread; upon our arrival, automated machines created the dome in a region of Consu space long quarantined to [...]
Scalzi likes Sandman
“The three other new guys, Watson, Gaiman and McKean, all got the same treatment [...]“
— Narration,
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.
How to interpret a peculiar request
“‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his [...]
Semi-stoicism by necessity
“You must understand one thing. We own nothing except ourselves. This world and its laws, allows us nothing, except ourselves. There is nothing we can leave behind when we die, except the memory of ourselves.”
— Styles,
in the township play Sizwe Bansi is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona.
2007-11-28 — Quote of the Day
“In the second century C.E., Loukianos of Samosato wrote, ‘Everyone’s writing history now, and I don’t want to be left out of the furore.’ Loukianos, who was also known as Lucian the Scoffer, then produced a fantasy story called True History.”
— John M. Ford,
in the “Historical Note” to The Dragon Waiting.
2007-11-25 — Quote of the Day
“‘Vi vet hvordan Universet ender -’ sa guiden, og Jorden har ikke noe med dét å gjøre, bortsett fra at også den blir ødelagt.’
‘Hvordan - hvordan kommer Universet til å ende?’ sa Billy.
‘Vi gjør at det eksploderer mens vi eksperimenterer med nye brennstoffer til de flygende tallerkenene våre. En Tralfamadoriansk testpilot trykker på en startknapp [...]
2007-11-15 — Quote of the Day
“Attacking his opponent Disraeli in Parliament, Gladstone remarked that ‘the honourable gentleman will either end on the gallows or die of some loathsome disease.’ To which Gladstone rejoined: ‘That depends on whether I embrace the honourable gentleman’s principles or his mistresses.’”
— An example of a witty repartee,
A Glossary of Literary Terms.
2007-11-14 — Quote of the Day
“What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”
— Friedrich Engels,
in a letter to Jean-Richard Bloch, September 21, 1890.
2007-11-13 — Quote of the Day
“It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogenous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time [...]
2007-11-11 — Quote of the Day
“Another of Burckhardt’s characterizations of the civilization of the Reneissance, the discovery of the world around man, was not one of the humanists’ primary aims. Yet, in their quest for the writings of antiquity, they also discovered the large corpus of the scientific work of the ancients and this they also proceeded to publish. the [...]
2007-11-10 — Quote of the Day
“The council of Constance (1414-1418) ended the schism. The three popes were all deposed. The famous eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon described the case against one of them, John XXIII: ‘The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest;…’”
— H.G. Koeningsberger,
Medieval Europe 400-1500, [...]
2007-11-09 — Quote of the Day
“The papacy pushed its universal claims and international organization to their highest point and defeated the rival universal claims of the Holy Roman Empire, only to be defeated, in its turn, by the regionally based monarchies.
“Here was the turning point of internationalism in the Middel Ages. The distinguished philosopher-historian Arnold Toynbee saw it as the [...]
2007-11-08 — Quote of the Day
“Some sixty years later the dispute between king and Church flared up again. This time it took the form of a quarrel between Henry II (1154-1189) [of England] and Thomas Becket [...] Just as in the case of the emperor Henry IV [of the Holy Roman Empire] and Pope Gregory VII, personalities played their part [...]
2007-11-07 — Quote of the Day
“The pagan barbarians had buried their most precious possessions with their dead. These possessions would vary, from the weapons of ordinary men and the simple bronze or copper jewelry which even poor women owned to the to the treasures of great warriors and kings, such as those superbly rich objects of Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, [...]
2007-11-06 — Quote of the Day (or, Bloody Homosexuals)
“The remarkable unity of culture of the later Roman Empire is seen most clearly in its art and architechture. Roman temples and theatres, Roman baths and aqueducts did not differ greatly from Spain to Asia Minor. Roman villas with their gay floor mosaics were almost interchangeable from Britain to Syria.”
— H.G. Koeningsberger,
Medieval Europe 400-1500, [...]
2007-10-28 — Quote of the Day
three is the magic number
yes it is its a magic number
Somewhere in this ancient mystic trinity
you got 3 as a magic number
the past and the present and the future
Faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
give you three as a magic number
Takes three legs to make a tripod and [...]
2007-10-22 — Quote of the Day
You would not believe the trouble I went through to get this crown in the first place. I went to steal it from this librarian in Cliffport, and it turned out oops! He was also an archmage! Needless to say, hilarity ensued.
— Xykon the Lich,
The Order of the Stick, strip 434.
2007-10-19 — Quote of the Day
It’s pretty fashionable, in the online goldfish bowl that seems to be the majority of genre criticism, to reflexively spit on the very concept of the fantasy series. But fuck ‘em. Snark is the cheapest of all forms of prose, and it comes no cheaper than from those who never had the vision or the [...]
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