Even though they are decontextualized...

I find the following quotes positively enchanting. Last night around 12 a.m. I was sitting on the floor in my room and began to page through a small leatherbound volume where I occasionally record particularly delicious quotes from books I'm reading. As I sat there, I thought, to hell with sharing recipes on my blog, I'll post these. Ok, ok, the language is a bit strong. And I still may provide you with instructions for making savory meals--that's just not especially high on my priority list at the moment. The mind and spirit before the body: I have Jesus himself to back that up, per his forty days in the desert. But I'm really taking this too far. All I want to do is allow you to enjoy the following:


"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody that wants to make some kind of splash."
-Franny in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey

"Like so many Americans, she [Billy's mother] was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
-Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five

"We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road."
-Virginia Woolf The Waves

"Thou from the first/ was present, and, with mighty wings outspread/ Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss/ And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark/ Illumine, what is low raise and support;/ that, to the heighth of this great argument/ I may assert Eternal Providence/ and justify the ways of God to men."
-John Milton Paradise Lost

"We've got ninety-nine percent the same genes as any other person. We've got ninety percent the same as a chimpanzee. We've got thirty percent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong."
-Caryl Churchill A Number

"Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from the Underground

"Leonato: Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband.
Beatrice: Not till God make man of some other mettle than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valient dust?"
-William Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing

"Nick went into his room, undressed, and got into bed. He heard his father moving around in the living room. Nick lay in the bed with his face in the pillow. 'My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.'"
-Ernest Hemingway "The Northern Woods" from The Nick Adams Stories

"The hands of the King are hands of healing, dear friends..."
-Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King