Who said clouds were lonely?

We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.”

Gil Scott-Heron, on his poem “The Revolution will not be Televised”

“I think the past is best left bleeding by the roadside, don’t you agree?”

Rachel Griffiths (Sirene), Indian Summers, PBS

How will we know it’s us without our past?

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae – they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi’s shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. “Yes, it is certified now.”

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

“I know it’s a great temptation to go mad, but don’t go in for it, you wouldn’t like it.”

George Eliot, Middlemarch

“A is for dining Alone…and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly.”

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

I always think there is something foreign about high spirits at breakfast.

Carson, Downtown Abbey, Season 4

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Ek is ‘n man met blombehoeftes.

Petra Muller, Verbeel Jou Nou Dit

“Die kierie kom uit Indonisie, gesny van ‘n tak wat van jongs af omslinger was deur a wildevy se rank. Hulle het saam grootgeword, en die rank het sy spoor op die tak gelos. Daarom is die slinger ook oneweredig, en hier,”se hy, “by die punt van die kierie moes daar iets gebeur het – die slinger en die tak het inmekaar gevleg en ‘n knoop gemaak. Die natuur het die kierie so gemaak.”

“n Kieriemaker sou dit eweredig gedoen het,” se ek.

“My kind,” se meneer Boje, “vermy die reguit lyn.”

Petra Muller, Koendoes

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

Henry David Thoreau, Walden