LibriVox Forum

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. -- "The Masque of the Red Death," Edgar Allan Poe, of course.

“I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door."

From "A Boy in France" by Salinger

"I blush to add that when the bird
Took in the situation,
He said one brief emphatic word
Unfit for publication."
-The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven
Why is it so funny when an author hints at a thing but doesn't say it outright?

This isn't all that short, but it was so good when I heard it PL'ing today, I had to post it on Facebook:

"Happiness is not, like a large and beautiful gem, so uncommon and rare, that all search for it is vain, all efforts to obtain it hopeless; but it consists of a series of smaller and commoner gems, grouped and set together, forming a pleasing and graceful whole. Happiness consists in the enjoyment of little pleasures scattered along the common path of life, which, in the eager search for some great and exciting joy, we are apt to overlook."
("Thrift" by Samuel Smiles)

That's gorgeous.

"Poverty is the banana skin on the doorstep of romance"
Something Fishy, by P. G. Wodehouse

Does Wodehouse count as literary?

zachh wrote: ↑April 10th, 2021, 4:13 pm "Poverty is the banana skin on the doorstep of romance"
Something Fishy, by P. G. Wodehouse

Does Wodehouse count as literary?

O YES.

“Take the piano teacher, for example. He always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity…

The personal conscious self being a kind of small island in the midst of an enormous area of consciousness — what has to be relaxed is the personal self, the self that tries too hard, that thinks it knows what is what, that uses language. This has to be relaxed in order that the multiple powers at work within the deeper and wider self may come through and function as they should. In all psychophysical skills we have this curious fact of the law of reversed effort: the harder we try, the worse we do the thing.”

— Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

How do I know what I think until I see what I say? -- E.M. Forster (probably)

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve”
-Bilbo, in The Fellowship of the Ring

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. -- Moby Dick, Herman Melville

maxgal wrote: ↑November 27th, 2020, 10:27 am "Let all the poison that lurks in the mud hatch out." -- Claudius the God, Robert Graves

that reminds me of Nausicaä of the Valley

"Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you."

- Joseph Heller: Catch 22.

"Mankind had disappointed him, but here was a dog!" -Sir Gibbie, George MacDonald

(And I'm not even a dog person! )

"I have one friend, a dog...." -- The House on the Borderland, Willam Hope Hodgson