Comments

• RockyRoger Shipmate

  June 27 edited June 27

  What a splendid idea for a topic! Trouble is, I have too many. But my favourite, which comes to my mind most often, being pertinent to many situations, personal and global, comes from Marlowe's 'Dr Faustus' where Faust first meets Satan.
  Faust, surprised at seeing him there, asks, 'Are you not in Hell?' to which Satan replies, 'Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it'.
  Some folk appear to bring their own private hells with them.
  
  I have more ...... the game's afoot .....
• Sparrow Shipmate

  June 27

  "Some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved."
  
  Terry Pratchett, "Snuff".
• quetzalcoatl Shipmate

  June 27

  Also from Marlowe's Faust, "See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament".
• Marsupial Shipmate

  June 27

  Evelyn Waugh was a master of writing really long sentences without appearing to write really long sentences -
  

  I heard the Mottrams’ names in conversation; I saw their faces now and again peeping from the Tatler, as I turned the pages impatiently waiting for someone to come, but they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other’s fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them.

  
  
  
• Nick Tamen Shipmate

  June 27

  I feel bound to give a nod to Raymond Chandler—creator of the dean of hard-boiled private eyes, Philip Marlowe—who gave us lines like these:
  
  “On the dance floor, half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.”—Playback
  
  “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”—Farewell, My Lovely
  
  “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”—Farewell, My Lovely
  
  “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” —Farewell, My Lovely
  
  “Tall, aren’t you?” she said.
  “I didn’t mean to be.”—The Big Sleep
  
  “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”—The Big Sleep
  
  “You’re broke, eh?”
  “I’ve been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”—The Big Sleep
  
  “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”—The Long Goodbye
  
  “She had eyes like strange sins.”—The High Window
  
  “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”—The High Window
  
  
  
• Hedgehog Shipmate

  June 27

  Yes, Raymond Chandler had a way about him.
  
  Here is one that I have found useful to quote on multiple occasions:
  
  "I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."--Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 6
  
  
  
  
• Enoch Shipmate

  June 27

  A source of so many of these, P.G. Wodehouse. Here's one to be going on with, describing the celebrated Miss Madeline Bassett, a young lady that Bertie Wooster is determined, often unsuccessfully, not to find himself engaged to.
  
  "I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”
  
  
  
• mark_in_manchester Shipmate

  June 27

  Nick Tamen wrote: »

  I feel bound to give a nod to Raymond Chandler—creator of the dean of hard-boiled private eyes, Philip Marlowe—who gave us lines like these:
  
  “On the dance floor, half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.”—Playback
  
  “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”—Farewell, My Lovely
  
  “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”—Farewell, My Lovely
  
  “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” —Farewell, My Lovely
  
  “Tall, aren’t you?” she said.
  “I didn’t mean to be.”—The Big Sleep
  
  “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”—The Big Sleep
  
  “You’re broke, eh?”
  “I’ve been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”—The Big Sleep
  
  “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”—The Long Goodbye
  
  “She had eyes like strange sins.”—The High Window
  
  “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”—The High Window
  
  

  
  You've reminded me to try to find my big volume of collected Chandler that I leant to someone who might (...) have given it back. Great stuff.
• mark_in_manchester Shipmate

  June 27

  I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, but I don't have the kind of memory where I can pull quotes off the top of my head. So I looked up a list of them, and enjoyed them all. Here's a couple:
  
  “It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it . . . so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.”
  
  “It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.”
  
  ...but the whole book is packed with memorable lines, which kind of hit me -wham-, -pow- like something out of Batman - I don't think I can remember being so moved when reading a book. That sounds silly for such a quiet story, but it really did.
  
• Gramps49 Shipmate

  June 27

  Rod Nordland, a former war correspondent for the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Philidelphia Examiner wrote a book Waiting for the Monsoon which is about him facing his own mortality. He recently died, but a few years ago he had an interview with Terri Gross from NPR. He was telling of a time when he was forced to take someone who had been shot to a hospital in a car he had rented. He said this line:
  

  You want to know the best all-terrain vehicle to have in a war zone? Make it a rental car.