Saturday: May 3rd [1958]... Tomorrow I must correct all my exams which I should do in one day- they're short and all on the same subject. Then a close outline of The Wasteland which should take all week. I pick up my ms. of poetry & leaf through it, unable to invent, to create- all my projected nostalgia for my students can't shake the conviction that teaching is a smiling public-service vampire that drinks blood and brain without a thank you.
Submitted on Wed, 2010-01-20 22:05 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2456 from Unabridged Journals by Sylvia Plath
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house, there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
Submitted on Sat, 2009-08-08 07:20 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2341 from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
What did I want? I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, 'The game's afoot!' I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance — for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be — and I had known it — and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:31 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2172 from Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein
Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2127 from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time. It seemed there would never be another book. It was all over, the book was dead. It lay in its bent cover by my hand. What was the use? Why bother dragging the weight of my small body down to dinner? Why move? Why breathe? The book had left me, and there was no reason to go on.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2104 from Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
..It's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, they don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #1994 from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and 'nutty'. You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket...even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #1977 from High Weirdness By Mail by Rev. Ivan Stang
Sara grew up to be a copy editor, a profession she compares to walking behind an elephant in a parade and scooping up what it has left on the road. Her prize find, to date, was a sentence in a manuscript for a San Francisco publisher: 'Einstein's Theory of Relativity led to the development of the Big Band Theory.' In her mind's ear, she still occasionally hears the strains of the cosmic orchestra.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #1923 from Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
She was reading a slim volume with grey covers. The corners of her mouth moved every now and then, and a gleam of pleasure lit up her face. He felt jealous of the man whose writings she seemed to find so fascinating.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #1880 from Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic, or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would never let you down.
Submitted on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:30 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #1870 from A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
