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Miscellaneous Quotations A-B

"We are here to help others. What the others are here for, I do not know."
W.H. Auden
"I laugh at everything, even at that which I love the most. There is no fact, thing, feeling or person over which I have not blithely run my clownishness, like an iron roller imparting sheen to cloth."
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot(London, 1984, p.34).
"But there are moments when I'm so tired that I feel I'm liquefying like an old Camenbert."
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (London, 1984, 37).
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't."
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (London, 1984, p.168).
"Coward, n. One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (New York, 1993, p.19).
"Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper - the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (New York, 1993, p.22).
"Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (New York, 1993, p.80).
"Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us."
Karen Blixen, née Dinesen, in Out of Africa (London 1954, p.224).
"[...] every human being whom we meet and get to know is, after all, something in our minds, like a tree planted in our gardens or a piece of furniture within our house. It may be better to keep them and try to put them to some use, than to cast them away and have nothing at all there in the end [...]"
Karen Blixen, née Dinesen, "The Roads Round Pisa" in Seven Gothic Tales (Harmondsworth 1988, p.46).
"We spend the best part of our lives in making mistakes, and the poor remainder in reflecting how very easily we might have avoided them."
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (Oxford, 1996, p.241).
"A ship that beares much saile, and little or no ballast, is easily overset; and that man, whose head hath great abilities, and his heart little or no grace, is in danger of foundering."
Ann Bradstreet
"No one single quality is perhaps so endearing, from man to man, as good-nature. Talents excite more admiration; wisdom, more respect; and virtue, more esteem: but with admiration envy is apt to mingle, and fear with respect; while esteem, though always honourable, is often cold: but good-nature gives pleasure without any allay; ease, confidence, and happy carelessness, without the pain of obligation, without the exertion of gratitude."
Fanny Burney, Camilla (Oxford, 1983, p.333).
"What is right [...] must only in itself seek what is pleasant; and there, when it ceases to look more abroad, it is sure to find it."
Fanny Burney, Camilla (Oxford, 1983, p.787).
Copyright © 2005, Eva Fitz