Book dissection

Select a paragraph from a book you like and post it here. It could be any kind of book: litterature. poetry, philosophy, history, politics etc etc.
This way each person will be his own judge.
when your out book hunting, you always wish to fall onto that perfect paragraph that says it all. This could help other members to see if wether they want to get into that book or not instead of reading brief reviews about it. let the book presents itself. curtains*

i'll start with an extract of "Notes from underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

" You thirst for life, yet you yourself resolve life's questions with a logical tangle. And how importunate, how impudent your escapades, yet at the same time how frightened you are! You talk nonsense, and are pleased with it; you say impudent things, yet you keep being afraid and asking forgiveness for them. You insist that you are not afraid of anything, and at the same time you court our opinion. You insist that you are gnashing your teeth, and at the same time you exert your wit to make us laugh. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are apparently quite pleased with their literary merits. You may indeed have happened to suffer, but you do not have the least respect for your suffering. There is truth in you, too, but no integrity; out of the pettiest vanity you take your truth and display it, disgrace it, in the market-place...You do indeed want to say something, but you conceal your final word out of fear, because you lack the resolve to speak it out, you have only cowardly insolence. You boast about consciousness, yet all you do is vacillate, because, though your mind works, your heart is darkened by depravity, and without a pure heart there can be no full, right consciousness. And how importunate you are, how you foist yourself, how you mug! Lies, lies, lies!"

another one. this was the first book i read,i choked on it at the end. it's "The Stranger " by Albert Camus. this is at the end of the book when Mersault (the main character) is at the dawn of his execution. sentenced to death because he didn't cry at his mother funeral and he killed two Algerians in self defense while walking peacfuly on the sea shore.

With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert a classic.

"In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. from witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols re kept out of the reach of common understanding-symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages."

I will have to check out the The Stranger and Notes from Underground.

Was Children of Dune the one where the Atraides family turned into spice worm hybrids? Or is it one after God Emperor of Dune?

I read the series when I was your age but I wasn't smart enough to pick up on some of the complex social and metaphysical themes in the series back then.

Yes, a child of dune was the book when Leto turns in to the worm hybrid. I too read the series when I was younger, but in past year or two I have managed to reread them to fully understand their meanings.

On Unrequited Love - Extract from Bob Dylan's 'Tarantula'
sorry to say, but i'm going to have to return your ring. it's nothing personal, except that i cant do a thing with my finger & it's already beginning to smell like an eyeball! you know, like i like to look weird, but nevertheless, when i play my banjo on stage, i have to wear a glove. needless to say, it has started to affect my playing. please believe me. it has nothing whatsoever to do with my love for you ... in fact, sending the ring back should make my love for you grow all the more profound ... say hi to your doctor love, Toby Celery
do people tell you to your face you've changed? do you feel offended? are you seeking companionship? are you plump?4 ft- 5? if you fit & are a full blooded alcoholic catholic, please call UH2-6969 ask for Oompa

plz do

'Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.'

Soren Kierkegaard

American God

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

- Neil Gaiman

I'm going to read the books you quoted from the last 2 posts. You have a very keen eye for important and interesting stuff!

Just curious... how do you usually find out about a book to read?

I did abuse my university library, and i do ask around, see what other people loved reading, for example, i discovered "American God" through a friend, "notes from underground" through Eye (forum member and friend). Little by little you know who to look into, through networking, another example, i found about Ginsberg through Dylan ( no direction home) . that's about it. and not to forget, having the time for it which i usualy do but which i wont anyday now.
hope that this helped. take care

Quite possibly one of my favorite paragraphs ever; from A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran:

It is an awakening in the spirit; it is an awakening in the inner depths of the heart; it is an overwhelming and magnificent power that descends suddenly upon man's conscience and opens his eyes, whereupon he sees Life amid a dizzying shower of brilliant music, surrounded by a circle of great light, with man standing as a pillar of beauty between the earth and the firmament. It is a kindness that envelops the individual's heart whereby he would bewilder and disapprove all who opposed it, and revolt against those who refuse to understand its great meaning. It is a secret hand which removed the veil from my eyes while I was a member of society amidst my friends, my family and my countrymen. It is an awakening in the spirit; he who knows it is unable to reveal it by words; and he who knows it not, will never think upon the compelling and beautiful mystery of existence."

I love it!
i only read "The Prophet" from Gibran and other things that they used to make us read in school but which i don't remember. can you tell me which book this is from?

It's from a short story he wrote called The Tempest. So far the only book I've been able to find it in is called A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran. But I would recommend the book because it has a lot of really good stuff from him.

thank you i'll check it out.

here is something from Nietzsche in "Gay Science"

"Our ultimate gratitude to art."- If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science-the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation-would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem: and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming-then we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an artistic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves; we must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge, we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom! Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings-really more weights than human beings-nothing does us as much good as a fool's cap: we need it in relation to ourselves-we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us. It would mean a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get involved entirely in morality and, for the sake of the over-severe demands we make on ourselves in these matters, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We should be able also to stand above morality-and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float above it and play! How then could we possibly dispense with art, and with the fool?- And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us!

wo years he walks the earth.
No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.
- Alexander Supertramp
May 1992