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Quotes from Classics

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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Camlost ---I was perusing http://www.rscottbakker.com and I noticed this:
--- Quote ---"A journey unlike any other you have experienced. Part Dante’s Inferno and part Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, this is fantasy literature like you’ve never read before.”

–Blogcritics
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It stood out to me because I read Heart of Darkness in the past month or so, and upon recognizing it it called to mind the following passage, which quickly became synonymous with the first book of Heart of Darkness to me.

"Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged. "The horror!" He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best--a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all the sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!"

Are there any classics that you'd recommend? From those, are there any passages that stood out to you?
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Camlost ---"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness of living, come to the artists caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the good that was alive and fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each seperate muscle, joint, and sinew all aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the starts and over the face of dead matter that did not move..."

From Call of the Wild by Jack London
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Curethan ---Good stuff Camlost.  Can't think of any myself atm, but I know they are out there.
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Camlost ---Thanks Curethan

And another:

"It was a black and hooded head; and there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. 'Speak, thou vast and venerable head,' muttered Ahab, 'which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all the divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful waterland, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where the bell of diver never went; has slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by the pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed --- while swift lightnings shivered the neighbouring ships that would have borne a righteous husband's outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not on syllable is thine!"

From Moby Dick by Herman Melville
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Soterion ---"The tools, the art, the building – these things stand in judgement on the latter races.  Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with.  The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter.  In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock.  All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.  So.  Here are the dead fathers."

~Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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