Non-Tolkien 📔Book Quotes

[Erestor Arcamen]

I thought it’d be fun to share some of our favorite quotes from books we’re reading or have read. I’m sure back in the day this thread already existed but I’m too lazy to do a search right now 😁. As always, keep it forum-friendly please.

To love the journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.
Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
Thornton Wilder, Our Town

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Of the many works quoted by Nicholson Baker in his 150-page essay on the word "lumber", one in particular stood out for me, from T.D. Weldon's Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:

It is unlikely that any philosopher has produced a more unutterably tedious work on metaphysics than Baumgarten's Metaphysica; or combined so successfully the pedantry of a dying scholasticism with the illusory clearness of a pseudo-geometrical demonstration.

About which Baker remarks "How wonderful to be given a fresh touchstone of unutterable tedium!"

This Baumgarten, by the way, is Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) who, I was surprised to learn, gave us the term aesthetics, at least in its modern sense.

For whatever it's worth, I was struck by the description because, as a miniature wargamer, it fits admirably the use and justification of the "wedge formation" in wargame rules:

Based on the fantasy formations invented by generations of classical and Medieval writers such as Vegetius, and going back to misreadings of earlier writers such as Arrian.

 

[Vorondil]

Rules are made for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.
Never call it a plane, or a kite or bird, it is an aeroplane.
From the book about Douglas Bader, Reach for the sky.

 

[Eljorahir]

From the book “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan

I always thought this was a simple but awesome quote and quite powerful when coupled with the photos.

The caption of the photographs reads: “Two human footprints. Above from Tanzania, 3.6 million years ago. Below, from Mare Tranquilitatis, 1969.”

Then in the closing paragraphs of the book:

“We have come far in 3.6 million years…”

 

[Olorgando]

Rules are made for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.
Never call it a plane, or a kite or bird, it is an aeroplane.
From the book about Douglas Bader, Reach for the sky.

Douglas Bader, the RAF's "legless wonder" fighter ace of the Battle of Britain, who got shot down over France in 1941, and was a POW until the end of WW II? How did you stumble across him???

 

[Maeglin]

From The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, which I recently read and absolutely loved (though not quite as much as I loved his previous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow)...

“And from all of these pages upon pages, one thing I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it.”

 

[Deimos]

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

 

[Vorondil]

Douglas Bader, the RAF's "legless wonder" fighter ace of the Battle of Britain, who got shot down over France in 1941, and was a POW until the end of WW II? How did you stumble across him???

Oh, we watched the movie, and then my Dad had the book, so I read it.

 

[Vorondil]

From the Iliad: (prepare yourself)
''No force, no firmness, the pale coward shows.
He shifts his place: his colour comes and goes:
A dropping sweat creeps cold on every part;
Against his bosom beats his quivering heart;
Terror and death in his wild eye-balls stare;
with chattering teeth he stands, and stiffening hair,
And looks a bloodless image of despair!
Not so the brave, still dauntless, still the same,
Unchanged his colour, and unmoved his frame:
Composed his thought, determined is his eye,
And fixed his soul, to conquer or to die:
If aught disturb the tenour of his breast,
'Tis but the wish to strike before the rest.''

 

[Deimos]

From the Iliad: (prepare yourself)
''No force, no firmness, the pale coward shows.
He shifts his place: his colour comes and goes:
A dropping sweat creeps cold on every part;
Against his bosom beats his quivering heart;
Terror and death in his wild eye-balls stare;
with chattering teeth he stands, and stiffening hair,
And looks a bloodless image of despair!
Not so the brave, still dauntless, still the same,
Unchanged his colour, and unmoved his frame:
Composed his thought, determined is his eye,
And fixed his soul, to conquer or to die:
If aught disturb the tenour of his breast,
'Tis but the wish to strike before the rest.''

Good heavens! Is that the translation of the Iliad you had??!!!
You said ".....I barely survived the ordeal."
I'm surprised you survived at all. 😬
I would have taken a blowtorch to it after the first page.
Such translations should never be published, the translators banished from decent society.

 

[Deimos]

@Aethelwulf...can you tell me the "Book" (i.e., chapter) that you pulled that passage from?
I don't need the line numbers....just the book (there are 24 "Books" in the Iliad)

 

[Vorondil]

@Aethelwulf...can you tell me the "Book" (i.e., chapter) that you pulled that passage from?
I don't need the line numbers....just the book (there are 24 "Books" in the Iliad)

Don't make us go back there! It would kill us!

I haven't got a clue I'm afraid, I wrote that bit down and put the book down as quickly as possible. It was somewhere in the middle I think.

 

[Deimos]

OK, I found it.. it is the scene near the Greek ships that have been pulled onto the beach to be used like a bulwark against the coming Trojan onslaught. Idomeneus (a leader/captain) is speaking to Meriones (another leader/captain) (Book 13, lines 276--287)

If now beside the ships all the best of us were to assemble
for a hidden position, and there man's courage is best decided,
where the man who is a coward and the brave man show themselves clearly:
the skin of the coward changes colour one way and another,
and the heart inside him has no control to make him sit steady,
but he shifts his weight from one foot to another, then settles firmly
on both feet, and the heart inside his chest pounds violent
as he thinks of the death spirits, and his teeth chatter together:
but the brave man's skin will not change colour, nor is he too much
frightened, once he has taken his place in the hidden position,
but his prayer is to close as soon as may be in bitter division:
and there no man could make light of your battle strength or your hand's work.

-----
Sorry, but the translation you were [unfortunately] given is just so.....inferior.

 

[Vorondil]

OK, I found it.. it is the scene near the Greek ships that (have been pulled onto the strand) and are being used like a bulwark against the coming Trojan onslaught. Idomeneus (a leader/captain) is speaking to Meriones (another leader/captain) (Book 13, lines 276--287)

If now besides the ships all the best of us were to assemble
for a hidden position, and there man's courage is best decided,
where the man who is a coward and the brave man show themselves clearly:
the skin of the coward changes colour one way and another,
and the heart inside him has no control to make him sit steady,
but he shifts his weight from one foot to another, then settles firmly
on both feet, and the heart inside his chest pounds violent
as he thinks of the death spirits, and his teeth chatter together:
but the brave man's skin will not change colour, nor is he too much
frightened, once he has taken his place in the hidden position,
but his prayer is to close as soon as may be in bitter division:
and there no man could make light of your battle strength or your hand's work.

-----
Sorry, but the translation you were [unfortunately] given is just so.....inferior.

I'm surprised you managed to find it!

 

[Deimos]

I'm surprised you managed to find it!

Well, you at least pointed me to the middle of the story 😄...and I know that section well enough that it didn't take too long to find it.

So...be honest (you won't hurt my feelings one way or the other)....
What do you think of the Lattimore translation? More "readable", less "readable", about the same?
More descriptive? ...To me it reads a little like the way the Silmarillion is written.
(And I'm certain that Tolkien read the Iliad in the original Greek.)

 

[Vorondil]

Well, you at least pointed me to the middle of the story 😄...and I know that section well enough that it didn't take too long to find it.

So...be honest (you won't hurt my feelings one way or the other)....
What do you think of the Lattimore translation? More "readable", less "readable", about the same?
More descriptive? ...To me it reads a little like the way the Silmarillion is written.
(And I'm certain that Tolkien read the Iliad in the original Greek.)

I actually like the description of cowards and brave warriors better in the horrid version I read, because its more descriptive. However I think the rest of the book would be better in the version you quoted.

 

[Deimos]

I actually like the description of cowards and brave warriors better in the horrid version I read, because its more descriptive. However I think the rest of the book would be better in the version you quoted.

Fair enough..."About taste it cannot be argued."
As I said in the other forum, it's the rhyme-y time-y thing along with the meter (beat) used...my brain would refuse to process it.

 

[Vorondil]

My favourite quotes from the James Herriot books:
''He's womitin bad sor, womitin bad.
And when does your dog womit, I mean vomit Mister Mulligan?.''

And another one:
''I once found a bicycle tire inside a cow.''

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Aethelwulf's original quote sounds a lot like Pope to me. No doubt not as accurate to the text as the one quoted by Deimos, but not what he was aiming for. I think no one would question which version rolls off the tongue better.

 

[Deimos]

Aethelwulf's original quote sounds a lot like Pope to me. No doubt not as accurate to the text as the one quoted by Deimos, but not what he was aiming for. I think no one would question which version rolls off the tongue better.

Yep, it's Pope's... when I emailed the 2nd hand bookseller (and unfortunately I deleted his reply) I remember being surprised.
I thought that it was done by a more contemporary classicist.

(But it matters not who translated it that way.... it still makes me gag 😬🙄)