Book quote

Tintomara! två ting äro vita
Oskuld - Arsenik.

CJL Almqvist, Drottningens juvelsmycke
(1834)

Tintomara! two things are white
Innocence - Arsenic.

Book quote

Ain't no right or wrong, the stronomer king teached me. Just protectin your tribe or judasin your tribe. Yea, just a strong will or a weak un.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2005)

Captain Wentworth's Letter to Anne

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan. - Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? - I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.- Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in

F.W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818

Some words on books

There is a certain class and kind of literature that has the quality of universality. It has something in it that reaches the high and the low, the wise and the foolish, the educated and the illiterate. This quality in it makes it ring as true as a bell. After all, in this transitory life, we are all, high and low, educated and illiterate, on one and the same pilgrimage. The essential frame of life is the same for all. The Anglo-Saxon who spoke of life as a bird passing a moment through a lighted hall and out into the darkness spoke down the ages to twenty generations. When Shakespeare said, "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" the words were as good yesterday as today.

What we call the classics are the books that have enough of this universal appeal to give them their place and keep them there. One might wonder why it often comes about that books seem written for one class, or in a language largely out of common understanding, yet reach and hold a wide enough world to make them classics. The reason is, I think that appreciation is a queer thing running in sympathetic channels. Children listen, enthralled with things they cannot understand. Clergymen love sea-stories and sea-captains read theology. When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading. Deep down in him are antecedent generations- soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the "universal" book is calling to one of them.

Stephen Leacock, Who Canonizes the Classics

Book quote

On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope's shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
(HarperCollins, 1998)

My copy on BookCrossing here.

Book quote

After love, food is the most important thing in life, and whoever thinks politics more important should ponder the fact that politics would not exist but for a lack of food and love.

JF Federspiel, The Ballad of Typhoid Mary
(Penguin Books?, 1985)

My copy on BookCrossing here.

Book quote

How long can an economy boom without adequate supplies of drinking water?

de Graaf/Wann/Naylor, Affluenza. The All-Consuming Epidemic
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2001)

My BookCrossing copy here.

Book quote

These two paragraphs are taken from a book I read a couple of years ago and loved so much that I had to buy my own copy. :-) It remains one of the most moving nonfiction books I have ever read. It's about sea turtles and the dangers they face in today's world ... but it also paints a much greater picture of the all-important oceans and their alarming condition, and it also educates the reader on issues like marine pollution and extinction processes. Perhaps the most gripping story in the book, for me, was the one quoted here, about the fate of the passenger pigeon.

The sleek, brightly colored bird (which only slightly resembled its cousin, the urban-dwelling European immigrant, the common pigeon) was once the most abundant bird on the continent, accounting for 25 to 40 percent of the entire bird population of the United States. John James Audobon wrote that when a flock of pigeons passed, “the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse.” He later observed the aftereffects of the great flock’s roosting: trees, with trunks two feet in girth, had collapsed under the weight of so many birds. It looked, he wrote, “as if the forest had been swept by a tornado.” Like forest fires, such intermittent damage was probably an important component in keeping the forests healthy, clearing out deadwood and allowing for new growth.

Even the “inexhaustible” flocks of passenger pigeons disappeared almost overnight, in evolutionary terms. An estimated 5 billion birds were reduced to a single flock of some 250,000 individuals by the end of the nineteenth century. A group of hunters found the brood in April 1896 and by the end of that bloody day only around 5,000 individuals remained. By 1909 the number of living passenger pigeons totaled just three – two males and a female, housed in a cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. The males died in the following year. For four years, the female named Martha was the last of her species. The crowds that passed before her cage were looking at a living fossil. On September 1, 1914, at approximately 1 P.M., she died, and the passenger pigeon was gone. In the span of a single person’s lifetime, a species had gone from a population of several billion to extinction.

Osha Gray Davidson, Fire in the Turtle House
(Perseus Publishing, 2003)

My copy on BookCrossing is here.

Boksitat

Om det å bruke et unødvendig ordrikt språk, spesifikt uttrykk som 'i forkant av' når man like gjerne kan si 'før'.

Men 'i forkant av budsjettbehandlingen' er bare pådynging for å skaffe taleren mer betenkningstid. Når man tenker så kleint at man må bruke slike ord, er det liten grunn til å tro at det hjelper med mer tid.

Per Egil Hegge, Heng ham ikke vent til jeg kommer
(Kagge Forlag, 2004)