"The speaker, and the schoolmaster, an the third grown person present, all blacked a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim."
— Hard Times- Charles Dickens
"I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier."
— Moral Disorder- Margaret Atwood
sopranomonroe:
seventhtable:
thewomanwhoconsults:
forgetyeahcomics:
Romeo and Juliet is not a love story it’s a cautionary tale about how everything would be better if you would just chill the fuck out
‘Everything would be better if you would just chill the fuck out’ - every play ever written by Shakespeare
“Yo, Hamlet. Chill the fuck out about your dad.”
“Yo, King Lear. Chill the fuck out about your daughters.”
“Yo, Othello. Chill the fuck out about your wife.”
(Source: punkasfrick, via benjavert)
"A caterpillar is letting itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiraling toward his chest. It’s a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with tiny bright hairs. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction.
These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency."
— from “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood. (via gronalund)
"For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do just the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”
“Where?”
“In the word-memory section,” he said, epexegetically."
— “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”- Roald Dahl
"As usual she wanted everything, which was in short supply."
— Bodily Harm, Margaret Atwood.
"…you all want to be the sea. But you’re not the sea, you’re just a raindrop."
— Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English
"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
— Bluebeard’s Egg- Margaret Atwood
"She read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives."
— Northanger Abbey- Jane Austen
"And what are you reading, Miss—-?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of the human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."
— Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
“Well, that escalated quickly”
