“Even the most primite societies have an innate resepect for the insane.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“I made up my mind that I'd get out of that place and I did...I learned that if you want to get somewhere, you just make up your mind and work like hell til you get there. If you want to go somewhere in life, you just have to work till you make it.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“Yeah," I said. "And I'm gonna look just like him."
The black cat paused and looked me over.
"No you ain't baby. That cat is a prince, man. He is royalty in exile. You ain't never gonna look like that.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“He had strange eyes-they make me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflections you saw was your own.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“I could never understand people being scared of things they didn't know nothing about.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
“If you're going to lead people, you have to have somewhere to go.”
― S.E. Hinton, quote from Rumble Fish
S.E. Hinton
Born place: in Tulsa, Oklahoma, The United States
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“Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.”
― Aristotle, quote from Poetics
“(…) la partie irrationnelle de l’âme sera comme un homme qui vit près d’un sage ; il profite de ce voisinage, et ou bien il devient semblable à lui, ou bien il aurait honte d’oser faire ce que l’homme de bien ne veut pas qu’il fasse. Donc pas de conflit ; il suffit que la raison soit là ; la partie inférieure de l’âme la respecte et, si elle est agitée d’un mouvement violent, c’est elle-même qui s’irrite de ne pas rester en repos quand son maître est là, et qui se reproche sa faiblesse.”
― Plotinus, quote from The Enneads
“If you are longing for something more than the hit-and-run relationship cycle, something beautiful and meaningful in your life, then I'm going to lay it on the line. You must let go of the captain's position in your life and trust Him. You must give up the little you're hanging on to now to gain something infinitely greater. You must let go of the helm and let Him lead.”
― Eric Ludy, quote from When God Writes Your Love Story
“The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“The Dying Man"
in memoriam W.B. Yeats
1. His words
I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.
“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.
“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.
2. What Now?
Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.
Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.
I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.
In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.
3. The Wall
A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.
Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.
The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.
4. The Exulting
Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.
5. They Sing, They Sing
All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.
Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.
I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.
The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems
Fall of Giants
Master of the Game
As You Like It
The Hundred-Year-Old...
Monsters of Men
Days of Blood & Star...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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