Joseph Duncan · 270 pages
Rating: (725 votes)
“In a culture that worshipped its ancestors, to die without offspring was next of kin to damnation.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I believed in the spirits of my ancestors.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“No child is ever loved as they are loved by the ones who gave them life.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have always found it both bitter and sweet that men become childlike in their old age.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have visited a great many cathedrals and have yet to burst into flames.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“We worshiped our ancestors. We believed in the spirits of men and animals,”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“Sometimes I think it is that loneliness that drove our species a little bit insane. Why else would we have invented such a vast assortment of preposterous characters, all those pantheons of mad gods and uncountable legions of angels and devils and supernatural dream-things, if not to fill the void”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
“That’s what’s so wonderful about you, you’re so self-sufficient that I feel that you’ve created your own self.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“—Shush sweet baby, I said, so tired, and mixed her gripe water with whiskey and dill weed, but it did no good, so I seen now why lullabies was all about cradles falling from trees, oh dear, when the wind blows, down will come baby, whoops too bad, but at least it’s quiet.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“a methodology is only effective when it is practiced consistently.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
“The way he had always tried to tell her he loved her when she least expected it.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
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