"Such a separation, I imagined, could indeed lead to loneliness intense enough to make one conspicuous in bus stations. It occurred to me that most people in bus stations would be conspicuous if it were not for the numbers of others there who would otherwise be conspicuous in the same way. Sylvie, at that moment, would hardly be noticed in a bus station."
"'To study! Hasn't he been taught enough? What does he want to learn? He's telling you lies, don't believe him: he deceives you to your face like a small child. Do grown-up people study anything? Hear what he says! Would a Court Councillor want to study? You studied at school, but are you studying now? And does he,' Tarantyev pointed to Alexeyev, 'study? Does that relative of his study? Can you think of any decent man who is studying? Do you imagine he is sitting in a German school and doing his lessons? Rubbish!'"
"History, too, depressed him terribly: you learn and read that at a certain date the people were overtaken by all sorts of calamities and were unhappy, then they summoned up the strength, worked, took infinite care, endured great hardships, laboured in preparation for better days. At last they came - one would think history might take a rest, but no, clouds gathered again, the edifice crashed down, and again the people had to toil and labour. "
"'. . . and everything , everything is so remarkably, so thrillingly true to life. . . . I've heard extracts from it - the author is a great man! He reminds one of Dante and Shakespeare . . . '
' Good Lord!' cried Oblomov in surprise, sitting up. 'Going a bit too far, aren't you?'
Penkin suddenly fell silent, realizing that he really had gone too far."
"Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, there was connection between them again. It came on him as he was working in the fields. The tension, the bond, burst, and the passionate flood broke forward into a tremendous, magnificent rush, so that he felt he could snap off the trees as he passed, and create the world afresh."
"'I've no doubt ye'd wish to come back,' said Smith; 'but ye might be away years and years. Ye might never have the chance to come home again.'"
"I had long expected something of the sort to happen, and had only wondered that an open break between Captain Bligh and the carpenter had not come before this time. There was such a deep and natural antagonism between the two men; they were too much alike in character ever to have been anything but enemies."
"Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no esthetic emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence."
"The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is very obvious. The tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its telos [end, goal] in a higher expression of the ethical; he scales down the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to a feeling that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of moral conduct. Here there can be no teleological suspension of the ethical itself."
Ex Libris Kirkland (formerly known as "I Just Read . . .") is where I quote, at length, something I found interesting in my reading. The selected passages might be funny, or sad, or true, or false, or irritating, but they all bear thinking about - or at least writing down.
