Annotation Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Annotation. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson, With Annotations - 1841-1844)
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau (I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau)
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden : An Annotated Edition)
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.
Lewis Carroll (The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition)
The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. ...The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.
Henry David Thoreau (I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau)
Farewell," they cried, "Wherever you fare till your eyries receive you at the journey's end!" That is the polite thing to say among eagles. "May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks," answered Gandalf, who knew the correct reply.
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Annotated Hobbit: The Hobbit, or, There and back again)
I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.
Bram Stoker (The New Annotated Dracula (The Annotated Books))
If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.
Maria Dahvana Headley (Magonia (Magonia, #1))
I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.
Erasmus
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Complete Poems (Annotated))
It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
Be true to your Dick.
Vladimir Nabokov (The Annotated Lolita)
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson, With Annotations - 1841-1844)
The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Illustrated and Annotated Edition))
Despite what you’ve read, your sadness is not beautiful. No one will see you in the bookstore, curled up with your Bukowski, and want to save you. Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare, for an end to your sadness in Keats. He coughed up his lungs at 25, and flowery words cannot conceal a life barely lived. Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world. Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth. Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor.
E.P. .
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own (annotated): The Virginia Woolf Library Annotated Edition)
It is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy. His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin. At the same time he causes them to cherish false conceptions of God so that they regard Him with fear and hate rather than with love. The cruelty inherent in his own character is attributed to the Creator; it is embodied in systems of religion and expressed in modes of worship.
Ellen Gould White (The Great Controversy: Annotated)
joy is not found in the things which surround us, but lives only in the soul.
Thérèse of Lisieux (The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux (annotated)
He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.” “Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do,
Oscar Wilde (The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (Annotated))
I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables (Annotated))
doing nothing often leads to the very best of something
A.A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh: (annotated))
I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Avonlea (Annotated))
Alice! A childish story take, And with a gentile hand Lay it where Childhood dreams are twined In memory's mystic band, Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers Pluck'd in a far off land.
Lewis Carroll (The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition)
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.
G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)
the outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
If a thing loves, it is infinite. (Annotations to Swedenborg)
William Blake
The only service you can render God is to give expression to what he is trying to give the world, through you. The only service you can render God is to make the very most of yourself in order that God may live in you to the utmost of your possibilities.
Wallace D. Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Well, The Science of Being Great & The Law of Opulence: The Collected “New Thought” Wisdom of Wallace D. Wattles [Annotated])
Before we can master an enemy, we must know its name, its habits, and its place of abode.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become...Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify.
Elaine Dundy (The Dud Avocado)
I have learned that newborn infants roll their eyes around and move their heads and their arms in short jerky spasms. And if you homeschool them, they will stay this way forever.
John Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order)
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
But he said, in substance, to himself that if the earth and moon were about to clash, many persons would doubtless plan to get upon the roofs to witness the collision.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.
Charles Stross (The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5))
The Constitution of the Unitied States of America Preamble We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Article I - The Legislative Branch Section 1 - The Legislature All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Founding Fathers (The Constitution of the United States of America, with all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and The Articles of Confederation, annotated (Breathitt Classics))
Riches are shy and timid. They have to be "attracted.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
Lord give me chastity and self control - but not yet.
Augustine of Hippo (The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Annotated Christianity theology in Middle Age and Reformation): 13 Christianity religious books from the Middle Age of the sinful and immoral life)
They were going to look at war, the red animal--war, the blood-swollen god.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
It was safe to assume he'd not only read the play but then re-read it, cross-referenced the annotations, and probably joined an online chat group called Buds of the Bard or something equally nerdy
Simon Holt (Soulstice (The Devouring, #2))
The Scholars "Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end; Wear out the carpet with their shoes Earning respect; have no strange friend; If they have sinned nobody knows. Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way?
W.B. Yeats (The Wild Swans At Coole)
So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
Bram Stoker (Dracula (Annotated))
In 1931, when Ambedkar met Gandhi for the first time, Gandhi questioned him about his sharp criticism of the Congress (which, it was assumed, was tantamount to criticising the struggle for the Homeland). “Gandhiji, I have no Homeland,” was Ambedkar’s famous reply. “No Untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land.”61
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.
David Shields (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto)
The master never counseled slavish belief. ‘Words are only shells,’ he said. ‘Win conviction of God’s presence through your own joyous contact in meditation.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Illustrated and Annotated Edition))
This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.
John Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order)
I refuse to join with them in performing the miracle—I will not say trick—of liberating the oppressed with the gold of the tyrant, and raising the poor with the cash of the rich.
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
FAITH and FEAR make poor bedfellows. Where one is found, the other cannot exist.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks— an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Winter Dreams (Annotated))
He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.
Oscar Wilde (The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (Annotated))
THE "depression" was a blessing in disguise. It reduced the whole world to a new starting point that gives every one a new opportunity.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.
Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own (annotated): The Virginia Woolf Library Annotated Edition)
The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden : An Annotated Edition)
The blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.
H.P. Lovecraft (The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft)
Manly deeds, womanly hands.
John Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order)
The moon had been lighted and was hung in a treetop.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars.
Thomas Cuong Huynh (The Art of War—Spirituality for Conflict: Annotated & Explained)
To lay aside what you have in your head (selfish desires and ambitions); to freely bestow what you have in your hand; and never to flinch from the blows of adversity!
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Illustrated and Annotated Edition))
Dalit aspirations are a breach of peace. Annihilation of Caste is a breach of peace.
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
This voice of heaven thrilled us,–we seemed the pioneers of darkness, on the very frontiers of hell.
Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer (Annotated))
We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics.
Epicurus (Complete works of Epicurus: Text, Summary, Motifs and Notes (Annotated))
His feet where retarded.
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
because they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, he gave them over to a reprobate mind
William Wilberforce (Real Christianity [Annotated])
Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as inter-dining and inter-marriage … These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the Caste System.57
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
My God, I choose everything, I will not be a Saint by halves, I am not afraid of suffering for Thee, I only fear one thing, and that is to do my own will. Accept the offering of my will, for I choose all that Thou willest.
Thérèse of Lisieux (The Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux (annotated)
Revolution consists not in the new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine, but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with the aid of a new machine.
Vladimir Lenin (State and Revolution: Fully Annotated Edition)
i have had my ups and downs but wotthehell wotthehell yesterday sceptres and crowns fried oysters and velvet gowns and today i herd with bums but wotthehell wotthehell i wake the world from sleep as i caper and sing and leap when i sing my wild free tune wotthehell wotthehell under the blear eyed moon i am pelted with cast off shoon but wotthehell wotthehell
Don Marquis (The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (Penguin Classics))
affliction is better than sin, and if God sends the one to cleanse us from the other, let us thank him, and be also content to pay the messenger.
John Bunyan (Advice To Sufferers (Annotated) (Vintage Puritan))
She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Winter Dreams (Annotated))
Come, take these two wicked girls, they are tender morsels for you, fat as young quails; for mercy's sake eat them!' The
Jacob Grimm (Grimm's Fairy Tales (Annotated))
For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I
H.P. Lovecraft (H. P. Lovecraft: Complete Collection of Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
This is why we cannot love in the common sense. Somehow with you I cannot long be trivial, and, you know, to be always beyond this mortal state would be to lose it.
D.H. Lawrence (SONS AND LOVERS (Annotated))
When two sides who consider each other enemies converge in armed struggle, for the moment they are no longer enemies. They are fellow human beings who face the same two choices that their ancestors did for centuries before them: to destroy each other or to prosper together.
Thomas Cuong Huynh (The Art of War—Spirituality for Conflict: Annotated & Explained)
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security —
James Madison (The Constitution of the United States of America, with all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and The Articles of Confederation, annotated (Breathitt Classics))
The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed. Section 3 - Treason Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of
Founding Fathers (The Constitution of the United States of America, with all of the Amendments; The Declaration of Independence; and The Articles of Confederation, annotated (Breathitt Classics))
Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.
Martin Gardner (The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition)
And do you call yours a divine discontent?' 'Yes. I don't care about its divinity. But damn your happiness! So long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.
D.H. Lawrence (SONS AND LOVERS (Annotated))
O hateful error, melancholy’s child. Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? O error soon22 conceived, 70      Thou never comest unto a happy birth, But kill’st the mother that engendered23 thee.
William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar (The Annotated Shakespeare))
Plato had no perception of the uniqueness of every individual, of his incommensurability with others, of each individual as forming a class of his own. He had no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies, and the combination of tendencies of which an individual is capable.
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it rails for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people.
Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own (annotated): The Virginia Woolf Library Annotated Edition)
The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind. Through pressure of instincts from past lives, strengths or weaknesses percolate gradually into human consciousness. They express as habits, which in turn ossify into a desirable or an undesirable body. Outward frailty has mental origin; in a vicious circle, the habit-bound body thwarts the mind. If the master allows himself to be commanded by a servant, the latter becomes autocratic; the mind is similarly enslaved by submitting to bodily dictation.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Illustrated and Annotated Edition))
I prefer to make my annotations 'hot on the heels', as it were, when the fortunes of battle, the worries, hopes and disappointments are still sufficiently fresh in my mind. Much as I would like to, I cannot say this about these few games which will be given below. In fact, if the annotator should begin to use phrases of the type: 'in reply to...I had worked out the following variation...', the reader will rightly say 'Grandmaster, you are showing off', since the 'oldest' of these games is now more than 25 years old, and even the 'newest' more than 20. Therefore, I would ask you not to regard the following 'stylised' annotations too severely.
Mikhail Tal (The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal)
How to Win a Fight - Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen - these days it's unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads - I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger.
John Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order)
This is not to say there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.
John Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise: An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order)
The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.
William James (The Principles of Psychology)
Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—
Virginia Woolf (The Mark on the Wall (ANNOTATED))
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night.  What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
G.K. Chesterton (The Everlasting Man (Illustrated & Annotated))
A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
Henry David Thoreau (Walking (Annotated Edition))
There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is "Does it work, and how does it work?" How does it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something comes through or it doesn't. There's nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.
Gilles Deleuze
But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore, Disciples of that astigmatic saint, That we would never leave the island Until we had put down, in paint, in words, As palmists learn the network of a hand, All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, Every neglected, self-pitying inlet Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves From which old soldier crabs slipped Surrendering to slush, Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and Losing itself in an unfinished phrase, Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms Inverted the design of unrigged schooners, Entering forests, boiling with life, Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille. Days! The sun drumming, drumming, Past the defeated pennons of the palms, Roads limp from sunstroke, Past green flutes of the grass The ocean cannonading, come! Wonder that opened like the fan Of the dividing fronds On some noon-struck sahara, Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling The world on its ancient, Invisible axis, The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers, To swivel our easels down, as firm As conquerors who had discovered home.
Derek Walcott (Another Life: Fully Annotated)
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. The
Vladimir Lenin (State and Revolution: Fully Annotated Edition)
The present generation sees everything clearly, marvels at the errors and laughs at the follies of its forefathers, not seeing that there are streaks of heavenly light in that history, that every letter in it cries aloud to them, that on all sides a pointing finger is turned upon it, upon the present generation. But the present generation laughs and proudly, self-confidently, enters upon a series of fresh errors at which their descendants will laugh again in their turn.
Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls - Full Version (Annotated) (Literary Classics Collection Book 84))
8. "For who would trust the seeming sighs Of wife or paramour? Fresh feres will dry the bright blue eyes We late saw streaming o'er. For pleasures past I do not grieve, Nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave No thing that claims a tear. 9. "And now I'm in the world alone, Upon the wide, wide sea: But why should I for others groan, When none will sigh for me? Perchance my dog will whine in vain, Till fed by stranger hands; But long ere I come back again, He'd tear me where he stands. 10. "With thee, my bark, I'll swiftly go Athwart the foaming brine; Nor care what land thou bear'st me to, So not again to mine. Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves! And when you fail my sight, Welcome, ye deserts, and ye caves! My native Land — Good Night!
Lord Byron (Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Annotated))
A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.
Henry David Thoreau (I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau)
The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time, he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger, that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. “But he cannot flourish without this diet, he eat not as others. Even friend Jonathan, who lived with him for weeks, did never see him eat, never! He throws no shadow, he make in the mirror no reflect, as again Jonathan observe. He has the strength of many of his hand, witness again Jonathan when he shut the door against the wolves, and when he help him from the diligence too. He can transform himself to wolf, as we gather from the ship arrival in Whitby, when he tear open the dog, he can be as bat, as Madam Mina saw him on the window at Whitby, and as friend John saw him fly from this so near house, and as my friend Quincey saw him at the window of Miss Lucy. “He can come in mist which he create, that noble ship’s captain proved him of this, but, from what we know, the distance he can make this mist is limited, and it can only be round himself. “He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust, as again Jonathan saw those sisters in the castle of Dracula. He become so small, we ourselves saw Miss Lucy, ere she was at peace, slip through a hairbreadth space at the tomb door. He can, when once he find his way, come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with fire, solder you call it. He can see in the dark, no small power this, in a world which is one half shut from the light. Ah, but hear me through.
Bram Stoker (Dracula (Annotated))
I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it. I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said, “Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin.” The other added, “He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all.” I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood. I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
Bram Stoker (Dracula (Annotated))