I'm wild again, beguiled again...

Hello! I'm here, as promised earlier today, to provide you all with some quotes! Enjoy!

From Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake

 Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: we never asked to be born in the first place. (249)

You think the ancient Romans were smart? Look at how dumb their numbers were. One theory of why they declined and fell is that their plumbing was lead. The root of our word plumbing is plumbum, the Latin word for 'lead.' Lead poisoning makes people stupid and lazy. What's your excuse? (239)

I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around! (240)

I'm wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I. (240)

Spoiler alert, this one is last line:

What a language. (250)

Please, please, please wait just a minute! At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about. (183)

No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. (189)

And perhaps my favorite one of all (though that last one is a close second):

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think as you, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone. (221)

From Marcel Proust's The Guermantes Way: 

Perpetually hovering between the two planes of experience and imagination, the human mind seeks to sound out the ideal life of the people it knows and to know the people whose life it has had to imagine. (228)

 Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which we get from the sun or travel to that which is brought on by exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication--and each should have a different grading mark, like sea depths on a map--lays bare in us, at the exact level affected, a particular sort of man. (165)

I had reached the point, in Balbec, of thinking that the pleasure of playing with a group of girls has a less pernicious effect on the life of the mind, to which at least it remains foreign, than friendship, which is totally bent on making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (except through art) to a superficial self that, unlike the other, finds no joy on its own; what it finds instead is a vague, sentimental satisfaction at being cherished by external support, hospitalized in the individuality of another person, where, in gratitude for the protection afforded by this, it radiates approval of its well-being and marvels at qualities it would castigate as failings and seek to correct in itself...But whatever my view of friendship, to mention only the pleasure it procured me, so mediocre in quality that it seemed to fall halfway between fatigue and boredom, there is no potion so deadly that it cannot in certain circumstances become precious and restorative by providing us with just the boost we needed and the warmth we are unable to muster of our own accord. (391) 

And because you feel alone and the world can seem far away, you long all the more to have a lover walking beside you. (382)

 When I found myself alone again at home, reminding myself that I had spen thte afternoon on an excursion with Albertine, that I was dining in two days with Mme de Guermantes, and that I needed to answer a letter from Gilberte, three woman I had loved, it occurred to me that our social life, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches depicting our momentary attempts to capture our need for a great love, but what did not occur to me was that sometimes, if the sketch is not old, we may return to it and transform it into a completely different work, possibly more important than the one we had originally planned. (386)

While you're off to some society tea party, your old friend will be out htere on his own in some remote suburb watching the pink moon rise in a violet sky, a happier man than you. The truth is that I scarcely belong to this earth, where I feel myself to be such an exile; it takes the full force of the law of gravity to keep me here and stop me from escaping into another sphere. I belong to a different planet. Farewell. (148)