Post your favourite inspirational literature quote!

Well there isn't exactly a place for theory of writing, or the like.. I find, as a writer that its very hard to find inspiration some times, and reading (for me) really helps break that writers block. I think it would be cool to see the favourite literature quotes of the ZU writing affectionatos. Something that helps you break your writers block, or something you just found that you think is worth sharing.

(please no song lyrics, lets stick to quotes by writers, and quotes from books and papers)

Anyhew, mine isss....


"Call me into that within your life
which most resists you - when inspiration fails
as most you need it, when feelings will not flow,
or when you think you've won anothers heart
only to find it suddenly withdrawn.
What is denied is yours for ever.
Now you're free. For what you'd hoped to grasp
can only be possessed if you release it.
O' how hard it is to trust our feelings,
we who are too young for what is old,
too old for what may never have existed -
each minute vulnerable as new-born infants,
we are also the yeoman’s axe, fulfillment,
and the sweet ambivalence of danger."
~ Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

I actually love this quote so much that i'm getting it tattooed on one of my sleeves. It really made me open my eyes to the depth of that style of writing.

share yours!

While I can think of far more songs that inspire me when I'm writing (I've been known to listen to one song on repeat for hours on end in an attempt to get into the right mindset for writing something), there are a few literary pieces that I hold to be awesome.

Like this piece from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is copy-pasted from the TV Tropes page on the novel:

"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't.", said the Controller, "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right, then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all." said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

This piece just makes me think about the value we attach to everything bad and miserable in our lives, and in the context of the novel, it makes me question why it is we value them, or if indeed they are worth valuing.

This is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang, but a whimper.
-TS Elliot's "The Hollow Men"

So it goes.
-Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
-Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

three very different takes on life which inspire me in very different ways.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

-Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft."