Vernacular Literature Quotes & Sayings

then coiling his length together, roaring like thunder underground, he sped from his deep lair through its great door, out into the huge passages of the mountain-palace and up towards the Front Gate. To hunt the whole mountain till he had caught the thief and had torn and trampled him was his one thought. He issued from the Gate, the waters rose in fierce whistling steam, and up he soared blazing into the air and settled on the mountain-top in a spout of green and scarlet flame. The dwarves heard the awful rumour of his flight, and they crouched against the walls of the grassy terrace cringing under boulders, hoping somehow to escape the frightful eyes of the hunting dragon. There they would have all been killed, if it had not been for Bilbo once again. "Quick! Quick!" he gasped. — J.R.R. Tolkien

JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life?
LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.
JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?
LENORE: I smell trap.
JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more?
LENORE: I would kill for a shower. — David Foster Wallace

DURING THE FIRST PART of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it. — Michel Houellebecq

To make sense of plastic on the mind and to develop a resistance to the perverse patterns that will otherwise run our world for us, I believe an activity of this sort - by way of a blog, an especially redemptive conversation with a coworker, a water coloring or a playlist - is absolutely crucial. It can be done. And when we do it, we begin to see things we didn't know. We have to try to make sense. We have to make time for artful analysis, which is the way we clear a space for the possibility of sanity. It is an outlet for honesty. — David Dark

Life teaches much, but to all thinking persons it brings ever closer the will of God - not because their faculties decline, but on the contrary, because they increase. — Madame De Stael

Fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class - Hope your surgery went well! — Simone Elkeles

For Sale: Complete set of encylopedias. Never used. Wife knows everything. — Paul Zindel

It's hard enough to track many simultaneous changes, let alone join in with them! However, we must embrace the fact that code changes: any code that stands still is a liability. No code is beyond modification. Treating a section of code as avoidably scary is counterproductive. — Anonymous

In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the vernacular and geared toward the general population. — Dan Brown

Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. — Benjamin Franklin

There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator. — Fritz Lang