"Century-old memories of magic ceremonies"

The Big Chill (1983)

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"'It is essential that your conscience guards vigilantly against this weakness: excessive sensitivity concerning vain exterior graces.'"

The Escape Artist (1982)

"I closed the book, opened it again, and finally threw it down. For the first time in my life it all seemed bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without life.  

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls. Something similar had happened to this poetry. The ardent aspirations of the heart, laden with earth and seed, had become a flawless intellectual game, a clever, aerial and intricate architecture. 

... The human element is brutish, uncouth, impure--it is composed of love, the flesh and a cry of distress. Let it be sublimated into an abstract idea, and, in the crucible of the spirit, by various processes of alchemy, let it be rarefied and evaporate."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Red and the Black, Stendhal (M-H B)

"I whistled to conceal my emotion."

Cable Guy (1996)

"I was happy and said to myself: 'This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To take part in the Christmas festivities and, after eating and drinking well, to escape on your own far from all the snares, to have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right: and to realize of a sudden that, in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

Cronos (1993)

"'Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. I'm not one of the worst, boss, nor yet one of the best. I'm somewhere between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humor. That's not too bad, after all!' 

He looked at me wickedly and started laughing. 

'As for you, boss,' he said, 'I think you do your level best to turn what you eat into God. But you can't quite manage it, and that torments you. The same thing's happening to you as happened to the crow.' 

'What happened to the crow, Zorba?' 

'Well, you see, he used to walk respectably, properly--well, like a crow.  But one day he got it into his head to try to strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn't for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don't you see? He just hobbled about.'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"The stars were shining, the sea was sighing and licking the shells, a glow-worm lit under its belly its little erotic lantern. Night's hair was streaming with dew. 

I lay face downward, plunged in silence, thinking of nothing. I was now one with night and the sea; my mind was like a glow-worm that had lit its little lantern and settled on the damp, dark earth, and was waiting. 

The stars were traveling round, the hours were passing--and, when I arose, I had, without knowing how, engraved on my mind the double task I had to accomplish on this shore: 

Escape from Buddha, rid myself of words of all my metaphysical cares and free my mind from vain anxiety; 

Make direct and firm contact with men, starting from this very moment. 

I said to myself: 'Perhaps it is not yet too late.'"

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

The Exorcist (1973)

"'I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids. ...Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die.'"

Christine, Stephen King

Fearless (1993)

Fearless (1993)

"The sun had risen, the sky was clear. I crouched among the rocks, perched like a seagull on a ledge, and contemplated the sea. My body felt powerful, fresh and obedient. And my mind, following the waves, became itself a wave, unresisting, submissive to the rhythm of the sea. 

Then my heart began to swell. Obscure, pleading and imperious voices rose within me. I knew who was calling to me. Whenever I was alone for a moment, this being cried out, in an anguish of horrible presentiments, transports and mad fears--waiting to be delivered by me. 

I hurriedly opened Dante, my traveling companion, in order not to hear and to exorcise the fearful demon. I turned over the pages, reading a line here and there, or ..."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

still got it

"To my mind, this Cretan countryside resembled good prose, carefully ordered, sober, free from superfluous ornament, powerful and restrained. It expressed all that was necessary with the greatest economy. It had no flippancy, no artifice about it. It said what it had to say with a manly austerity. But between the severe lines one could discern an unexpected sensitiveness and tenderness; in the sheltered hollows the lemon and orange trees perfumed the air, and from the vastness of the sea emanated an inexhaustible poetry."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

parfait mélange

"and the palms of my hands became redolent with savory, sage and mint."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

Babies (2010)

"I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it."

On Writing, Stephen King

Surface Tension (1968)

"It was raining and I could see the shafts of rain link sky and mud. ...The rain and my spleen took on, in the humid atmosphere, the features of my great friend. Was it last year? In another life? Yesterday?... 

... The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty."

Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

"... I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I'll ever be able to use this experience in a book. With one long pinkie nail, I dislodge another piece of herring from between my teeth and flick it dramatically into the North Sea."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

"'Dancing is like fucking,' I said, 'it doesn't matter how you look--just concentrate on how you feel.' Wasn't I the brazen one? What was this woman-of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong