NICE DUDE BASSETT SEMESTER 2 EXAM QUOTES? YOU MUST BE SMART AS HELL DUDE!
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth . . .
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
Can you not hate me, as I know you do, But you must join in souls to mock me too?
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
David, at fourteen, had been more moved than a mover; like the furniture, he had to find a new place, and on the Saturday of the second week he tried to work off some of his disorientation by arranging the books.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
Did not you tell me I should know the man By the Athenian garment be had on?
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
This was the initial impact—that at a definite spot in time and space a brain black with the denial of Christ's divinity had been suffered to exist; that the universe had not spit out this ball of tar but allowed it to continue in its blasphemy, to grow old, win honors, wear a hat, write books that, if true, collapsed everything into a jumble of horror.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
To his relief, she was not giving off the stifling damp heat of her anger, but instead was cool, decisive, maternal. She handed him an old green book, her college text of Plato.
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"...there has been some progress . . . such things as poetry and music . . . In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have to ... cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching .... Don't—don't hang back with the brutes!"
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"-You're simple, straightforward and honest, a little bit on the primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to... -To lay her cards out on the table."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"And funerals are pretty compared to deaths."
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
"And then there are some who just live, really, in hell and they know it and they see what's happening and they go right on."
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" - Ernest Hemingway
"Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café."
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
"For the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway
"He was in despair." "What about?" "Nothing."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" - Flannery O'Connor
"I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"I never met a woman that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got. I once went out with a doll who said to me, "I am the glamorous type, I am the glamorous type!" I said. "So what?"
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"It isn't enough to be soft. You've got to be soft and attractive. And I - I'm fading now! I don't know how much longer I can turn the trick."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"It's dark in here....I don't think I ever seen you in the light....What it means is I've never had a real good look at you...."
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
"It's not so much to play. It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level." He frowned and smiled: "In order to keep from shaking to pieces."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"Never inside, I didn't lie in my heart..."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"Now let's cut the re-bop!"
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"Now run along, now, quickly! It would be nice to keep you, but I've got to be good - and keep my hands off children."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!"
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" - Flannery O'Connor
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee" The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty."
"The Old People" - William Faulkner
"Steady," father said. For an instant his hand rested upon my knee. "Steady. I know you did. So did I. Sam took me in there once after I killed my first deer."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"That's how I'll clear the table! [He seizes her arm.] Don't ever talk that way to me! "Pig - Polack - disgusting - vulgar - greasy!" - them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's too much around here! What do you think you two are? A pair of queens? Remember what Huey Long said - "Every Man is a King!" And I am the King around here, so don't forget it"
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!"
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
"This reminds me of death." It was a phrase of his that David had heard so often he never considered its sense.
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"We've had this date with each other from the beginning."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"What you are talking about is brutal desire - just - Desire! - the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bans through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another... "
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going! And wasn't we happy together, wasn't it all okay till she showed here?"
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
"While I was downstairs before, on my way here, listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through--to sing like that. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"You know as well as I do that a single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions or she'll be lost!"
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"You see, under the Napoleonic code - a man has to take an interest in his wife's affairs - especially now that she's going to have a baby."
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
"You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of."
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
As the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within; the music seemed to soothe the poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
...I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke: peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
...he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.
"The Old People" - William Faulkner
And I did that—drew the throat taut by one of the antlers and drew Sam's knife across it, and Sam stooped and dipped his hands in the hot bloog and wiped them back and forth across my face.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
And even for that do I love you the more. I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you. What worser place can I beg in your love,-- And yet a place of high respect with me,-- Than to be used as you use your dog?
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty-five minutes is at one with the words of the Mass. Each morning I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual.
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" - Flannery O'Connor
Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love. And, while my mind dwells on breakfast, or Major or Duchess tethered under the church eave, there is, as I take the Host from Father Paul and place it on my tongue and return to the pew, a feeling that I am thankful I have not lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty. Or the certainty of peace.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
He had the sensation of a creator; these little smudges and flickers that he was clever to see and even cleverer to hit in the dim recesses of the rafters—out of each of them he was making a full bird. A tiny peek, probe, dab of life, when he hit it, blossomed into a dead enemy, falling with good, final weight.
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
He turned back to the window, looking out. "All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" - Flannery O'Connor
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
I am as fair now as I was erewhile. Since night you loved me; yet since night you left me: Why, then you left me--O, the gods forbid!-- In earnest, shall I say?
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
I do not feel the peace I once did: not with God, nor the earth, or anyone on it. I have begun to prefer this state, to remember with fondness the other one as a period of peace I neither earned nor deserved. Now in the mornings while I watch purple finches driving larger titmice from the feeder, I say to Him: I would do it again. For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke Ripley I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl. And He says: I am a Father too.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
I have said I talk with God in the mornings, as I start my day, and sometimes as I sit with coffee, looking at the birds, and the woods. Of course He has never spoken to me, but that is not something I require. Nor does He need to. I know Him, as I know the part of myself that knows Him, that felt Him watching from the wind and night as I kneeled over the dying boy.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
I must to the barber's, monsieur; for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face; and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
I saw my little girl again and I felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
I think of death too, not sadly, or with fear, though something like excitement does run through me, something more quickening than the coffee and tobacco. I suppose it is an intense interest, and an outright distrust: I never feel certain that I'll be here watching birds eating at tomorrow's daylight. Sometimes I try to think of other things, like the rabbit that is warm and breathing but not there till twilight. I feel on the brink of something about the life of the senses, but either am not equipped to go further or am not interested enough to concentrate. I have called all of this thinking, but it is not, because it is unintentional; what I'm really doing is feeling the day, in silence, and that is what Father Paul is doing too on his five-to-ten-mile walks.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
I will roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear me; I will roar, that I will make the duke say 'Let him roar again, let him roar again.'
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
I woo'd thee with my sword, And won thy love, doing thee injuries; But I will wed thee in another key, With pomp, with triumph and with revelling.
"The Old People" - William Faulkner
I would not question him; he did not react to questions. I would just wait and then listen and he would begin, talking about the old days and the People whom he had never known, and so could not remember him- self, and in place of whom the other race into which his blood had run had supplied him with no substitute.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend: And, as I am an honest Puck, If we have unearned luck Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
In my real one I go to bed early and sleep well and wake at four forty-five, for an hour of silence. I never want to get out of bed then, and every morning I know I can sleep for another four hours, and still not fail at any of my duties. But I get up, so have come to believe my life can be seen in miniature in that struggle in the dark of morning. While making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and moods, as a prayer of thanksgiving, and for Gloria and my children and my friends and two women I made love with after Gloria left. This morning offertory is a habit from my boyhood in a Catholic school; or then it was a habit, but as I kept it and grew older it became a ritual. Then I say the Lord's Prayer, trying not to recite it, and one morning it occurred to me that a prayer, whether recited or said with concentration, is always an act of faith.
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway
In the day time the street was dusty; but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
It was as if a stone that for weeks and even years had been gathering weight in the web of David's nerves snapped them and plunged through the page and a hundred layers of paper underneath. These fantastic falsehoods—plainly untrue; churches stood everywhere, the entire nation was founded "under God"—did not at first frighten him; it was the fact that they had been permitted to exist in an actual human brain.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
Love can transpose to form and dignity: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind: Nor hath Love's mind of any judgement taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in game themselves forswear, So the boy Love is perjured every where: For ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's eye, He hail'd down oaths that he was only mine; And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, So he dissolved, and showers of oaths did melt.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
O weary night, O long and tedious night, Abate thy hour! Shine comforts from the east, That I may back to Athens by daylight, From these that my poor company detest:
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
Standing in the center of the floor, fully master now, disdaining to steady the barrel with anything but his arm, he killed two more that way. He felt like a beautiful avenger. Out of the shadowy ragged infinity of the vast barn roof these impudent things dared to thrust their heads, presumed to dirty its starred silence with their filthy timorous life, and he cut them off, tucked them back neatly into the silence.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
The feathers were more wonderful than dog's hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird's body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests.
"Pigeon Feathers" - John Updike
The tremor must be its heart beating. Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
Then I said, 'Oh God,' and felt Him in the wind and the sky moving past the stars and moon and the fields around me, but only watching me as He might have watched Cain or Job, I did not know which, and I said it again, and wanted to sink to the earth and weep till I slept there in the weeds.
"The Old People" - William Faulkner
Then he saw us. And still he did not begin to flee. He just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at us, then his muscles suppled, gathered. He did not even alter his course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of Walter out at his gate two miles from us, his head high and the eye not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid, and Sam standing beside me now, his right arm lifted at full length and the hand turned palm-outward, and speaking in that tongue which I had learned from listening to him and Joe Baker, while up the ridge Walter Ewell's horn was still blowing us in to a dead buck.
"Sonny's Blues" - James Baldwin
Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after a while I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
True, and I don't want You to lift it from me either. And if one of my sons had come to me that night, I would have phoned the police and told them to meet us with an ambulance at the top of the hill. Why? Do you love them less? I tell Him no, it is not that I love them less, but that I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons' pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and nails. But You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion. So, He says, you love her more than you love Me. I love her more than I love truth. Then you love in weakness, He says.
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed. Marriages have lost that, and I wish I had known then what I know now, and we had performed certain acts together every day, no matter how we felt, and perhaps then we could have subordinated feeling to action, for surely that is the essence of love. I know this from my distractions during Mass, and during everything else I do, so that my actions and feelings are seldom one. It does happen every day, but in proportion to everything else in a day, it is rare, like joy.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
WALL Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so; And, being done, thus Wall away doth go. Exit THESEUS Now is the mural down between the two neighbours. DEMETRIUS No remedy, my lord, when walls are so willful to hear without warning. HIPPOLYTA This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard. THESEUS The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. HIPPOLYTA It must be your imagination then, and not theirs. THESEUS If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.
"The Old People" - William Faulkner
We were the white boy, not yet a man, whose grandfather had lived in the same country and in almost the same manner as the boy himself would grow up to live, leaving his descendants in the land in his turn, and the old man past seventy whose grandfathers had owned the land long before the white men ever saw it and who had vanished from it now with all their kind....
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
What hast thou done? thou hast mistaken quite And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight: Of thy misprision must perforce ensue Some true love turn'd and not a false turn'd true.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
Why should you think that I should woo in scorn? Scorn and derision never come in tears: Look, when I vow, I weep; and vows so born, In their nativity all truth appears. How can these things in me seem scorn to you, Bearing the badge of faith, to prove them true?
"A Father's Story" - Andre Dubus
With arms about each other we walked to the house, and it was good to know he was doing his work but coming as a friend too, and I thought what good work he had. I have no calling. It is for me to keep horses.
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
With cunning hast thou filch'd my daughter's heart, Turn'd her obedience, which is due to me, To stubborn harshness: and, my gracious duke, Be it so she; will not here before your grace Consent to marry with Demetrius, I beg the ancient privilege of Athens
