“… what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?”
Source: The Swan Thieves
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Elizabeth Kostova 31
American writer 1964Related quotes
“But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.”
Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 11.
Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here
“All these books were written by idle, unoccupied, ignorant men, the slaves of vice and filth. I wonder what it is that delights us in these books unless it be that we are attracted by indecency. Learning is not to be expected from authors who never saw even a shadow of learning. As for their story-telling, what pleasure is to be derived from the things they invent, full of lies and stupidity?”
Quos omnes libros conscripserunt homines otiosi, male feriati, imperiti, vitiis ac spurcitiae dediti, in queis miror quid delectet nisi tam nobis flagitia blandirentur. Eruditio non est exspectanda ab hominibus qui ne umbram quidem eruditionis viderant. Iam cum narrant, quae potest esse delectatio in rebus quas tam aperte et stulte confingunt?
De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1523), trans. by C. Fantazzi (1996), Vol. I, p. 47.
“We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.”
Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 18
Context: She looked quickly up. And then her eyes once more went back to the flashing thing she was holding in her hands.
He saw that it was the pyramid of spheres and now all the spheres were spinning slowly, in alternating clockwise and counterclockwise motions, and that as they spun they shone and glittered, each in its own particular color, as if there might be, deep inside each one of them, a source of soft, warm light.
Enoch caught his breath at the beauty and the wonder of it — the old, hard wonder of what this thing might be and what it might be meant to do. He had examined it a hundred times or more and had puzzled at it and there had been nothing he could find that was of significance. So far as he could see, it was only something that was meant to be looked at, although there had been that persistent feeling that it had a purpose and that, perhaps, somehow, it was meant to operate.
And now it was in operation. He had tried a hundred times to get it figured out and Lucy had picked it up just once and had got it figured out.
He noticed the rapture with which she was regarding it. Was it possible, he wondered, that she knew its purpose?
Written in the 1920s, as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 8, by William V. Holtz (1993).
(1st July 1826) Moralising
The London Literary Gazette, 1826
