“How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.”

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente
"Le Pont Mirabeau" (Mirabeau Bridge), line 13; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 193.
Alcools (1912)

Source: Ulysses (1842), l. 22-32
Context: How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

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Of Henry Irving's funeral.
Quoted in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, John Michael Cohen, M. J. Cohen (1971)

Source: How to Love

"Review of Meet Mr. Grizzly by Montague Stevens" [1944]; Published in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony (eds.) 1990, p. 220.
1940s

Source: Frankenstein