Quotations and Principles
of the Last Thursday Book Club
collected works inspired by selection of the month

Who are these proud men who populate our nation's second finest Book Club?  They are not easy to describe in today's bland use of language.  Perhaps they were captured best in the words of the late Jean de La Bruyère (1645-96), French writer, moralist, when he wrote  Characters, "Of Personal Merit," aph. 22 (1688):

"From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light.   Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants:   they are the whole of their race."

LTBC Quote of the Month:

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; 
teach a person to use the Internet and 
they won't bother you for weeks.

Don't argue with an idiot; people watching may not be able to tell the difference.

Life is sexually transmitted.

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Some people are like a Slinky...not really good for anything,
but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.

 Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in
hospitals dying of nothing. 
 Indecision may or may not be my problem. - Jimmy Buffett

"A point of information for those with time on their hands: if you were to read 135 books a day, every day, for a year, you wouldn't finish all the books published annually in the United States.  Now add to this figure, which is upward of 50,000, the 100 or so literary magazines; the scholarly, political and scientific journals (there are 142 devoted to sociology alone), as well as the glossy magazines, of which bigger and shinier versions are now spawning, and you'll appreciate the amount of lucubration that finds its way into print."
   -Arthur Krystal, "On Writing: Let There Be Less," New York Times, March 26, 1989


I'm a lucky man.  I carry the world within me.  You see, Salim, in this world beggars are the only people who can be choosers.  Everyone else has his side chosen for him.  I can choose.
- V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, pg 155 of 277

Your manuscript is both good and original,
but the part that is good is not original
and the part that is original is not good.
- Samuel Johnson


These men follow desire and come to emptiness.
-  Rudyard Kiping, Kim, pg 84

We embrace the theology of Frisbeetarianism: 
the belief that when you die,
your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there. 
Start each day off with a smile, and get it over with.
-  W. C. Fields


There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment.
A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment.
If one fully understands the present moment,
there will be nothing else to do, and nothing left to pursue.
-  The Book of the Samurai

Silence, except for the wind sharpening itself
on the corner of the building, the gnawing sea.
- E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, page 41

"My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it ."
-  Henry David Thoreau, 1849
"An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read somebody else." --DH Lawrence to Carlo Linati, 22 Jan. 1925

Here it is!  That for which the literate world has been clamoring!
Ordered Listing:  All Books Read by the Last Thursday Book Club
(ordered from Best to Worst, we read 'em all)

Last Year's Movie Selection based on a book previously selected by the LTBC:
All the Pretty Horses
  Why you can't trust a movie to get it right: "Die-hard fans of the Cormac McCarthy novel might not be too happy with director Billy Bob Thorton when he says, "I apologized to [Cormac McCarthy] in advance. I just said, 'Look, we're going to screw up your book.' … He's totally fine with that and understands that he's given it up to Hollywood."  Thorton originally cut the running time down from 240 to 135 minutes, but Reel.com reports that the final cut may be as short as 113 minutes.


Previous Best Quotes:

possible description of the LTBC web site:
"The whole work compil'd and Methodically digested, as well as for the Entertainment of the Curious as the Information of the Ignorant, and for the Benefit of young Students, Artificers, Tradesmen and Foreigners..."
- from the title page of Nathaniel Bailey's dictionary c. 1721

"If I have deeper vision, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets..."
- LTBC member Ron B.


"Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow.  You could bury them and knife their names onto an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing - not their acts of meanness or kindness or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces - would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away." - Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, page 177.

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts."  -  Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake


Web Site
 Why you might want to visit
Scared to be an American
 Purported actual quotes that you will find difficult to believe

Our Daily Affirmation:        In some cultures what we do would be considered normal.
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I
             definitely overpaid for my carpet. -- Woody Allen

             Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco. -- Will Rogers

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This page last updated: 
29 November 2005		 Return to: 
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