Terra Nostra Quotes

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

Don Quixote is not just Don Quixote;
La Mancha is not just geography;
It is our personal territory
Terra Nostra. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

... is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young?
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra ~ Carlos Fuentes

Relations between Terra and Luna had been strained since the Lunans had eaten Neil Armstrong in 1960. ~ A. Lee Martinez

Ryan looked almost eye-to-eye with the lifelike statue. The warrior's noble and steady gaze stared back at him. Ryan thought that the way the man's thin moustache curved above his unsmiling mouth made him look like he was hiding a secret. He wore no helmet, but his torso and arms had been intricately chiseled to display fine armour. He was poised to fight.
Ryan, Alex and Hong Mei moved forward, studying each sculpture that they passed. Just like real people, some were tall and slim while others were short and heavy. They wore different uniforms and hairstyles, and on some, Ryan could see remnants of the coloured lacquer that once would have covered them. ~ B.L. Sauder

Guarda il cielo. Non troverai mai un arcobaleno se stai guardando per terra.
Look up to the sky. You'll never find rainbows if you're looking down. ~ Charlie Chaplin

Why aren't you at school?" I ask suddenly.
"It's a holiday," he says, a little too quickly.
"Right. What holiday would that be? National Talk Out of Your Ass Day? ~ Gretchen Powell

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece. ~ Erica Jong

Do not underestimate what you specific conventional, nor covetousness others. He who envies others does not terra firma organization of intellect. ~ Gautama Buddha

Diplomats willing to sit for an interview usually prefer the terra firma of CNN over the whoopee cushion of Comedy Central. ~ Kevin Bleyer

People like terra firma, and they should be allowed to walk where they wish. ~ Stephen Gardiner

I wasn't aware that was how I felt, either, until it was out. And now that I've said it like that, I'm not exactly sure it is how I feel. But this isn't a piece of paper I can crumple up and throw away. they aren't words I can cross out to start over. Now they're out, and I know they'll hang here, between us, maybe forever. ~ Terra Elan McVoy

The word "marriage" lingered in Guy's ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam's round terra cotta-coloured mouth saying, "Why should I put myself out for you?" and it was Anne's eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve's long dark head, insolently smiling. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Terra had climbed well beyond that which its ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Henry studied Merri Lee, then Meg. "Humans don't like mice?" "Not in the building!" Meg said. "And not around food," Merri Lee added. The three terra indigene looked baffled. "But it's fresh meat," the brown-haired woman finally said. ~ Anne Bishop

My geography savors a delicious paradox: Home - a grounding - found in unearthly beauty. The predominant colors are blue, emerald, and terra-cotta. Every day, every season, I taste these colors and the intricate flavors of their unaccountable tones and hues. I have yet to earn this land. Perhaps I never will. Home is a religion. Sensibly you understand the need for it, yet not even sensible people can explain it. - from the Chapter Finding Home ~ Ellen Meloy

I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them.
It's for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before. ~ Erica Jong

Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little. ~ Kate Grenville

You're a dick," Ellison said. "Or, is it just that you suck it?"

Aaron knew by the stillness in the room that everyone was awaiting Tony's response.

"Both," Tony agreed lightly. "And if you actually had one you might be in trouble, sailor. ~ Terra Laurent

I love paperwhites - they smell heavenly and you can often pick them up from a big home improvement store garden center already planted in pretty terra cotta pots. ~ Clinton Smith

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward - pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found that what had already been found in abundance on Earth - a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remain terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe's oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that's the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.

(...)

He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that's too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history. ~ Martin Scorsese

A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think? ~ Alan Bradley

Earth natives didn't absorb everything from the forms they had chosen over the long years the sun had risen and set over Namid. They were first and always terra indigene. But they learned from the predators they became, and certain traits were passed down to the young of each form. Yes, ~ Anne Bishop

... a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread.
"What's this?" I asked.
"It's bread," she replied.
"But it's in a flowerpot?" She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said, "Yeah? So?"
"Well, isn't that kind of unusual?"
She considered for a moment. "Is a bit, I suppose." "And will we be following a horticultural theme throughout the meal?" Her expression contorted in a deeply pained look, as if she were trying to suck her face into the back of her head. "What?"
"Will the main course arrive in a wheelbarrow?" I elaborated helpfully. "Will you be serving the salad with a pitchfork?"
"Oh, no. It's just the bread that's special."
"I'm so pleased to hear it. ~ Bill Bryson

I fell in love with electronics, which for me was the terra incognita, because I had never heard such sounds. If you'd asked me 50 years ago, I would have said the future of music is only electronic, but I would have been wrong. I learnt how to produce everything I needed with live instrumentalists, so I don't need electronics. ~ Jonny Greenwood

Inside my head / or in a distant / Galaxy / Soft I hear it / Calling me." from the song "In the Blackness" in the poetry collection "Terra Affirmative". ~ Jay Woodman

By now I was utterly deprogrammed. I walked along naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat. ~ Robyn Davidson

Always work on the things you're not good at, because once you develop skills in those areas, you have no more fears. ~ Caio Terra

How old is the sun? Sun not temporary, not chronological. There is the terra-celestial and the celestial. I am celestial, mon. I am here, there and everywhere. I live among men so I must adjust myself. When I go to other planet, I must adjust myself there, too, mon. ~ Peter Tosh

They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents' manners. ~ Lauren Groff

As I look through my box of photos, my eyes well up with tears as I hold in front of me, the one of my brother Spence when he was five years old. He looks so cute in his cowboy outfit, drawing his toy pistols as if he were having a showdown with nasty outlaws. ~ Terra Lorin

We're going to destroy Cel-Romano. I wanted you to know that before you die," Stavros said. "You upstart infestation. You thought you could wipe out the terra indigene? It's your species that is going to wither - and you will be one of the things the survivors, if there are any, can thank for that." He released Scratch and floated a safe distance away as dozens of the Sharkgard rushed in to strike the enemy, consuming the human piece by piece. A foot. A hand. A forearm. A thigh. ~ Anne Bishop

It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face
the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra. ~ H. Beam Piper

He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terra-cotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people's saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no farther. ~ Hilary Mantel