MY FAVOURITE QUOTES FROM LITERATURE

MY FAVOURITE QUOTES FROM LITERATURE

On reading:

"A reader lives a thousand lives before dying. The one who has never read lives only one."

Jojen Reed (by George R.R. Martin)

On waiting:

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem short."

Iago (by William Shakespeare)

On phobias:

"A phobia is a silliness you can’t control and it is a very frightening thing to have."

Eva Ibbotson

On casuality:

"No one can escape being blown about by the winds of change and chance."

Jethro (High Priest of Midian)

On first impressions:

“I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.” 

Lemony Snicket

On how to commence a story:

"All right, let us begin; and when we have reached the end of our story, we shall know so much more than we already know!"

H.C. Andersen

On altered states:

"The best of life is but intoxication."

Lord Byron

On translation:

"Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence; only in the imperfection of translation can art and thought truly manifest."

George Steiner

FLEXIBILITAS CEREA

When I was in my teens, I usually wandered about my Swedish grandmother's villa in Stora Höga. One of her treasures was the Household Book of Medicine (Hemmets läkarebok) from the 1920s, which consecrated a chapter to hypnotism and catalepsia.
What interested me the most was flexibilitas cerea, ie waxy flexibility, referred to in the aforementioned book by its Latin name. According to the daguerreotypes that illustrated the chapter, a catatonic or hypnotised person's neck, torso, and limbs can be contorted by another person into the most bizarre and outrageous shapes, into which the subject would remain fixed in that new position, still, unmoved, like wax or clay once it has hardened.
For instance, if one were to move the arm of someone with waxy flexibility, they would keep their arm where one moved it until it was moved again, as if it were made from wax. Further alteration of an individual's posture is similar to bending a candle.