quotes

i think i have a fairly good memory for quotes, but it's mixed with a helpless system of filing that leaves a trail of highlighted text and little more.

A (twice) relevant example would be the scene in "Franny and Zooey" where Zooey goes into Buddy and Seymour's old room, and sees the neatly compiled list of quotes that covers the back of the door. The list goes all the way down to the floor, and you could tell that the bottom ones were added while one of the boys lay on his belly. -I always wanted this to be me. - Anyway, I can remember the summery of this quotation; but i have no way to access it in its literary realness.

So i've decided i'm going to start posting quotes here so i won't forget them.
This, by the way, was prompted by the discovery that when i enter a quotation mark into google, my autofinish comes up with this:

"Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present."

A quote that is apparently by Cyril Connolly, and which i have no recollection of reading or subsequently googling. It seems pretty high school yearbook-ish anyway.

So lets start with my perennial favorite, recently recalled:

"Quick as thought he snatched a knife from Hook's belt and was about to drive it home, when he saw that he was higher up the rock that his foe. It would not have been fighting fair. He gave the pirate a hand to help him up.

It was then that Hook bit him.

Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest."

-j.m. Barrie