Linux Literature

Mind!  I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is
particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined, myself,
to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.  You will therefore permit
me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
                -- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"

Must I hold a candle to my shames?
                -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"

        My dear People.
        My dear Bagginses and Boffins, and my dear Tooks and Brandybucks,
and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers,
Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots.  Also my good
Sackville Bagginses that I welcome back at last to Bag End.  Today is my
one hundred and eleventh birthday: I am eleventy-one today!"
                -- J. R. R. Tolkien

My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
                -- William Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet"

Never laugh at live dragons.
                -- Bilbo Baggins [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Hobbit"]

No group of professionals meets except to conspire against the public at large.
                -- Mark Twain

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of
absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness
within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.
Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and
doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone
of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
                -- Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House"

No violence, gentlemen -- no violence, I beg of you!  Consider the furniture!
                -- Sherlock Holmes

Noise proves nothing.  Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles
as if she laid an asteroid.
                -- Mark Twain

"Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none."
                -- Shakespeare