Three favourite quotes from The Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Attention: spoiler.
If you have not read The Animal Farm but intend to in the future (or even if you don’t) here are my three favourite quotes from the book.
Quote 1
THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS
- Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
- Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
- No animal shall wear clothes.
- No animal shall sleep in a bed.
- No animal shall drink alcohol.
- No animal shall kill any other animal.
- All animals are equal.
Quote 2
For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
Quote 3
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Photo credit: http://www.michaelspornanimation.com
My top 3 reasons for detention
I would gladly do any of them (and complete my detention(s)) .
May I have the second activity during a detention? 🙂
Practice makes perfect
For those of you who have read the “Outliers” by Michael Gladwell and/or my 30-second review on it, here is a marvellous infographic that shows what exactly 10,000 hours of practice look like.
Enjoy 🙂
Free books: 100 legal sites to download literature
The Classics
Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here.
- Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.
- The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.
- Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.
- Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.
- Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.
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- Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.
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- The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.
- Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.
- Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.
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Textbooks
If you don’t absolutely need to pay for your textbooks, save yourself a few hundred dollars by reviewing these sites.
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- Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.
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Math and Science
Turn to this list to find books about math, science, engineering and technology.
- FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.
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Children’s Books
Even children’s books are now available online. Find illustrated books, chapter books and more.
- byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.
- Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.
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Philosophy and Religion
For books about philosophy and religion, check out these websites.
- Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.
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- Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.
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Plays
From Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw to more contemporary playwrights, visit these sites.
- ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.
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- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.
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Modern Fiction, Fantasy and Romance
These websites boast collections of graphic novels, romance novels, fantasy books and more.
- Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.
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- Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.
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For books in a foreign language like French, Spanish and even Romanian, look here.
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- Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.
- KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.
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- Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.
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- Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.
- CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.
- Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.
History and Culture
Refresh your memory of world history, the classics and U.S. history here.
- LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.
- The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.
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- Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.
Rare Books
Look for rare books online here.
- Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.
- …
Arts and Entertainment
This list features books about celebrities, movies, fashion and more.
- Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.
- Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.
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- Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.
- Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.
Mystery
Here you can find mystery books from Sherlock Holmes to more contemporary authors.
- MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.
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Poetry
These poetry sites have works by Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and others.
- The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.
- Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”
- Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.
- Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.
- Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, from The Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.
- QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.
- CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.
- PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.
Miscellaneous
For even more free book sites, check out this list.
- Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.
- World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.
- DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the more recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.
- A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.
- Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.
- ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.
- Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.
- Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.
Source
Wait, there are other awesome posts around here:
I read and review – Outliers by Michael Gladwell
Today is the launch of my new column I read and review where I will be giving you my 30sec. opinion on my last readings.
Your feedback on contents of the review and its visual formatting is important and what is more, interesting to me, so please, feel free and encouraged to share it in the comments below. 🙂
Without further due, my first guest, Michael Gladwell:
(click to enlarge)
Want to receive more of my book reviews? Please subscribe in one (two) easy step(s) 🙂
Do you ENJOY language?
A question by one of my most beloved actors (and voices), Stephen Fry:
Do you?
Geroff Kindle!
And by Kindle, I mean all types of e-readers.
And by geroff I mean, for authors’ sake, just let it be.
Every week I pick up a handful of posts by some moaning, whining and pouring buckets of anger bloggers who despise the very existence or even the idea of an electronic book. Cry me a river, then. Ok.
No, wait. What?! Come again? Are you serious? You are mad, because… let me think. Because someone is in love with the contents of a book, not with its binding, smell of glue, or of vanillin paper, or with the sound of rustling pages. Really? Is this the reason you buy books for? Kind of fetish? It’s fine by me. But.
I don’t like reading on computer or phone because it strains my eyes. I don’t like reading on a tablet either, for the very same reason. Yet I don’t write despicable posts to tell the world how I die to ban reading on anything but a soft off-white paper with 11pt Georgia font. I just don’t use what does not seem to suit me well. I also happen to dislike gumbo but I don’t deny your right to have some once in a while.
Now you let the people who actually care about worlds of words and heroes have it their way and that is whichever the way possible. Computer, e-reader, tissue paper, wall, sand, stone…never mind. Why? Because it does not matter what you think of the medium/device/bearer of the information. It’s the story that’s important. And certainly not your personal taste.
No fancy binding could divert me of satisfy my needs for READING.
Now have it your way, or other way but do not become a paper book-nazi. We have had enough.
I don’t care that much about the form,
I challenge you: just finish it
I know that most of the times I am just like a mathematician who loses interest in the problem once they find there is a solution.
I cannot focus my attention on a single thing.
In my head a new idea is always impeccable and I am surefooted and adequate to doing it. I imagine the end result, the rapture, the joy, and… my interest evaporates.
-
Doable = No challenge.
-
No challenge = No interest = Not for me (I have a new idea!)
Same with reading. In the past four years there were just two periods when I have been reading just one book at a time: the Harry Potter and later the Hunger series. My other books in the queue are just equally interesting, so I alternate between all of them. 30 pages of this one, 20% of the other. The books are now over 200 (two hundred). Yep. This is an issue.
- Starting isn’t Useful Without Finishing
Starting interesting things is a worthwhile trait, but perhaps a more important one is finishing those things. The world is full of half-finished projects which could have been great if the fire-starter hadn’t burnt out a month or two in.
The courage to start things needs to be matched with the discipline to see them through. They’re both critical, and my guess is that you can probably assess which one you need to work on.
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2012/02/19/just-finish-it/
What is it with my finished projects?
The unexpected happens.
My sewing: I start with an idea (and a pattern) and end up with a completely different outcome. Get-go with a skirt pattern, end up with a dress. (too much imagination)
My blogging: You can bet that what you are reading now are not the perfect ideas, dressed in pluperfect words, dancing in excellent grammar lines that I had in my mind 30 minutes ago… (this is nothing like it)
And I do not like the unexpected. Nope, no surprises for my liking.
Ahem…decide!
The first small step.
I made my decision to finish the 240 book lot before thinking about buying or borrowing new one.
Three days in the venture, I already have finished 3 books, and today will be the fourth and the fifth.
To You
So, as much as I challenge myself, I challenge you: just finish it.
Whether it is a book you read/write, a project, or a simple task, don’t always strive for perfection at any cost (paralysing you from doing a thing), reach for the end line. Finish. Then go back, polish, edit, revise, re-write, re-do, but first have it complete. You will clear you mind for the new ideas instead of rethinking the pending ones. “Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.” ~Francis Bacon
Just do it. Finish
(and then tell me how you did it, I still learn),
P.S. 11 hours later my finish-two-books-today mission is complete. How about your progress? I am eager to know (but also can wait). 🙂
AWARDS
Just English 