Quote/ Passage Thread [Archive]

Mysterious Dude

01-20-2008, 02:59 AM

His jaws uplifting from their fell repast,
That sinner wip’d them on the hairs o’ th’ head,
Which he behind had mangled, then began:
“Thy will obeying, I call up afresh
Sorrow past cure, which but to think of wrings
My heart, or ere I tell on’t. But if words,
That I may utter, shall prove seed to bear
Fruit of eternal infamy to him,
The traitor whom I gnaw at, thou at once
Shalt see me speak and weep. Who thou mayst be
I know not, nor how here below art come:
But Florentine thou seemest of a truth,
When I do hear thee. Know I was on earth
Count Ugolino, and th’ Archbishop he
Ruggieri. Why I neighbour him so close,
Now list. That through effect of his ill thoughts
In him my trust reposing, I was ta’en
And after murder’d, need is not I tell.
What therefore thou canst not have heard, that is,
How cruel was the murder, shalt thou hear,
And know if he have wrong’d me. A small grate
Within that mew, which for my sake the name
Of famine bears, where others yet must pine,
Already through its opening sev’ral moons
Had shown me, when I slept the evil sleep,
That from the future tore the curtain off.
This one, methought, as master of the sport,
Rode forth to chase the gaunt wolf and his whelps
Unto the mountain, which forbids the sight
Of Lucca to the Pisan. With lean brachs
Inquisitive and keen, before him rang’d
Lanfranchi with Sismondi and Gualandi.
After short course the father and the sons
Seem’d tir’d and lagging, and methought I saw
The sharp tusks gore their sides. When I awoke
Before the dawn, amid their sleep I heard
My sons (for they were with me) weep and ask
For bread. Right cruel art thou, if no pang
Thou feel at thinking what my heart foretold;
And if not now, why use thy tears to flow?
Now had they waken’d; and the hour drew near
When they were wont to bring us food; the mind
Of each misgave him through his dream, and I
Heard, at its outlet underneath lock’d up
The’ horrible tower: whence uttering not a word
I look’d upon the visage of my sons.
I wept not: so all stone I felt within.
They wept: and one, my little Anslem, cried:
“Thou lookest so! Father what ails thee?” Yet
I shed no tear, nor answer’d all that day
Nor the next night, until another sun
Came out upon the world. When a faint beam
Had to our doleful prison made its way,
And in four countenances I descry’d
The image of my own, on either hand
Through agony I bit, and they who thought
I did it through desire of feeding, rose
O’ th’ sudden, and cried, Father, we should grieve
Far less, if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gav’st
These weeds of miserable flesh we wear,
And do thou strip them off from us again.’
Then, not to make them sadder, I kept down
My spirit in stillness. That day and the next
We all were silent. Ah, obdurate earth!
Why open’dst not upon us? When we came
To the fourth day, then Geddo at my feet
Outstretch’d did fling him, crying, ’Hast no help
For me, my father!’ “There he died, and e’en
Plainly as thou seest me, saw I the three
Fall one by one ’twixt the fifth day and sixth:
Whence I betook me now grown blind to grope
Over them all, and for three days aloud
Call’d on them who were dead. Then fasting got
The mastery of grief.” Thus having spoke,
Once more upon the wretched skull his teeth
He fasten’d, like a mastiff’s ’gainst the bone
Firm and unyielding.

- from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIII

Wryan

01-20-2008, 05:26 AM

My favorite passage from the audacious Grendel, John Gardner's lunatic re-imagining of Beowulf told from the monster's point of view. Can't figure out how to force indents into the page, so this is the best I could do:

I was sure, going back to my cave (it was nearly dawn), that he wouldn't follow me. They never did. But I was wrong; he was a new kind of Scylding. He must have started tracking me that same morning. A driven man, a maniac. He arrived at the cave three nights later.

I was asleep. I woke up with a start, not sure what it was that had awakened me. I saw my mother moving slowly and silently past me, blue murder in her eyes. I understood instantly, not with my mind but with something quicker, and I darted around in front to block her way. I pushed her back.

There he lay, gasping on his belly like a half-drowned rat. His face and throat and arms were a crosshatch of festering cuts, the leavings of the firesnakes. His hair and beard hung straight down like seaweed. He panted for a long time, then rolled his eyes up, vaguely in my direction. In the darkness he couldn't see me, though I could see him. He closed his hand on the sword hilt and jiggled the sword a little, too weak to raise it off the floor.

"Unferth has come!" he said.

I smiled. My mother moved back and forth like a bear behind me, stirred up by the smell.

He crawled toward me, the sword noisily scraping on the cave's rock floor. Then he gave out again. "It will be sung," he whispered, then paused again to get wind. "It will be sung year on year and age on age that Unferth went down through the burning lake--" he paused to pant "--and gave his life in battle with the world-rim monster." He let his cheek fall to the floor and lay panting for a long time, saying nothing. It dawned on me that he was waiting for me to kill him. I did nothing. I sat down and put my elbows on my knees and my chin on my fists and merely watched. He lay with his eyes closed and began to get his breath back. He whispered: "It's all very well to make a fool of me before my fellow thanes. All very well to talk about dignity and noble language and all the rest, as if heroism were a golden trinket, mere outward show, and hollow. But such is not the case, monster. That is to say--" He paused, seemed to grope; he'd lost his train of thought.

I said nothing, merely waited, blocking my mother by stretching out an arm when she came near.

"Even now you mock me," Unferth whispered. I had an uneasy feeling he was close to tears. If he wept, I was not sure I could control myself. His pretensions to uncommon glory were one thing. If for even an instant he pretended to misery like mine...

"You think me a witless fool," he whispered. "Oh, I heard what you said. I caught your nasty insinuations. 'I thought heroes were only in poetry,' you said. Implying that what I've made of myself is mere fairytale stuff." He raised his head, trying to glare at me, but his blind stare was in the wrong direction, following my mother's pacing. "Well, it's not, let me tell you." His lips trembled and I was certain he would cry, I would have to destroy him from pure disgust, but he held it. He let his head fall again and sucked for air. A little of his voice came back, so that he no longer had to whisper but could bring out his words in a slightly reedy whine. "Poetry's trash, mere clouds of words, comfort to the hopeless. But this is no cloud, no syllabled phantom that stands here shaking its sword at you."

I let the slight exaggeration pass.

But Unferth didn't. "Or lies here," he said. "A hero is not afraid to face cruel truth." That reminded him, apparently, of what he'd meant to say before. "You talk of heroism as noble language, dignity. It's more than that, as my coming here has proved. No man above us will ever know whether Unferth died here or fled to the hills like a coward. Only you and I and God will know the truth. That's inner heroism."

"Hmm," I said. It was not unusual, of course, to hear them contradict themselves, but I would have liked it if he'd stuck to one single version, either that they would know and sing his tragedy or that they wouldn't. So it would have been in a poem, surely, if Unferth were a character, good or evil, heroic or not. But reality, alas, is essentially shoddy. I let out a sigh.

He jerked his head up, shocked. "Does nothing have value in your horrible ruin of a brain?"

I waited. The whole shit-ass scene was his idea, not mine.

I saw the light dawning in his eyes. "I understand," he said. I thought he would laugh at the bottomless stupidity of my cynicism, but while the laugh was still starting at the corners of his eyes, another look came, close to fright. "You think me deluded. Tricked by my own walking fairytale. You think I came without a hope of winning-- came to escape indignity by suicide!" He did laugh now, not amused: sorrowful and angry. The laugh died quickly. "I didn't know how deep the pool was," he said. "I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. It's all a hero asks for."

I sighed. The word "hero" was beginning to grate. He was an idiot. I could crush him like a fly, but I held back.

"Go ahead, scoff," he said, petulant. "Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile."

I nodded in the darkness. "And breaks up the boredom," I said.

He raised up on his elbows, and the effort of it made his shoulders shake. "One of us is going to die tonight. Does that break up your boredom?"

"It's not true," I said. "A few minutes from now I'm going to carry you back to Hrothgar, safe and sound. So much for poetry."

"I'll kill myself," he whispered. He shook violently now.

"Up to you," I answered reasonably, "but you'll admit it may seem at least a trifle cowardly to some."

His fists closed and his teeth clenched; then he relaxed and lay flat.

I waited for him to find an answer. Minutes passed. It came to me that he had quit. He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, had struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it, and was disappointed. One could sympathize.
He was asleep.

I picked him up gently and carried him home. I laid him at the door of Hrothgar's meadhall, still asleep, killed the two guards so I wouldn't be misunderstood, and left.

He lives on, bitter, feebly challenging my midnight raids from time to time (three times this summer), crazy with shame that he alone is always spared, and furiously jealous of the dead. I laugh when I see him. He throws himself at me, or he cunningly sneaks up behind, sometimes in disguise--a goat, a dog, a sickly old woman--and I roll on the floor with laughter. So much for heroism. So much for the harvest-virgin. So much, also, for the alternative visions of blind old poets and dragons.

SpaceOddity

01-20-2008, 07:12 AM

Duras...

"that she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion."

"In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?"

"they look at each other, endlessly, endlessly, decide that it's impossible to describe, to give an account of those moments, of that evening whose veritable depth and density they, and they alone, are familiar with, that night whose hours they had seen slip by, one by one, until the last had gone"

"she had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become"

"When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them."

"she can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes."

SpaceOddity

01-20-2008, 07:23 AM

Peter Pan...

"Stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was."

"He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."

That was the last time the girl Wendy ever saw him. For a little while longer she tried for his sake not to have growing pains; and she felt she was untrue to him when she got a prize for general knowledge. But, the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys. Wendy was grown up. You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.
All the boys were grown up and done for by this time; so it is scarcely worth while saying anything more about them. You may see the twins and Nibs and Curly any day going to an office, each carrying a little bag and an umbrella. Michael is an engine driver. Slightly married a lady of title, and so he became a lord. You see that judge in a wig coming out at the iron door? That used to be Tootles. The bearded man who doesn't know any story to tell his children was once John.

*bawls*

*swears vendetta against age*

SpaceOddity

01-20-2008, 07:38 AM

Wuthering Heights...

"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water and altered the colour of my mind"

"heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out"

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same"

"The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her."

"I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being"

"I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills."

"I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it."

*pines for Heathcliff* ;)

SpaceOddity

01-20-2008, 07:53 AM

Edith Wharton...

"They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets."

"It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now."

"There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you -I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you"

"What if 'niceness' carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness?"

"Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears."
"Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary - she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness."

"When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed."

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:05 PM

From Sartre's Nausea:

"I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other."

"I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present."

"I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day."

"I looked around me: the present, nothing but the present... Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them... there is nothing."

"My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop... At this very moment—it’s frightful—if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing."

"'I was just thinking,’ I tell him, laughing, 'that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.'"

"Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things."

"There were those idiots who came to tell you about will-power and struggle for life. Hadn’t they ever seen a beast or a tree?"

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:10 PM

From Joyce's Portrait of the Artist:

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...

His father told him that story."

From Pessoa's Book of Disquiet:

"The monotony, the dull sameness of the same days, the absence of difference between today and yesterday-- I hope things stay like that forever, and that I have my soul alert to enjoy the fly that amuses me by flying by chance before my eyes, the peal of laughter that floats up from the street, the vast sense of liberation that it's time to shut up the office, the infinite repose of a day off."

"There are creatures who suffer for hours and hours because they cannot be the figures in paintings or on playing cards. There are souls on whom not being able to be people from the Middle Ages weighs like a malediction. I've had that problem. But not today. I've gone beyond it. But it does pain me, for example, not to be able to dream of two kings in different kingdoms belonging, for example, to universes with different kinds of space and time. Not having achieved this truly saddens me."

From Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway:

"Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute, with the blood red nostrils."

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:14 PM

From Dicken's Great Expectations:

"I therefore hit out at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, 'Aha! Would you?' and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled within my limited experience...
He fell to pulling off, not only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once light-hearted, businesslike, and bloodthirsty...
My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life, as when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back...
But he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with a great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again, looking up at me out of a black eye.
His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down; but, he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made me believe he really was going to do for me at last."

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:19 PM

From Camus' The Stranger:

Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."

From Heller's Catch-22:

"'You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you’re at war and might get your head blown off any second.'
'I more than resent it, sir. I’m absolutely incensed.'
'You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate.'
'Consciously, sir, consciously,' Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. 'I hate them consciously.'"

"Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out... Here was God’s plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared– liver, lungs, kidney, ribs, stomach and bits of stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch...
'I'm cold,' Snowden whimpered. 'I'm cold'
'There, there,' Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. 'There, there.'
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
'I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold'
There, there,' said Yossarian.'There, there.'"

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:26 PM

From Borges' Pierre Menard:

"Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes...

It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the ‘ingenious layman’ Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality."

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:30 PM

From Hamsun's Hunger:

"Being in the mood to surmount difficulties, I decided upon a three-part monograph about philosophical cognition. Needless to say, I would have an opportunity to deal a deathblow to Kant’s sophisms."

"In order to seem calm and indifferent I waved my arms absurdly, spat at the ground and cocked my nose in the air, but it was no use."

"These people that I met—how lightly and merrily they bobbed their bright faces, dancing their way through life as though it were a ballroom! There was no sign of grief in a single eye that I saw, no burden on any shoulder, not even a cloudy thought maybe, or a little secret suffering in any of those happy hearts. While I, who walked right beside these people, young and freshly blown, had already forgotten the very look of happiness! Coddling myself with this thought, I found a terrible injustice had been done to me... When I pondered this, it became more and more incomprehensible to me why precisely I should have been chosen as a guinea pig for a caprice of divine grace. To skip a whole world in order to get to me—that was a rather odd way of doing things... I discovered the weightiest objections to the Lord’s arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everybody else’s sake... From that day in May when my adversities had begun I could clearly perceive a gradually increasing weakness, I seemed to have become too feeble to steer or guide myself where I wanted to go... My whole being was at this moment filled with the utmost anguish; even my arms ached, and I could barely endure carrying them in the usual way."

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:32 PM

From Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:

“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.”

“His moans acquire a kind of nastiness, they become mean and malicious, and continue day and night. And yet he himself knows that his moans won’t do him any good at all; he knows better than anyone else that he is merely lacerating and irritating both himself and others to no good purpose; he knows that even the audience, for whose benefit he is exerting himself, and his whole family are sick to death of listening to him, that they no longer believe him and know that he could moan quite differently, more simply, without all those flourishes and trills, and that he’s merely indulging himself out of spite and meanness.”

“I remained obstinately silent. I was, of course, the chief sufferer because I was aware of the revolting meanness of my vicious stupidity, and yet I could not control myself.”

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:55 PM

Wuthering Heights...
Although I appreciated its absolute devotion to its characters, I remember thinking that the over-the-top melodrama of Wuthering Heights was a bit... well, over the top. But those quotes are pretty intriguing. Maybe I should give the book another perusal.

Melville

01-20-2008, 05:58 PM

- from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIII
Which translation is that? I definitely read the wrong one.

SpaceOddity

01-20-2008, 06:25 PM

From Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:

I liked...

"We are born dead, and we are becoming more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it."

Benny Profane

01-20-2008, 06:43 PM

From Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon:

"You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams, or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine." It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible."

SpaceOddity

01-20-2008, 06:50 PM

We...

"It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about then simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today."

"to be original is to be in some way distinct from others. Hence, to be original is to violate equality. And that which in the language of the ancients was called 'being banal' is with us merely the fulfillment of our duty."

Wryan

01-21-2008, 04:58 AM

A Night at the Opera (Wood) - 4
The Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick) - 7

/bawls for ugly Opera score and "meh" Success score.

SpaceOddity

01-21-2008, 07:03 AM

All Men are Mortal...

"For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here."

"There was no other land for me but this planet where I felt I no longer belonged. ... the years that would stretch out endlessly before me would be years of exile. All my clothes would be costumes and my life a perpetual play."

"If you were mortal I'd go on living in you until the end of the world, because for me your death would be the end of the world. Instead, I'm going to die in a world that will never end."

SpaceOddity

01-21-2008, 07:17 AM

Orlando

"Heaven has mercifully decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist"

"what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?"

"A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one."

"some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six"

Duncan

01-21-2008, 07:55 AM

From Dostoevsky's White Nights:

"And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him."

From Ovid's Metamorphoses:

"The Golden Age was first created, without any avenger
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.
Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read
On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear
The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger.
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world,
And mortals knew no shores but their own."

"There was eternal Spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."

From Thoreau's Walden:

"Talk of Heaven! ye disgrace Earth."

From Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

"When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible - such descent I call beauty.
And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest.
Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you."

From Ginsberg's Transcription of Organ Music:

"The music descends, as does the tall bending stalk of the heavy blossom, because it has to, to stay alive, to continue to the last drop of joy.
The world knows the love that's in its breast as in the flower, the suffering lonely world.
The Father is merciful."

From The Koran, sura 81:

"When the sun ceases to shine; when the stars fall and the mountains are blown away; when camels big with young are left untended and the wild beasts are brought together; when the seas are set alight and men's souls are reunited; when the infant girl, buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain; when the records of men's deeds are laid open, and heaven is stripped bare; when Hell burns fiercely, and Paradise is brought near: then each soul shall learn what it has done."

Kurosawa Fan

01-21-2008, 02:16 PM

From Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment:

"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"

Kurosawa Fan

01-21-2008, 02:31 PM

From Me Talk Pretty One Day:

"A week after putting her to sleep, I received Neil's ashes in a forest green can. She'd never expressed any great interest in the outdoors, so I scattered her remains on the carpet and then vacuumed her back up. The cat's death struck me as the end of an era. It was, of course, the end of her era, but with the death of a pet there's always that urge to string black crepe over an entire ten- or twenty-year period. The end of my safe college life, the last of my thirty-inch waist, my faltering relationship with my first real boyfriend: I cried for it all and wondered why so few songs were written about cats. My mother sent a consoling letter along with a check to cover the cost of the cremation. In the left-hand carner, on the line marked MEMO, she'd written, 'Pet Burning.'"

Fezzik

01-21-2008, 08:17 PM

Both from Beach Music by Pat Conroy...

"...I learned from those evening recitals that music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."

"Without music, life is a journey through a desert that has yet to hear the rumor of God."

Lucky

01-21-2008, 08:25 PM

I really like that quote from C&P, K-Fan. That's what I always think of first when I reflect on the novel.

Since I know quite a few of you read this the past year, these are all from Fifth Business:

"This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries."

"There's just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no good to be afraid."

"Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill defined though it was, that a serious study of any important body of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man."

"Mankind cannot endure perfection; it stifles him."

"God is subtle, but He is not cruel."

"Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom."

"People want to marvel at something, and the whole spirit of our time is not to let them do it. They will pay to do it, if you make it good and marvellous for them. Didn't anybody learn anything from the war? Hitler said, 'Marvel at me, wonder at me, I can do what others can't.' --and they fell over themselves to do it."

"This is the revenge of the unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly it makes a fool of you."

"When love strikes the successful middle-aged they bring a weight of personality and a resolution to it that makes the romances of the young seem timid and bungling."

"Whom the gods hate they keep forever young."

SpaceOddity

01-21-2008, 10:37 PM

Since I know quite a few of you read this the past year, these are all from Fifth Business:

I liked:

"It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way"

"the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selfs were wearing thin"

SpaceOddity

01-21-2008, 10:43 PM

Harriet Hume by Rebecca West

"works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously"

"Each of us has always hoped that a stranger would come who would scatter holy water on the image of the other and lay it for ever"

"It is other things as well as a flower. It is a phrase in a sonata by Mozart, which I like to think he has given me for a keepsake ... And it is something I felt about you once"

SpaceOddity

01-21-2008, 10:47 PM

I'm kinda surprised Torture Garden hasn't appeared. *obliges* ;)

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world."

Mysterious Dude

01-23-2008, 06:12 AM

Which translation is that? I definitely read the wrong one.

The one I read was from Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor ld) series. I don't know who did it, but I definitely found it superior to other translations.

megladon8

01-23-2008, 06:56 AM

"I don't know if now, having lived and died the life of a man, I can write about little-boy love, but remembering it now, it seems the cleanest pain I've known.
Love without desire, or conditions, or limits - a pure and radiant glow in the heart that could make me giddy and sad and glorious all at once. Where does it go? Why, in all their experiments, did the Magi never try to capture that purity in a bottle? Perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps it is lost to us when we become sexual creatures, and no magic can bring it back. Perhaps I only remember it because I spent so long trying to understand the love that Joshua felt for everyone."

-Christopher Moore (from "Lamb")

SpaceOddity

01-23-2008, 10:36 AM

From Sartre's Nausea:

Some Sartre I liked...

"I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don't know how many consciences"

"I enjoy saying no, always No, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes"

"I am outliving myself ... I used to be capable of rather wonderful passions. All that is over, of course."

"Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death. Towards this death, which may be my own, I am drawn irrevocably."

SpaceOddity

01-23-2008, 11:04 AM

From The Mandarins (de Beauvoir)

"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal."

"The trouble is the only personal things in an experience are the errors, the delusions. Once you've understood that, you no longer feel like telling about it."

"Neither had she changed. She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust."

"I'd rather die of suffering, than ever sneeringly scatter the ashes of my past to the winds."

"Surviving one's own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory."

"There's only one sickness that really amounts to anything - being yourself, just you."

SpaceOddity

01-23-2008, 11:11 AM

From Doctor Zhivago

"I'll write your memory into an image of infinate pain and grief. I'll stay here till this is done, then I too will go."

"The great majority of us are bound to live a life of constant systematic duplicity. your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike ...your soul exists in time and space and is inside you. You can't keep violating it with impunity."

"You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another."

"The root of all evil to come was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people's notions."

SpaceOddity

01-24-2008, 08:15 AM

From The Passion of New Eve (Angela Carter)

"we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms."

"You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish."

"This world had never been sufficient for you; to go beyond the boundaries of flesh had been your occupation and so you had become nothing, a wraith that only left traces of silver powder on the hands that clutched helplessly at your perpetual vanishings"

"Suffering was her vocation. She suffered exquisitely until suffering became demoted then she retired"

"eyes that delighted and appalled me since, in their luminous and perplexed depths, I saw all the desolation of America, or of more than that - of all estrangement, our loneliness, our abandonment."

"your face an invitation to necrophilia, face of an angel upon a tombstone"

"all you signified was false! Your existence was only notational; you were a piece of pure mystification"

SpaceOddity

01-24-2008, 08:27 AM

Miracle of the Rose (Genet)

"the sadness of his leaving soon lost its original meaning and became a kind of chronic melancholy, like a misty autumn, and that autumn is the basic season of my life"

"He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up."

"names alone will remain in the future, divested of their objects"

"Their love, my love for them persists within me"

"I shall try to tell as well as I can what it is about these handsome thugs that charms me, the element that is both light and darkness... the living apparent synthesis of Evil and the Beautiful."

"I need only evoke my childhood loves to redescend to the depths of time"

SpaceOddity

01-24-2008, 08:37 PM

From Portrait of a Lady

"You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional."

"in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet were still upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where it's very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of it's smallness."

"She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more - this idea was as sweet as a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land. ... but Isabel recognised, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end."

"For them there could be no condonement, no compromise, no easy forgetfulness, no formal readjustment. They had attempted only one thing, but that one thing was to have been exquisite. Once they missed it nothing else would do; there was no conceivable substitute for that success."

"What does it lead to? Well, how can you penetrate futurity? How can you tell what lies ahead? If it's a pleasant road I don't care where it leads. I like the road; I like the dear old asphalte."

"She envied the security of valuble pieces which change by no hair's breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty."

SpaceOddity

01-25-2008, 07:08 AM

From East of Eden

"Our species is the only creative species, and it has one creative instrument, the creative mind and spirit of a man. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosphy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extent it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war ... the free roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken."

"When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking.... Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. ... And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man."

*siezes opportunity for pic of James Dean* ;)

http://www.classicdriver.com/upload/images/_de/2864/img02.jpg

SpaceOddity

01-27-2008, 10:59 AM

The Little Prince

"I wonder," he said, "whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again"

"If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers . . ."

"I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds."

"What a queer planet!" he thought. "It is altogether dry, and altogether pointed, and altogether harsh and forbidding. And the people have no imagination. They repeat whatever one says to them . . . On my planet I had a flower; she always was the first to speak . . ."

"At a glance I can distinguish China from Arizona. If one gets lost in the night, such knowledge is valuable."

"What moves me so deeply, about this little prince who is sleeping here, is his loyalty to a flower--the image of a rose that shines through his whole being like the flame of a lamp, even when he is asleep . . ."

http://www.generationterrorists.com/graphics/the_little_prince_046.jpg

"This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. It is the same as that on the preceding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory. It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared. Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognize it in case you travel some day to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back."

Sycophant

01-30-2008, 07:59 AM

Methinks I really need to read The Little Prince. My only knowledge of it comes from an old anime that I have terribly fond memories of.

From Almost Transparent Blue (which I just read tonight, so I don't know how long I'll hold onto this one, but it and its whole segment impressed me):

"I remembered a friend who'd died of a bad liver, and what he'd always said. Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my bell's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again. It's hard to take, sure, but I feel sort of peaceful. Because it's always hurt ever since I was born."

lovejuice

01-30-2008, 11:29 PM

"This is the revenge of the unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly it makes a fool of you."

yup! after more than three years i still remember this one.

dreamdead

01-31-2008, 08:21 PM

From Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried:

"Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."

Fezzik

02-01-2008, 01:51 AM

Finally found the passage I'd been looking for. This was the first book I ever read on the recommendation of a teacher and it changed the way I read books.

From Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis:

"After them came a number of others armed with harpoons and apparently guarding two creatures which he did not recognize. The light was behind them as they entered through the two farthest monoliths. They were much shorter than any animal he had yet seen on Malacandra, and he gathered that they were bipeds, though the lower limbs were so thick and sausage-like that he hesitated to call them legs, The bodies were a little narrower at the top than at the bottom so as to be very slightly pear-shaped, and the heads were neither round like those of the hrossa, nor long like those of the sorns, but almost square. They stumped along on narrow heavy-looking feet which they seemed to press into the ground with unnecessary violence. And now their faces were becoming visible as masses of lumped and puckered flesh of variegated colour fringed in some bristly, dark substance...Suddenly, with an indescribable change of feeling, he realized that he was looking at men. The two prisoners were Weston and Devine and he, for one privileged moment, had seen the human form with almost Malacandrian eyes."

SpaceOddity

02-01-2008, 09:43 AM

From Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis:

I liked...

"He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness."

Melville

02-01-2008, 08:04 PM

From The Brothers Karamazov:

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!

...

I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony... I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

Wryan

02-01-2008, 10:35 PM

The Little Prince

"All the stars are a-bloom with flowers"

That would make a good album or song title. :)

D_Davis

02-07-2008, 04:02 AM

Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man

Run, or I'll miss the Paris Pneumatique and that exquisite girl with her flower face and figure of passion. There's time if I run. But that isn't the Guard before the gate. Oh Christ! The Man With No Face. Looking. Looming. Silent. Don't scream. Stop screaming...

But I'm not screaming. I'm singing on a stage of sparkling marble while the music soars and the lights burn. But there's no one out there in the amphitheater. A great shadowed pit...empty except for one spectator. Silent. Looming. The Man With No Face.

Theodore Sturgeon - To Marry Medusa

I - and “I,” now, think as I work of what is happening - a different kind of thinking than any I have ever known...if thinking was seeing, then all my life I have thought in a hole in the ground, and now I think on a mountaintop. To think of any question is to think of the answer, if the answer exists in the experience of any other part of “I.” If I wonder why I was chosen to make that leap from the car, using all my strength and all its speed to carry me exactly to that point in space where the descending machines would be, then the wonder doesn't last long enough to be called that: I know why I was chosen, on the instant of wondering.

transmogrifier

02-10-2008, 02:28 PM

When the three fools found the communal kitchen, whose main job was to make lunch for workers in the slaughterhouse, everybody had gone home but one woman who had been waiting for them impatiently. She was a war widow. So it goes. She had her hat and coat on. She wanted to go home, too, even though there wasn't anybody there. Her white gloves were laid out side by side on the zinc counter top.

She had two big cans of soup for the Americans. It was simmering over low fires on the gas range. She had stacks of loaves of black bread, too.

She asked Gluck if he wasn't awfully young to be in the army. He admitted that he was.

She asked Edgar Derby if he wasn't awfully old to be in the army. He said he was.

She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didn't know. He was just trying to keep warm.

'All the real soldiers are dead,' she said. It was true. So it goes.

Benny Profane

03-10-2008, 12:37 AM

"Does Brittania, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allowed Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, the Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."

-- Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon.

Milky Joe

03-10-2008, 01:23 AM

"... It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You'll know Brando when you watch him, and you'll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type leaning back on his chair's rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used. With the overclumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life's grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn't understand him, is what's ruined her for everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with a broiler door? It's carnage, Jim, it's to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it's tribute to this slouching slob-type she loved as he roared by. Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man's quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects. The way he'd oh so clearly practiced a chair's back-leg tilt over and over. The way he studied objects with a welder's eye for those strongest centered seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support. She never ... never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly he'd no need for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless way he actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own body. The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling. And no one ... and she never understood that. Sour sodding grapes indeed. You can't envy someone who can be that way. Respect, maybe. Maybe wistful respect, at the very outside. She never saw that Brando was playing the equivalent of high-level quality tennis across sound stages all over both coasts, Jim, is what he was really doing. Jim, he moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player's dictum: touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you. I know you don't understand. Yet. I know that goggle-eyed stare. I know what it means all too well, son. It's no matter. You will. Jim, I know what I know.

I'm predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great. You will be the real thing. I know I haven't taught you to play yet. I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know. It doesn't affect my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today you are starting, and within a very few years I know all too well you will be able to beat me out there, and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It'll be out of a sort of selfless pride, an obliterated father's terrible joy. I feel it Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child's body in the chair so it's at the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book's stiff bend. You do it unconsciously. You have no idea. But I watch, very closely. Don't ever think I don't, son."
--infinite jest

Duncan

03-10-2008, 01:33 AM

Benny Profane

03-10-2008, 02:33 AM

Awesome.

"What Machine is it," young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, "that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro' another Day, another Year,-- as thro' an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight...we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,-- we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop...gather'd dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver,...no Horses,...only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity..."

Mason & Dixon.

SpaceOddity

05-01-2008, 09:18 PM

"Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectual mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return."

*revives thread*

Melville

05-02-2008, 01:54 PM

Where's that quote from?

SpaceOddity

05-02-2008, 03:08 PM

Where's that quote from?

Sorry, I forgot protocol. *away too long*

Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker.

SpaceOddity

05-10-2008, 11:10 AM

"The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition."

Les Enfants Terribles

trotchky

05-11-2008, 06:10 AM

A fly would settle and walk in the vicinity of her navel or explore her tender pale areolas. She tried to catch it in her fist (Charlotte's method) and then would turn to the column Let's Explore Your Mind.
"Let's explore your mind. Would sex crimes be reduced if children obeyed a few don'ts? Don't play around public toilets. Don't take candy or rides from strangers. If picked up, mark down the license of the car."
". . . and the brand of the candy," I volunteered.
She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); and this was a good day, mark, O reader!
"If you don't have a pencil, but are old enough to read -"
"We," I quip-quoted, "medieval mariners, have placed in this bottle -"
"If," she repeated, "you don't have a pencil, but are old enough to read and write - this is what the guy means, isn't it, you dope - scratch the number somehow on the roadside."
"With your little claws, Lolita."

SpaceOddity

05-11-2008, 07:16 AM

I liked this passage:

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions...

megladon8

05-11-2008, 08:23 PM

From "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon...

"No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine."

Benny Profane

08-15-2008, 06:28 PM

"At the window she gazed out toward the river, seeing nothing but fog. A hand touched her spine, exactly in that spot every man she ever knew had been able to find, sooner or later. She straightened up, squeezing her shoulder blades together, moving her breasts taut and suddenly visible toward the window. She could see his reflection watching their reflection. She turned. He was blushing. Crew cut, suit, Harris tweed. "Say, you are new," she smiled. I am Esther."

He blushed and was cute. "Brad," he said. "I'm sorry I made you jump."

She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect, why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45 degree angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes."

Thomas Pynchon, V

Kurosawa Fan

08-15-2008, 06:45 PM

Wow. That's wonderful. Is V. easily accessible? Is most of the book as straight-forward as that?

Duncan

08-15-2008, 07:31 PM

Wow. That's wonderful. Is V. easily accessible? Is most of the book as straight-forward as that?

The thing about Pynchon is that he often vears from one subject to another without warning, and in doing so his style can radically change as well. He also has a habit of writing sentences so complex that you have to read them two or three times to figure out what modifies what. That happens more in Gravity's Rainbow than V., though. I could see you liking V., but I wouldn't call it easily accessible.

Kurosawa Fan

08-15-2008, 07:35 PM

Well, I read and loved The Sound and the Fury, so I can handle a difficult read, but for some reason lately I just haven't been as compelled to pick something up if it's abstract and hard to break into. I'll grab V. the next time I'm at the store.

Benny Profane

08-15-2008, 07:50 PM

Wow. That's wonderful. Is V. easily accessible? Is most of the book as straight-forward as that?

V. is kinda divided into two parts, much like the shape of the letter "V" where V represents the double-sidedness of everything, this being a very major theme of the novel. (V represents a lot more than that, but you can see why he chose this particular letter).

The accessible half of the novel deals with Benny Profane in NYC with the Whole Sick Crew and the more frustrating narratives are told by Herbert Stencil whose stories come from colonial Africa all the way through war-time Europe in search of the elusive V. These chapters alternate, for the most part.

It's definitely readable, and there are guides like www.pynchonwiki.com to help you through the confusing parts, but no, it is not always as straight-forward as the quote above.

Just read it you big baby. I'm batting 1.000 so far.

Duncan

08-22-2008, 08:31 PM

"When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, 'Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.'

I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.

The world is at fault, not because it is inherently good or bad or anything but what it is, but because it doesn't prepare us in anything but body to get along with.

Our souls it leaves to whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less Brownian (your phrase) pilgrimage between the cord-cutting ceremony and the time they slide you down the chute into the oven, while the guy on the Wurlitzer plays Aba Daba Honeymoon because you had once told somebody it was the nadir of all American expression; only they didn't know what nadir meant but it must be good because of the vehemence with which you expressed yourself."

- Thomas Pynchon in a letter to his college roommate.

Benny Profane

11-25-2008, 03:25 PM

"What vast forces of good and evil have brought me to this?"

-- V. Woolf, The Waves.

Duncan

11-27-2008, 04:34 PM

"All is avowed, and as I smote I stand
With foot set firm upon a finished thing!
I turn not to denial: thus I wrought
So that he could nor flee nor ward his doom.
Even as the trammel hems the scaly shoal,
I trapped him with inextricable toils,
The ill abundance of a baffling robe;
Then smote him, once, again--and at each wound
He cried aloud, then as in death relaxed
Each limb and sank to earth; and as he lay,
Once more I smote him, with the last third blow,
Sacred to Hades, saviour of the dead.
And thus he fell, and as he passed away,
Spirit with body chafed; each dying breath
Flung from his breast swift bubbling jets of gore,
And the dark sprinklings of the rain of blood
Fell upon me; and I was fain to feel
That dew-- not sweeter is the rain of heaven
To cornland, when the green sheath teems with grain."

- Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Benny Profane

11-30-2008, 06:08 PM

"Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room."

The Waves

Kurosawa Fan

12-04-2008, 06:47 PM

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Barbed wire again gave way to the familiar parade of more beige, prefab, cinderblock office machine distributors, sealant makers, bottled gas works, fastener factories, warehouses, and whatever. Sunday had sent them all into silence and paralysis, all but an occasional real estate office or truck stop. Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillnes and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape; it wasn't. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

Both from different chapters of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Fucking beautiful. I wish he'd write an entire novel just like this.

D_Davis

12-04-2008, 11:01 PM

I feel so stupid when I read Pynchon. And I am totally not stupid - quite the contrary really. I just can't crack the rhythm of his prose; I never know what he is saying. It's confusing. It's like washing my face with water that isn't wet; I feel like I'm splashing the water on my face, but it remains dry. It's frustrating.

And it's not that I don't like a challenge, or enjoy experimental novels and prose. I mean, JG Ballard is one of my favorite authors, and his novel The Atrocity Exhibition is considered one of the seminal works of experimental fiction.

But when I read Ballard - I get it, both intellectually and emotionally.

Reading Pynchon, to me, is like reading something in a different language. And I don't see the beauty in it that so many people see. I see only words.

Crazy.

Malickfan

12-05-2008, 03:38 AM

Columbus landed in the second grade for me, and my teacher made me swallow the names of the boats one by one until in the bathtub of my summer vacation I opened my mouth and they came back out-Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria-and bobbed on the surface of the water like toys. I clapped my hand over my mouth once, Indian style, then looked up, for my mother, so she could pull the plug, stop all this, but when I opened my mouth again it was just blood and blood and blood.

-Bleed Into Me from Stephen Graham Jones

lovejuice

05-09-2009, 09:39 PM

let's revive this quote thread. but to make it's more interesting, here's the new rule. you cannot use google or internet. i am not interested in "famous quotations" but ones that are actually "memorable." something that had impact on your life.

from tom clancy's the cardinal of the kremlin

(describing a physicist) "...he's very smart. so smart that he realizes there is somebody smarter than he's."

Dead & Messed Up

05-10-2009, 09:44 PM

"We all die in time," the gunslinger said. "It's not just the world that moves on." He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. "But we will be magnificent."

Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

Duncan

05-11-2009, 12:58 AM

"That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything."
- William Gaddis

Benny Profane

05-11-2009, 11:33 PM

"Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos..."

- William Gaddis, J R

Thirdmango

05-12-2009, 01:12 AM

"I just know there's something dark in me, I hide it. I certainly don't talk about it, but it's there, always. This dark passenger, when he's driving I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness, I don't fight him, I don't want to. He's all I've got. Nothing else could love me, not even, especially not me. Or is that just a lie the dark passenger tells me, because lately there are these moments when I feel... connected to something else, someone, and it's like the mask is slipping, and things... people... that never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter, it scares the hell out of me."

Dexter Season 2

Duncan

05-12-2009, 03:18 AM

Benny Profane

05-12-2009, 03:28 AM

That's a good one. Who says that? Gibbs?

Right. Page 20.

Milky Joe

05-14-2009, 05:56 AM

"What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
- Roberto Bolaño

Benny Profane

05-27-2009, 02:06 PM

Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movement of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars.

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Hugh_Grant

05-28-2009, 03:44 PM

"Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he hadn't lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's face, it came to me what we were both seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches."
James Baldwin--"Sonny's Blues"

Benny Profane

07-28-2009, 01:30 PM

"Around them travelers drank wine out of cheap Murano souvenirs, clapped shoulders, brushed away leaf and petal debris from last-minute bouquets, argued over who had failed to pack what....Dally was supposed to be past the melancholy of departure, no longer held by its gravity, yet, as if she could see the entire darkened reach of what lay ahead, she wanted now to step close, embrace him, this boy, for as long as it took to establish some twofold self, renounce the somber fate he seemed so sure of. He was gazing at her as if having just glimpsed the simple longitude of what he was about to do, as if desiring to come into some shelter, though maybe not her idea of it...so, like terms on each side canceling, they only stood there, curtains of Venetian mist between them, among the steam-sirens and clamoring boatmen, and both young people understood a profound opening of distinction between those who would be here, exactly here day after tomorrow to witness the next gathering before passage, and those stepping off the night precipice of this journey, who would never be here, never exactly here, again."

- Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon.

Absolutely beautiful.

trotchky

08-05-2009, 08:48 AM

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

-one of my favorite opening lines, from donna tartt's the secret history

Skitch

08-05-2009, 12:00 PM

"I have 7,592 stones in my room. I have counted them many times."

"But have you named them yet?"

*cries*

:lol:

Benny Profane

08-05-2009, 03:48 PM

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane."

- John Greene, Looking for Alaska.

Not a book I've read, but someone showed me this quote and I liked it.

Milky Joe

08-14-2009, 11:08 PM

D_Davis

08-16-2009, 09:51 PM

One thing I like about Theodore Sturgeon is the rhythm of his prose - some of it really needs to be read aloud. Sometimes it reads more like verse in its rhythm:

From To Here and the Easel:

Shucks, Maestro! Get me a job in a sign shop. I'll sell everything else. Ad in the paper: for sale cheap, one set sable-tipped vesicles. One heart: ventricle, sinister; auricle, Delphic. Nine yards plumbing with hot and cold running commentaries, and a bucket of used carmine, suitable for a road-company Bizet-body.

Was a painter, will be a painter, ain't a painter. Make a song of that, Giles, and you can die crazy yelling it like Ravel chanting the Bolero, Ravel, unravel. Gile's last chants.

Ain't a painta, ain't a painta, ain't a painta pow! Ain't a painta, ain't a painta, ain't a painta now!

Duncan

08-31-2009, 09:55 PM

"-- O my sweet gold! why were we born so beautiful? That's why we're here, an alchemist and a priest, without blemishes, you and I. It's true? You've never seen a cross-eyed priest? an ordained amputee? No, never! By all that's ugly, it's done! He sat, pinching up folds on the back of his hand. -- Now, remember? Who was it, "gettato a mare," remember? an anchor tied to his neck? and thrown, caught by kelpies and martyred, remember? in the celestial sea. Here, maybe we're fished for."

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

People being fished for seems to come up pretty often in the book.

BuffaloWilder

09-09-2009, 11:58 PM

"Eve: All this riot and uproar, V... is this Anarchy? Is this the Land of Do-As-You-Please?

V: No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means "without leaders", not "without order". With anarchy comes an age or ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."

Alan Moore, V For Vendetta.

While I'm more of a democratic socialist (or social democrat) now, I still hold that V For Vendetta may be the book that has most influenced my political opinions just this side of Mr. Orwell, himself.

MadMan

09-22-2009, 09:54 PM

Not sure if this has been posted, but still:

"What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."

-Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Benny Profane

09-23-2009, 08:02 PM

so you want to be a writer? - Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.

Lasse

09-23-2009, 09:06 PM

Duncan

09-30-2009, 12:55 PM

My new favourite sentence ever:

"Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew, and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing--but is that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is a might-have-been which is more true than truth, from which the dreamer, waking, says not 'Did I but dream?' but rather says, indicts high heaven's very self with: 'Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?' "

- Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Duncan

02-11-2010, 02:19 AM

Donald Barthelme on the subject of nothing:

"And it is not the yellow curtains behind which fauns and astronauts embrace, behind which flesh crawls in all directions and flickertail squirrels fall upward into the trees. And death is not nothing and the cheering sections of consciousness ("Do not go gentle into that good night") are not nothing nor are holders of the contrary view ("Burning to be gone," says Beckett's Krapp, into his Sony). What can I tell you about the rape of Lucrece by the beastly nephew of proud Tarquin? Only this: the rapist wore a coat with raglan sleeves. Not much, but not nothing. Put it on the list. For an ampler account, see Shakespeare. And you've noted the anachronism, Lord Raglan lived long after the event, but errors, too, are not nothing. Put it on the list. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What a wonderful list! How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely and that the task will remain always before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail."

Duncan

02-11-2010, 02:24 AM

Barthelme again. From "A Manual for Sons"

The best way to approach a father is from behind. Thus if he chooses to hurl his javelin at you, he will probably miss. For in the act of twisting his body around, and drawing back his hurling arm, and sighting along the shaft, he will give you time to run, to make reservations for a flight to another country. To Rukmani, there are no fathers there. In that country virgin corn gods huddle together under a blanket of ruby chips and flexible cement, through the long wet Rukamanian winter, and in some way not known to us produce offspring. The new citizens are greeted with dwarf palms and certificates of worth, are led (or drawn on runnerless sleds) out into the zocalo, the main square of the country, and their augensheinlich parentages recorded upon a great silver bowl. Look! In the walnut paneling of the dining hall, a javelin. The paneling is wounded in a hundred places.

Benny Profane

08-01-2010, 03:57 PM

She watched him, his eminently intelligent wife. He pulled her closer to make the scrutiny stop, and feeling her head on his shoulder was reassuring. He was doomed to ambivalence and desire. A braver man, or a more cowardly one, would simply flee. A happier or more complacent man would stay and revel in the familiar, wrap it around him like an old bathrobe. He seemed to be none of those things, and could only deceive the people he loved, and then disappoint and worry them when they saw through him. There was a poem Meg had brought home from college, with the line "Both ways is the only way I want it." The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of a fool only wanted it one way?

- Maile Meloy

endingcredits

08-04-2010, 05:12 AM

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad...I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

Celine
Death on the Installment Plan.

Mara

08-04-2010, 03:38 PM

For Meg:

But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.

--Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Benny Profane

09-15-2010, 09:31 PM

"I'm saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed," Chip said. "I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant."

Denise closed one eye and opened the other very wide. Her open eye was like nearly black balsamic vinegar beading on white china. "If I grant that these are interesting issues," she said, "will you stop talking about them and come upstairs with me?"

- The Corrections

I am REALLY liking this one so far.

Duncan

10-07-2010, 08:29 AM

He was not surprised or disappointed. That which was missing only outlined that which was not. Their emptiness contained the entirety of what had been lived, and the certainties of how it ended, how it must end for each of us. Our last moment in a string of final moments, the last look you take backward before going forward to the light: that pinprick of dawn, the horizon turning vertical, the sun and the moon in the same sky. The rhythm of a breath we've known always and the terminal sequence of heartbeats. The concave heavens and the convex earth. And in the curve between, the dangling end of a rope, that long cord of life, its loose ends frayed, its individual sinews, moments insignificant on their own, woven together, for strength.

- Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

Chac Mool

10-16-2010, 08:08 PM

I can think of little 20th century English prose as passionate, powerful or as deserving to be read out loud as Cormac McCarthy's:

(read them out loud!)

From "All The Pretty Horses":

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

There are descriptions in this one that take your breath away:

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

"Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world."

"While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned."

"She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal."

"What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise."

In contrast, the bleakness of Blood Meridian:

"They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea."

"They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood."

"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."

"This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be."

"The Road" contains maybe his most pared-down prose since Outer Dark, the paragraph-long sentences of the Border trilogy traded in for short, harrowing passages:

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it." (The Road)

"From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned."

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." (The Road)

Kurosawa Fan

10-28-2010, 11:57 PM

From The Woman in the Dunes:

"In the final analysis, nothing had been of any avail, nothing had been finished. It was not he who had satisfied his desires, but apparently someone quite different, someone who had borrowed his body. Sex, of its nature, was not defined by a single, individual body but by the species. An individual, finished with his squalid act, must return at once to his former self. Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair. Those who were dying return to their deathbeds. How could he possibly be convinced that such trickery was passionate? Was there anything better in this passionate love than in commutation sex?"

Kurosawa Fan

11-21-2010, 05:57 PM

From Ragtime:

"Yet they were beautiful, he in his stately blond thoughtfulness, she a smaller, darker, more lithe being, with flash in her dark eyes and an almost military bearing. When they ran their hair lay back from their broad foreheads. Her feet were small, her brown hands were small. She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans. She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements. The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles. She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels. He had never gone without a meal. He had never been cold at night. He ran with his mind. He ran toward something. He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he. He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by coincidence. A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes."

Kurosawa Fan

12-04-2010, 02:25 AM

From Under the Volcano:

"Beyond the barranca the plains rolled up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuad, and for a moment they stood on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren't dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night."

Kurosawa Fan

12-04-2010, 03:34 AM

I am loving the hell out of Under the Volcano:

"He was not the person to be seen reeling about in the street. True he might lie down in the street, if need be, like a gentleman, but he would not reel."

Duncan

12-04-2010, 04:52 AM

I am loving the hell out of Under the Volcano: Cool. Great, great book.

Kurosawa Fan

12-04-2010, 05:16 AM

Cool. Great, great book.

That third chapter, where Consul is trying to abstain from liquor in front of Yvonne, was one of the most hypnotic I've ever read.

Duncan

12-04-2010, 06:34 AM

That third chapter, where Consul is trying to abstain from liquor in front of Yvonne, was one of the most hypnotic I've ever read.

Yeah, I remember that scene. Of course there's a sip here and a sip there... At times it can feel a bit formless, but all these seemingly haphazard details build and build up to the ending, which, for me, was like getting hit by a train.

Btw, I'm about halfway through The Master and Margarita, so we're sort of exchanging favourites. Loving it so far.

Kurosawa Fan

12-04-2010, 01:47 PM

Yeah, I remember that scene. Of course there's a sip here and a sip there... At times it can feel a bit formless, but all these seemingly haphazard details build and build up to the ending, which, for me, was like getting hit by a train.

Btw, I'm about halfway through The Master and Margarita, so we're sort of exchanging favourites. Loving it so far.

Awesome.

Under the Volcano was tough to get into at first, because there are so many odd breaks and incomplete thoughts, and it's the first book I'm reading on my Kindle, so at first I thought somehow it got screwed up and I wasn't getting all of the text. Quickly discovered all was well. Still, Lowry certainly doesn't waste time with exposition. He just kind of throws you to the wolves, in a manner of speaking. It can be a bit formless and rambling, but the prose is immaculate, and even when I'm not completely sure what's being talked about, it isn't frustrating because of that.

Chac Mool

12-04-2010, 05:21 PM

"...having at last regained my passion for reading, my literary instincts, completely cured, while the ship went on parting the waves, faring on through ocean twilight and bottomless Atlantic night, and, comfortably seated in that room with its fine wood, its smell of the sea and strong liquor, its smell of books and solitude, I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the Donizetti, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are, and then I stepped on to dry land, on to Italian soil, and I said goodbye to the Donizetti and set off on the roads of Europe, determined to do a good job, light-hearted, full of confidence, resolution, and faith." - Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

Coming back to this thread, I was again struck by Bolano's ability to obliquely describe the indescribable. The entire body of his work seems to be dedicated to the task of putting into words an ineffable feeling/thought/sentiment/concept, something that lies at the heart of his existence but that he is unable to describe. The clearest such attempt is "2666", with its circular structure and tangential stories seemingly centered around ...something... in the Sonora desert, but another interesting (and highly recommended) entry is "Last Evenings on Earth", a short-story collection that's full of these ephemeral, seemingly mundane but somehow momentous moments.

endingcredits

12-04-2010, 10:33 PM

From Growth of the Soil:

"In the wilds, every season has its wonders, but there is always something unchanging: the immense, heavy sound of heaven and earth, the sense of being surrounded on all sides, the darkness of the forest, the friendliness of the trees. Everything is heavy and soft, no thought is impossible there. North of Sellanraa there was a little tarn, a puddle, no bigger than an aquarium. Swimming around it were little baby fish which never grew any bigger; they lived and died there and were no use at all--goodness, no, not in the least. One evening when Inger stood there listening for the cowbells, she heard nothing else, because all was dead round about; but she did hear a song from the aquarium. It was so small, next to nothing, dying away. It was the little fishes' song.

They had this good fortune at Sellanraa, every fall and spring, in seeing the graylag geese sailing in formation over the wilderness and hearing their chatter high in the air--it sounded like someone talking in delirium. The world seemed to stand still for a moment, until the flock had disappeared. And the people, didn't they feel a certain weakness glide through them then? They went back to their work, but only after catching their breaths; something had spoken to them from the beyond.

They were surrounded by great marvels at all times, in winter the stars, often also the northern lights, a firmament of wings, a fire in God's house. Now and then--not often or usually, but now and then--they heard the thunder. This was mostly in the fall, when darkness put both man and beast in a solemn mood; the cattle grazing in the home pasture would huddle together and stand waiting. What did they hang their heads for? Were they waiting for the end? And what were the people in the wilds waiting for when they stood in the storm, their heads bowed?

Spring with its rush and frenzy and rapture, all right, but fall! It made you feel afraid of the dark and say your evening prayers, you became clairvoyant and heard omens. On the fall days people would go out and look for something--the men for a piece of wood to work, the women for animals, which were now running frantically after mushrooms--and come home with many secrets in their hearts. Had they inadvertently stepped on an ant and glued its hind part to the path, so that the forepart couldn't break free? Had they got too close to the ptarmigan's nest, arousing the hostility of a hissing, flapping mother? Not even those big boletus mushrooms that the cows go for are meaningless, human eyes do not turn white and empty from looking at them. Such a mushroom doesn't bloom or move, but has a weltering look; it is a monster, resembling a lung that sits there alive and naked, without a body."

endingcredits

12-07-2010, 01:10 AM

''I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one smiling face on Earth."

(Abraham Lincoln, letter to John T. Stuart, January 1841)

Benny Profane

01-10-2011, 03:54 PM

In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn’t want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he’s afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he’s about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren’t invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it’s because polite society was so small back then. I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn’t tell you.

- 2666

Chac Mool

01-15-2011, 04:33 PM

Here's an awesome passage from "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet", by David Mitchell:

"Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself."

Duncan

01-21-2011, 01:33 AM

In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the colour of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch

D_Davis

04-05-2011, 03:05 AM

He was beautiful in her bed.

When you care, when you love, when you treasure someone, you can watch the beloved in sleep as you watch everything, anything else--laughter, lips to a cup, a look even away from you; a stride, sun a-struggle lost in a hair-lock, a jest or a gesture--even stillness, even sleep.

She leaned close, all but breathless, and watched his lashes. Now, lashes are thick sometimes, curled, russet; these were all these, and glossy besides. Look closely--there where they curve lives light in tiny serried scimitars.

-Theodore Sturgeon, "When You Care, When You Love"

D_Davis

04-18-2011, 05:16 AM

"People must hurt each other, as inevitably as they breathe. Nothing can stop it. It's not enough to accept it. Accepting it is not enough, like sighing resignedly and putting on an attitude of long-suffering. Don't get to be too good at protecting yourself. You've got to be ripped to pieces for the one you love, again and again. That's doesn't prove anything but love, and its entitlements are a frailty that can't be held. But you will live even in that hell. The fire that hurts you gives off light like any other fire, that illuminates beautiful things, and is beautiful itself."

The Great Lover, Michael Cisco

Benny Profane

04-18-2011, 01:52 PM

D_Davis

04-18-2011, 02:08 PM

This is great.

Yeah - I've read that paragraph like 20 times in the last week. The entire book is just one brilliantly written moment after another. So good.

Benny Profane

04-29-2011, 03:27 PM

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou has been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine.

Moby Dick

D_Davis

07-30-2011, 12:02 AM

"A living thing should either create or destroy according to his capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen.... I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste."

The Circus of Dr. Lao, by Charles G. Finney

D_Davis

08-10-2011, 08:23 PM

I: I THINK I WILL DISMEMBER THE WORLD WITH MY HANDS

There is entwined seven-tentacled lightning. It is fire-masses, it is sheets, it is arms. It is seven-coloured writhing in the darkness, electric and alive. It pulsates, it sends, it sparkles it blinds!
It explodes!
It is seven murderous thunder-snakes striking in seven directions along the ground! Blindingly fast! Under your feet! Now! At you!
And you! You who glanced in here for but a moment, you are already snake-bit!
It is too late for you to withdraw. The damage is done to you. That faintly odd taste in your mouth, that smallest of tingles which you feel, they signal the snake-death.
Die a little. There is reason for it.Fourth Mansions, R.A. Lafferty

Benny Profane

09-10-2011, 02:32 PM

He gazed at his world through inward eyes and saw all his ideals and aspirations crumbling gray and ineffectual. He saw himself a fool. He had deluded himself with his ideals of humanity and liberality, but peace came after war, not out of reason. They would have to have fire and blood to make their union. So it had always been, and revolutions were made by men who conquered, or who died, and not by gray thought in gray minds. Peace came with a sword, right with a sword, justice and freedom with swords, and the struggle to them must be led by men with swords rather than by ineffectual men counseling reason and moderation.

- Warlock, Oakley Hall.

D_Davis

12-06-2011, 11:31 PM

“We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops---which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.”

William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

D_Davis

12-06-2011, 11:32 PM

D_Davis

01-05-2012, 08:59 PM

"You pigs, you. You goof like pigs, is all. You got the most in you and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you….”

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

Dead & Messed Up

01-06-2012, 04:06 AM

I know it's not poetry, but this snippet really hit me.

With dinosaurs...the stories will always be incomplete, ambiguous, under revision, and we'll always want to fill in the missing pieces. Because we can't help it. Seeing what's not really there - remembering and anticipating - is one of the things we do best. We are, I think, a perfect match, homo sapiens and dinosauria. Knowing man meets the partially known but unmistakably real, a factual footing for an ever-restless imagination. Wherever fate leads us, then, doubtless we'll continue to turn around now and again, glancing backward, taking the measure of who we are against everything that ever was.

And once upon a time, the dinosaur was. It actually was. That's where we began. It's where we'll begin again.

John Horner, Dinosaur Lives

Lucky

01-12-2012, 05:01 AM

I always highlight my books with the quotes/passages that particularly strike me. It's fun when you lend your books out to others and they get a taste of your reading experience, but mostly my books just sit around collecting dust afterwards. I want to start incorporating my highlights in this thread so that they are at least electronically perserved, and perhaps some of you will find some enjoyment from this.

These are all from Light Years by James Salter...

A bad shirt is like the story of a pretty girl who is single and one day she finds herself pregnant. It's not the end of life, but it's serious.

There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other.

Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers in the sun.

Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.

You've heard of blind storytellers. It's in darkness that myths are born.

Like those who have given everything - performers, athletic champions - they would sink into that apathy which only completion yields.

Consciously or unconsciously, we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we believe everything is right.

Detachment is what brings forth humor. It's a paradox. We're the only creatures that laugh, they say, and the more we laugh, the less we care.

How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

The only thing I'm afraid of are the words 'ordinary life.'

One of the last great realizations is that life will not be what you dreamed.

To understand everything is to love nothing.

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one's own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

Benny Profane

01-16-2012, 03:46 PM

These are all from Light Years by James Salter...

I swear I could've highlighted the entire book. I definitely highlighted/underlined this book more than any other by a significant margin.

Milky Joe

02-08-2012, 10:38 PM

—"O man, consider thyself! Here thou standest in the earnest perpetual strife of good and evil," Reverend Gwyon thundered the lines of William Law down upon the gray faces (whose owners, years later when he was locked up, defenseless, recalled it as the last truly Christian sermon he had ever read).
—"All nature is continually at work to bring forth the great redemption; the whole creation is travailing in pain and laborious working to be delivered from the vanity of time; and wilt thou be asleep? Everything thou hearest or seest says nothing, shows nothing to thee but what either eternal light or eternal darkness has brought forth; for as day and night divide the whole of our time, so heaven and hell divide all our thoughts, words, and actions. Stir which way thou wilt, do or design what thou wilt, thou must be an agent with the one or the other. Thou canst not stand still, because thou livest in the perpetual workings of temporal and eternal nature; if thou workest not with the good, the evil that is in nature carries thee along with it. Thou hast the height and depth of eternity in thee and therefore, be doing what thou wilt, either in the closet, the field, the shop or the church, thou art sowing that which grows and must be reaped in eternity."

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

D_Davis

07-04-2012, 08:01 PM

...providentially cool July day...to think I first began to see things pertaining to this in my dreams
the past present and future, time and space, the journey I became persuaded I was being expressed to take
celebrating the rite of a lifetime, the whole of a life? when I'm only already halfway through mine? but the whole of a life can also be the whole of everything me - even a genius doesn't contain all or most or perhaps any of the things he does or will do, he causes them in a flash, just exactly like a dream
he finds the time and place for the write, which is possible only because life as whole is a write, and, in an instant only he can select, only he is selected, and he dreams the whole of life and launches that dream entire, with himself, into whatever surpasses it and breaks it -

The Celebrant, Michael Cisco

Lucky

11-19-2012, 11:36 PM

I'm a couple books behind. I just realized how much of the year A Storm of Swords sapped from my reading life.

Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.

Everyone wants something, Alayne. And when you know what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him.

It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads.

Lucky

11-19-2012, 11:51 PM

The Last American Man - Elizabeth Gilbert

The only way modern America can begin to reverse its inherent corruption and greed and malaise is by feeling the rapture that comes from face-to-face encounters with what he calls "the high art and godliness of nature."

Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what?

People say I don't live in the real world, but it's modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they've stepped outside the natural circle of life.

Do you like chocolate? Do you want to know the best way to eat it? Just put a tiny square of it under your tongue and let it melt there. That way, you'll get the most flavor over the longest time and never take any of it for granted.

It is very human to think that you can control your children, but now I realize it's an impossible proposition. The best plan is to have no plan at all; just let them go and become the people they were meant to be.

Just imagine if you took all the money you've spent on these things and traveled around the world with it, instead, or bought books and read them. Think about how much you'd know about life.

I'll tell you a little secret, my friend. You'll never find in all of nature such a thing as a 'defenseless' animal. Except maybe some human beings I've known.

This woman was a dream beyond even my capacity to dream, and I'm a goddamn dreamer!

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains? And, as ever, dear old Walt gave us the answer: Nature remains.

Lucky

11-20-2012, 12:00 AM

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

amberlita

11-20-2012, 05:11 AM

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

So much gold in this book.

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”

Lucky

12-23-2012, 04:45 PM

Black Swan Green - David Mitchell

Dead things show what you'll be too some day.

This "Not Today" attitude of yours is a cancer. Cancer of the character. It stunts your growth. Other kids sense your Not-Todayness, and despise you for it. "Not Today" is why those plebs in the Black Swan make you nervous. "Not Today"--I would bet--is at the root of that speech defect of yours. "Not Today" condemns you to be the lapdog of authority, any bully, any shitehawk. They sense you won't stand up to them. Not today, not ever. "Not Today" is the blind slave of every petty rule. Jason, you have to kill "Not-Today."

You have to inhale, Jace. Into your lungs. Otherwise it's like sex without an orgasm.

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

Your "sort of" is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification, please. "Sort of" is an idle loubard, an ignorant vandale. "Sort of" says, "I am ashamed by clarity and precision."

If you have a magnolia in a moonlight courtyard, do you paint its flowers? Affix the flashy-flashy Christmas lights? Attach plastic parrots? No, you do not.

If an art is true, if an art is free of falseness, it is, a priori, beautiful.

"Wish I could be thirteen again." Then, I thought, you've obviously forgotten what it's like.

The world won't leave things be. It's always injecting endings into beginnings. [...] The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

D_Davis

05-14-2013, 11:12 PM

I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good. That is wrestling with what I have been given. Do I rage at what I have not? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which time is perceived?) I try to end this pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion. But the veil is the juncture of the perceived and perception. And what in life can rip that? Is the only prayer, then, to live steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands? I am limited, finite, and fixed. I rage for reasons, cry for pity. Do with me what way you will.

- Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

D_Davis

05-14-2013, 11:15 PM

Lucky

08-03-2013, 04:48 AM

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (SLIGHTLY ALTERED TO KEEP SPOILER-FREE)

But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

The few happy ones are like my parents: They're baffled by my singleness. A smart, pretty, nice girl like me, a girl with so many interests and enthusiasms, a cool job, a loving family. And let's say it: money. They knit their eyebrows and pretend to think of men they can set me up with, but we all know there's no one left, no one good left, and I know that they secretly think there's something wrong with me, something hidden away that makes me unsatisfiable, unsatisfying.

We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blase: Seeeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

On that single, two-hour flight, I transformed from in love to not in love. Like walking through a door.

I want to watch alone, but he hovers around me all day, floating in and out of whatever room I retreat to, like a sudden patch of bad weather, unavoidable.

"You are a petty, selfish, manipulative, disciplined psycho bitch--"

"You are a man," I say. "You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man."