Quotes from Books

[Tuesday]

"The Fascist guns were of the same make and calibre as our own, and the unexploded shells were often reconditioned and fired back. There was said to be one old shell with a nickname of its own which travelled daily to and fro, never exploding."

(Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell)


Seriously...this is like the prototype for Catch-22 :D

[Idril]

"I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought."

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett

[Bakiryu]

"
Nothing ever begins.
There's no first moment; no single word or place in which this or any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
thus, the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic becomes laughable, great lovers stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
Nothing is fixed. in and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden among them is a filigree that will with time become a world"


~I just found this whole paragraph so beautiful I copied it all. It's the first page of Weaveworld by Clive Barker.

[Demian]

"...For me a projection involves the two perceptions of sound and sight. I draw upon picture and sonic images in my memory circuits. Since I have read and summarized every book in print during my time, seen and summarized and cross-filed lectures, conversations between individuals, and been separately programmed to evaluate all formal human philosophies ... Dr. Pierce's request evokes a process of options, each of which I produce for myself in the form of images on a screen. It's as if I'm actually looking at a different future each time. And, since I have no bias, no preconception, the decision as to which is the most likely to happen is something I observe in a mechanically detached way."

-from Computerworld by A.E. Van Vogt

[quasimodo1]

..............."I will have such difficulty in becoming English again: here I am Arab in habits, and slip in talking from English to French and Arab unnoticing, yesterday I was 3 hours with an Orleannais, talking French, and he thought at the end I was a compatriot. You may be happy, now all my rough work is finished successfully, and my thesis is I THINK ASSURED. 'Irade' invaluable' ." (Last expression footnote...Lawrence carried {irades} or letters of protection from the Sultan obtained for him by Lord Curzon, then Chancellor of Oxford University.) quote from [Letters of T.E.Lawrence...Archaeology chapter] p77

[quasimodo1]

The Letters of T.E. Lawrence -To His Brother, Will Lawrence-June 8, 1911

(from Carchemish)..................."I left my special subject (the Crusades) till the last two weeks

of the last term. It was mosotly done while the examination was actually in progress in

three all-night sittings: special subjects, if you know all but the facts are a matter of

simple cram. I should certainly not recommend doing it (except to know your ground, if it is

territorial) before the last term: or the term before the last, leaving the last for revision.

If it is a matter like the Crusades two or three weeks are more than enough. Other subjects

have more to read: but always read something that throws a side-light on the set

authorities. ...You are going to too many lectures." [Archaeology]

[Planet]

I have just finished Do With Me What You Will by Joyce Carol Oates. it made me think on very different levels.
Here is a quote:

Will we always be alone? Always live alone?
Alone in our heads? - absolutely not.
But there were so many years before I met you... I lived alone... I was always alone...
I was alone too, honey, but look: now we relive it all, together. That's my theory about marriage... a long conversation where you relive your life, remembering things, maybe inventing a few things.
Are we married, then?
In our heads, why not?... you don't really live alone, because after you fall in love you retell it all, it's like a book two people create together, a novel... There's the need to talk, like making love. First you do one and then you do the other.

[aeroport]

From Melville's White-Jacket

I did not fancy this station at all; for it is well known on
shipboard that, in time of action, the quarter-deck is one of the
most dangerous posts of a man-of-war. The reason is, that the
officers of the highest rank are there stationed; and the enemy
have an ungentlemanly way of target-shooting at their buttons. If
we should chance to engage a ship, then, who could tell but some
bungling small-arm marks-man in the enemy's tops might put a
bullet through me instead of the Commodore? If they hit him,
no doubt he would not feel it much, for he was used to that sort
of thing, and, indeed, had a bullet in him already. Whereas, I
was altogether unaccustomed to having blue pills playing round my
head in such an indiscriminate way. Besides, ours was a flag-
ship; and every one knows what a peculiarly dangerous predicament
the quarter-deck of Nelson's flag-ship was in at the battle of
Trafalgar; how the lofty tops of the enemy were full of soldiers,
peppering away at the English Admiral and his officers. Many a
poor sailor, at the guns of that quarter-deck, must have received
a bullet intended for some wearer of an epaulet.

[quasimodo1]

Letter 65: To V.W. Richards, Dec. 10, 1913.........written at Carchemish "Dear Richard, It's quaint, isn't it, to begin again a correspondence which has lapsed for about a twelve-month? but, you know, I'm about as sick of myself and my affairs as one can well be, and it would be a consolation, if not exactly a comfort, to hear something of the sort from you. The fault was in ever coming out to this place, I think, because really ever since knowing it I have felt that (at least for the near future) to talk of settling down to live in a small way anywhere else was beating the air: and so gradually I slipped down, until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archaeologist. I fought very hard, at Oxford and after going down, to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down, now." from the letters of T.E. Lawrence (Archaeology chapter) ...author also known as Lawrence of Arabia (page 160)

[karo]

"We live in a time when no none wants to remember. We pretend we are where it starts. Look at the way we live - we build houses on cliffs, on fault lines, in the path of things, and when something happens, we don't learn history, we build it again, right on the same spot, bigger and better......Fallout accumulates. What we've got now is a blend of fact and fiction that we're agreeing to call reality."

[quasimodo1]

Letters of T.E.Lawrence, #114, To Mr. LLoyd George, Thursday, Sept. 19, 1919 Chapter: Dog Fight in Downing Street "Dear Mr. Lloyd George, I must confess to you that in my heart I always believed that in the end you would let the Arabs down: -so that now I find it quite difficult to know how to thank you. It concerns me personally, because I assured them during the campaigns that our promises held their face value, and backed them with my word, for what it was worth. Now in your agreement over Syria you have kept all our promises to them, and given them more than perhaps they ever deserved, and my relief at getting out of the affair with clean hands is very great." T.E. Lawrence p. 287

[quasimodo1]

February 16, 1920....letter 120, To Colonel S. F. Newcombe (chapter.........Dog Fight in Downing Street) Dear S.F., I owe you five letters! At first it wasn't worth while for you were reported to me in one week as at Aleppo, Azraak, Bagdad & Cairo: and then it became a habit. However the arrival of a smaller (I hope not cheaper) edition* is an occasion for a bookworm like myself. The "editio princeps" always has a special value: but in some cases (Shakespeare folios e.g.) new matter is embodied in the reprints, which give them a market reputation little, if any, less than original. At the same time collectors, and especially collectors of sentiment, always prefer the genuine article. However Mrs. Newcombe will regard the graft as the first. These things, as Solomon quoted from Adam's table-talk, depend on the point of view. Please give her my heartiest congratulations. *footnote, Colonel Newcombe's son, Stewart Lawrence Newcombe, had just been born. .....from The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett, with a forward by Captain B.H. Liddell Hart. copyright 1938

[quasimodo1]

Letter 131, Mesopotamia, by Ex-Lieut-Colonel. T.E.Lawrence (Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford) (Mr. Lawrence, whose organization and direction of the Hedjaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war, has written this article at our request in order that the public may be fully informed of our Mesopotamian commitments.) "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Bagdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster." {This first paragraph might indicate how history repeats itself; the parallels to present day geo-politics are uncanny.} written in August of 1920

[Xcape]

Possession - A S Byatt



And I listened to the increasing Quiet - and my horse went softly on the beech-mast - which was wet after rain - not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become - all at once, all wound in one - and I moved on indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remainded still. Now to me such moments are poetry.

The next I laughed out loud to this morning.


'Just at the moment, I'm trying celibacy, I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.'
'Oh, I did, for a month, back in the Fall. It was great at first. I got to be quite in love with myself, and then I thought I was unhealthily attached to me, and I should give myself up.'

[quasimodo1]

To Xcape: Your quote is a revelation; it sounds a little like Samuel Beckett. quasi

[quasimodo1]

Letter 161: To Bernard Shaw, written August 17, 1922 from 14 Barton Street, Westminster........."Dear Mr. Shaw, You will be puzzled at my writing to you: but Cockerell some months ago took me round to you and introduced me, and you did not talk too formidably. I want to ask you two questions: the first one, 'Do you still read books?', doesn't require an answer. If you still go on reading I'm going to put the second question: if you don't, then please skip the two inside pages of this note and carry over to my signature at the end, and burn it all without replying. I hate letter-writing as much as I can, and so, probably, do you. My real wish is to ask if you will read, or try to read, a book which I have written. It's about the war, which will put you off, to start with, and there are technical unpleasantnesses about it. For instance it is very long: about 300,000 words I suspect, though I have not counted them. I have very little money and do not wish to publish it: however it had to be printed, so I got it done on a lino. press, in a newspaper office. That means it's beastly to look at, two columns on a quarto page, small newspaper type which hurts your eyes, and dozens of misprints, corrected roughly in ink: for only five copies exist, and I could not afford a proof. The punctuation is entirely the compositor's fancy: and he had an odd fancy, especially on Mondays." {This letter refers to T.E. Lawrence's book, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom".}

[karo]

I spoke of a memoir. Is this what this chronicle will prove to be? At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier...But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but 'recollection in tranquility'. To repent of a life of egoism? Not exactly, yet something of the sort. I never said this to the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre. They would never have stopped laughing.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin sooner?

[quasimodo1]

Letter 350: To H.S. Ede (sent April 16, 1928) mailed from Karachi, Pakistan. From Chapter "The Years of Hide and Seek"............"I hope that the Gallery has now re-opened, and restored itself, as the best art entertainment in London. You may feel that it's hopelessly slow and cloggy: but I confess that Frys and Ivor Churchills and Courtaulds* do not sum up more than the yesterday of expression, in my backward regard. It makes me smile, sometimes, to think that all the varying pictures produced in 1928 will all date themselves, by some subtlety of likeness to 1928, in the eyes of 2028. Yet today we are hardly on speaking terms. Of pictures and sculpture I'm not talking, now, but of the writing gangs: the Joyces and the Kiplings, the Steins and Wells, the Forsters and the D.H. Lawrences: they will all date within 20 years, by some yet-imperceptible solidarity. There WILL be a common thread between T.S.Eliot and Alfred Noyes."..............{comment: T.E. Lawrence is now writing in a somewhat jaded fashion of these great writers, not dismissively but with respect and yet percieving their work as books that will be quickly dated. The writing of this day had such high standards without being aware of it, that Lawrence (after years of internal ambivalence concerning his own book "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom") was maybe too close to these writers to see the genious in their work. He seems to exclude from this general opinion, the writing of T.S. Eliot and Alfred Noyes.} *footnote: Roger Fry, the critic, Lord Ivor Churchill and Samuel Courtauld have made famous collections of works of art.

[quasimodo1]

A LOOM OF YEARS


In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,
In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree,
Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,
I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The leaves of the winter wither and sink in the forest mould
To colour the flowers of April with purple and white and gold:
Light and scent and music die and are born again
In the heart of a grey-haired woman who wakes in a world of pain.

The hound, the fawn, and the hawk, and the doves that croon and coo,
We are all one woof of the weaving and the one warp threads us through,
One flying cloud on the shuttle that carries our hopes and fears
As it goes thro’ the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

The green uncrumpling fern and the rustling dewdrenched rose
Pass with our hearts to the Silence where the wings of music close,
Pass and pass to the Timeless that never a moment mars,
Pass and pass to the Darkness that made the suns and stars.

Has the soul gone out in the Darkness? Is the dust sealed from sight?
Ah, hush, for the woof of the ages returns thro’ the warp of the night!
Never that shuttle loses one thread of our hopes and fears,
As it comes thro’ the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

O, woven in one wide Loom thro’ the throbbing weft of the whole,
One in spirit and flesh, one in body and soul,
Tho’ the leaf were alone in its falling, the bird in its hour to die,
The heart in its muffled anguish, the sea in its mournful cry,

One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moon
One with the granite mountains that melt into the noon
One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.

Alfred Noyes

{This poet/writer mentioned with T.S.Eliot in previous post}

[karo]

Hey, quasimodo. Really enjoyed the Alfred Noyes poem. It reminded me of one a poet friend of mine sent me some time ago. Here it is:

My Law-Tieme Ranapiri

The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
will sweep on its course till the cycle is run
and when into chaos the system is hurled.
Again shall the builder reshape a new world

Your path maybe clouded, uncertain your goal,
Move on- for your orbit is fixed to your soul.
And though it may lead into darkness of night
the torch of the builder shall give it new light.

You were - you will be - know this while you are
Your spirit has travelled both long and afar
It came from the source to the source it returns
The spark which was lighted eternally burns.

It slept in a jewel, it lept in a wave
It roamed in the forest, it rose from the grave,
It took on strange garbs for long aeons of years
And now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on,
it seeks a new form when the old one has gone
and the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
on the loom of the mind from the fibre of thought

As dew is drawn upwards, in rain to descend
your thoughts drift away and in destiny blend.
You cannot escape them, for petty or great,
or evil or noble they fashion your fate.

Somewhere on some planet sometime and somehow
your life will reflect your thoughts of your now.
My law is unerring, no blood can atone,
the structure you built you will live in alone

From cycle to cycle through time and through space
your lives with your longings will ever keep pace
And all that you ask for and all you desire
must come at your bidding as flame out of fire.

Once list' to that voice and all tumult is done-
your life is the life of the infinite one
In the hurrying race you are concious of pause
with love for the purpose and love for the cause.

You are your own devil you are your own god
You fashioned the paths your footsteps have trod.
And no one can save you from error or sin
untill you have harkened to the spirit within.

Attributed to a Maori

[quasimodo1]

To karo: "My Law" is a fabulous piece and it's similarity to the Alfred Noyes poem jumps right out. The attribution is unknown to me, unless "a Maori" or "Maori" is a pen name (the proper name is identical to a tribe somewhere in the New Zealand part of the world.) Don't suppose you know any more about the writer? Looking here for more information... http://www.path-ways.com/forums/archive/index.php/f-6.html: [Tieme Ranapiri... (enhance the mind)]

[quasimodo1]

Letter 352: To E.M. Forster, April 16, 1928 ...from Karachi, Pakistan..... " Dear E.M.F., Forgive the pencil. I am inkless this afternoon. Don't cut me off from anything you may write in future, because you've sent me one supremely good thing.* I've liked everything you've written: some of it very much, some of it less: but I liked it all. I've tried to write, myself, and know that a man doesn't ever succeed in mating sound and sense and expectation. We land, always, other than we meant to land. That's presumably the fun as well as the vexation of writing. Your less-good work is very helpful to me, as an amateur of writing: for our minds are parallel enough for me to see your intention behind the expression, (or to flatter myself that I do partly and in some senses see it...oh shades of Henry James in this style of letter!) and just because it may not completely come off, so I may be able to see the works inside it more clearly. " {*footnote, an unpublished story}

[Idril]

From The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal:


"On May 15, 1796, a whole people became aware that all it had hitherto respected was supremely ridiculous, and, occasionally hateful to boot."

[Circuvico]

From Finnegans Wake
"O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now."

[karo]

Quasimodo, unfortunately I know nothing about the author of 'My Law', but I believe it was inspired by a New Zealand Maori.

[karo]

Quoting from letter from Lizzie to Charles:

If I came to see you like you want, just coming because you feel in the mood to see me, to sort of try my company again, I would fall straight back into the old madness....you didn't love me enough, and now - I don't believe in miracles....Charles, I've been in hell and I've come out of it and I don't want to go there again..... My love for you is quiet at last. I don't want it to become a roaring furnace.

[ngtotd_dtrt]

From Don Quixote (Ormsby translation)... just finished it, very enjoyable.
Some of may fav quotes, mostly Sancho's proverbs. (Sorry for the quantity...collected them as I read.)


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

"To be grateful for benefits received is the part of persons of good birth,
and one of the sins most offensive to God is ingratitude;
------------------------

And still more surprised were they when they perceived that what they heard
sung were the verses not of rustic shepherds, but of the polished wits of
the city; and so it proved, for the verses they heard were these:

What makes my quest of happiness seem vain? Disdain.
What bids me to abandon hope of ease? Jealousies.
What holds my heart in anguish of suspense? Absence.
If that be so, then for my grief Where shall I turn to seek relief,
When hope on every side lies slain By Absence, Jealousies, Disdain?

What the prime cause of all my woe doth prove? Love.
What at my glory ever looks askance? Chance.
Whence is permission to afflict me given? Heaven.
If that be so, I but await The stroke of a resistless fate,
Since, working for my woe, these three, Love, Chance and Heaven, in league I see.

What must I do to find a remedy? Die.
What is the lure for love when coy and strange? Change.
What, if all fail, will cure the heart of sadness? Madness.
If that be so, it is but folly To seek a cure for melancholy:
Ask where it lies; the answer saith In Change, in Madness, or in Death.
------------------------

for virtue is more persecuted by the wicked than loved by the good.
------------------------

for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it, but by spending it, and not by spending as he pleases, but by knowing how to spend it well. The poor gentleman has no way of showing that he is a gentleman but by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, courteous, gentle-mannered, and kindly, not haughty, arrogant, or censorious, but above all by being charitable;
------------------------

"Teresa says," replied Sancho, "that I should make sure with your
worship, and 'let papers speak and beards be still,' for 'he who binds
does not wrangle,' since one 'take' is better than two 'I'll give
thee's;' and I say a woman's advice is no great thing, and he who won't take it is a fool."
------------------------

for learning without virtue is a pearl on a dunghill.
------------------------

"God will guide it better," said Sancho, "for God who gives the wound gives the salve;
------------------------

No, faith; and between a woman's 'yes' and 'no' I wouldn't venture to put the point of a pin, for there would not be room for it;
------------------------

As a grandmother of mine used to say, there are only two families in the world, the Haves and the Haven'ts; and she stuck to the Haves; and to this day, Senor Don Quixote, people would sooner feel the pulse of 'Have,' than of 'Know;' an *** covered with gold looks better than a
horse with a pack-saddle.
------------------------

"He preaches well who lives well," said Sancho, "and I know no more theology than that."

"Nor needst thou," said Don Quixote, "but I cannot conceive or make out how it is that, the fear of God being the beginning of wisdom, thou, who art more afraid of a lizard than of him, knowest so much."
------------------------

that love has no greater enemy than hunger and constant want; for love is all gaiety, enjoyment, and happiness, especially when the lover is in the possession of the object of his love, and poverty and want are the declared enemies of all these;
------------------------

"Remember, O prudent Basilio," added Don Quixote, "it was the opinion of a certain sage, I know not whom, that there was not more than one good woman in the whole world; and his advice was that each one should think and believe that this one good woman was his own wife, and in this way he would live happy.
------------------------

a good woman does not win a good name merely by being good, but by letting it be seen that she is so, and open looseness and freedom do much more damage to a woman's honour than secret depravity.
------------------------

“…at the worst the hypocrite who pretends to be good does less harm than the open sinner."
------------------------

…My lady the duchess kisses thy hands a thousand times; do thou make a return with two thousand, for as my master says, nothing costs less or is cheaper than civility.
------------------------

"Secondly, thou must keep in view what thou art, striving to know
thyself, the most difficult thing to know that the mind can imagine…
------------------------

…pride thyself rather upon being one of lowly virtue than a lofty sinner.

"Remember, Sancho, if thou make virtue thy aim, and take a pride in doing
virtuous actions, thou wilt have no cause to envy those who have princely
and lordly ones, for blood is an inheritance, but virtue an acquisition,
and virtue has in itself alone a worth that blood does not possess.
------------------------

it is not well for those that administer governments to be long without their wives

[but choose wisely, for] all that may be gained by a wise governor may be lost and wasted by a boorish stupid wife.
------------------------

"Abuse not by word him whom thou hast to punish in deed, for the pain of punishment is enough for the unfortunate without the addition of thine objurgations.
------------------------

diligence is the mother of good fortune, and indolence, its opposite, never yet attained the object of an honest ambition.
------------------------
never engage in a dispute about families, at least in the way of comparing them one with another; for necessarily one of those compared will be better than the other, and thou wilt be hated by the one thou hast disparaged, and get nothing in any shape from the one thou hast exalted.
------------------------

'they'll come for wool and go back shorn;'
------------------------

'whether the pitcher hits the stove, or the stove the pitcher, it's a bad business for the pitcher;'
------------------------

'the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man in another's.'"
------------------------

and if there's any reason to think that because of my being a governor the devil will get hold of me, I'd rather go Sancho to heaven than governor to hell."
------------------------

for I place a barrier between my inclinations and my virtue, and I do not wish to break this rule through the generosity your highness is disposed to display towards me;
------------------------

…show thyself grateful to them, for ingratitude is the daughter of pride, and one of the greatest sins we know of; and he who is grateful to those who have been good to him shows that he will be so to God also who has bestowed and still bestows so many blessings upon him.
------------------------

keep a safe conscience and let them say what they like; for trying to stop slanderers' tongues is like trying to put gates to the open plain.
------------------------

"for what thou hast to give to the mouse, give to the cat, and it will save thee all trouble."
------------------------

For the sense of being under an obligation to return benefits and favours received is a restraint that checks the independence of the spirit. Happy he, to whom heaven has given a piece of bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but heaven itself!"
------------------------

'For giving and keeping there's need of brains.'
------------------------

for pledges don't trouble a good payer."
------------------------

for jests that give pain are no jests, and no sport is worth anything if it hurts another.
------------------------

Her companion then came up and said, "I should like to know, Head,
whether my husband loves me or not;" the answer given to her was, "Think
how he uses thee, and thou mayest guess;" and the married lady went off
saying, "That answer did not need a question; for of course the treatment
one receives shows the disposition of him from whom it is received."
------------------------

'a good hope is better than a bad holding’
------------------------

They did not embrace each other [publicly], for where there is deep love there will never be overmuch boldness.
------------------------

for, as sensible people hold, 'the fault of the *** must not be laid on the pack-saddle;'
------------------------

'better a clear escape than good men's prayers.'
------------------------

"it is the part of brave hearts to be patient in adversity just as much as to be glad in prosperity”
------------------------

"No, no, senor," replied Sancho; "it shall never be said of me, 'The money paid, the arms broken;'
------------------------

[Idril]

From The Rat by Günter Grass:


And I saw the She-rat on top of the garbage mountain, proclaiming that man is no more. This, she cried out, is your heritage.

[Riesa]

Then one arose in the host of Olwe, which was ever the hindmost on the road; Lenwe he was called. He forsook the westward march, and led away a numerous people, southwards down the great river, and they passed out of the knowledge of their kin until long years were past. Those were the Nandor; and they became a people apart, unlike their kin, save that they loved water, and dwelt most beside falls and running streams. Greater knowledge they had of living things, tree and herb, bird and beast, than all other Elves. In after years Denethor, son of Lenwe, turned again west at last, and led a part of that people over the mountains into Beleriand ere the rising of the Moon.


J.R.R Tolkien The Silmarillion

The Rat's lookin' pretty good right 'bout now. :p ;)

[Idril]

J.R.R Tolkien The Silmarillion

The Rat's lookin' pretty good right 'bout now. :p ;)

Okay, right there, Olwe really isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, nor are the Nandor all that important so feel free to wipe all that from your memory. That's the kind of stuff you can just skim over. ;)

[quasimodo1]

Letter 205: To Lionel Curtis, dated March 19, 1923. .........."There again, perhaps there's a solution to be found in multiple personality. It's my reason which condemns the book (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) and the revolt, and the new nationalities: because the only rational conclusion to human argument is pessimism such as Hardy's, a pessimism which is very much like the wintry heath, of bog and withered plants and stripped trees, about us. Our camp on its swelling in this desolation feels pustular, and we (all brown-bodied, with yellow spots down our front belly-line), must seem like the swarming germs of its fermentation. That's feeling, exterior-bred feeling, with reason harmonising it into a picture: but there's a deeper sense which remembers other landscapes, and the changes which summer will bring to this one: and to that sense nothing can be changeless: whereas the rational preference or advantage of pessimism is its finality, the eternity in which it ends: and if there isn't an eternity there cannot be a pessimism pure."

[quasimodo1]

Letter 234: December 19, 1923. To Subscribers to 'Seven Pillars' postmarked at Clouds Hill, Moreton ...............[On May 31st, 1923, Bernard Shaw wrote a private memorandum to Mr. Baldwin, then Prime Minister, expressing his great concern at Lawrence's poverty. 'Clearly this is a bad case of Belisarius begging obols in an ungrateful country...the fact remains that he is serving as a private soldier for his daily bread: and however much his extraordinary character may be accountable for this, it strikes all who know about it as a scandal that should be put an end to by some means. They feel that the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery and are amazed to find that Lawrence is not in a position of a pensioned commanding officer in dignified private circumstances.' Bernard Shaw sent the letter to Hogarth, who corrected some of his statements, before sending it to the Prime Minister. Shaw did not rest content with a refusal but continued to press Mr. Baldwin, and afterwardes Mr. MacDonald, on the subject of a pension for Lawrence, but without success. From several of Lawrence's letters it would appear that he would have accepted a pension, had one been offered him, but I cannot think he would have been pleased that the sentence 'the private soldier business is a shocking tomfoolery' should be read by Mr. Baldwin]

[NickAdams]

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

"The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye)."

"He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pic-
tured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was
no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world out-
side. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at is head,
wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat
hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one
fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the
man sleeping."

[Woland]

Canto 1 from Purgatorio

"Who are you that up the blind river have fled
the eternal prison?

Who has guided you, or what has been your
lantern, coming forth from the deep night that
makes the valley of Hell forever black?

Can the laws of the abyss be broken, then? or
has some new counsel been adopted in Heaven,
that although damned, you come to my cliffs?"

[NickAdams]

A humorous description:

"Age. Unimportant
Head. Small and round.
Eyes. Green.
Complexion. White.
Hair. Yellow.
Features. Mobile.
Neck. 13 3/4".
Upper arm. 11".
Forearm.9 1/2".
Wrist 6".
Bust. 34".
Waist. 27".
Hips, etc. 35".
Thigh. 21 3/4".
Knee. 13 3/4".
Calf. 13".
Ankle. 8 1/4".
Instep. Unimportant.
Height. 5'4".
Weight. 123 lbs.

She stormed away from the callbox, accompanied delightedly by her hips, etc."

[quasimodo1]

Letter 376A: Confessionn of Faith, (a note to himself), it is not clear if he sent this to any of his correspondents. Not the conquest of the air, but our entry thither. We come. Our soiled overalls were the the livery of that sunrise. The soilings of our bodies in its sevice were prismatic with its light. Moody or broody. From ground to air. First we are not earthbound. In speed we hurl ourselves behond the body. Our bodies cannot scale the heavens except in a fume of petrol. The concentration of our bodies in entering a loop. Bones, blood, flesh all pressed inward together. Not the conquest of the air. Be plain, guts. In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body. We enter it. we come. Our bodies cannot scale heaven except in a fume of burnt petrol. As lords that are expected. Yet there is a silent joy in our arrival. Years and years. Long arpeggios of chafing wires. The concentration of one's body in entering a loop. { ......this "letter" is more a poetic memorandum to himself of a personal and spiritual nature (my comment). No footnote indicates otherwise.}

[Zybahn]

Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things.

As he went down the passage he encountered three steps before reaching the lift. The only purpose he could assign to them was that they warned him he was going to suffer.

[karo]

The next morning I woke to a sense of an utterly changed world, like on the first day of war. Joy, hope, came too, but fear first, and a black sense of confusion as if the deep logic of the universe had suddenly gone wrong.

[aeroport]

from Moby-Dick
(Old Fleece preaches to the sharks eating the whale carcass)

"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help demselves."

[quasimodo1]

Letter 464: To W.B. Yeats, October 12, 1932, postmarked Mount Batten, Plymouth................."I am Irish, and it has been a chance to admit it publicly- but it touches me very deeply that you should think anything I have done or been to justify this honour. I'm afraid the truth-if people could look inside- would destroy the flattering picture of myself that has been put about. I knew you had seen my "Revolt", because you referred to it in your foreward to Gogarty's last Cuala selection: but I never expected this. It is very good of you, and touches me particularly, for I have been reading your work for years. ..............I set eyes on you once, in Oxford, many years ago, and wanted then to call the street to attention but fortunately did nothing. I hope that you are going further yet, in poetry, for our benefit."

[River]

From "Cry, The Beloved Country" by Alan Paton:

"Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the women and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart."

[karo]

What an excellent quote, river. It's moving, it's poetic. Wonderful!

[River]

What an excellent quote, river. It's moving, it's poetic. Wonderful!

I'm glad you liked it. At about four parts in the novel thus-far he begins a paragraph with those four words. When he finally sat down after writing it and need to come up with a title, he and his editor (I think!) decided to both write down what they thought it should be called. They both wrote 'Cry, The Beloved Country' which really go to show how memorable the parts which started with those lines were.

[quasimodo1]

"The tendon of the day is strained,/The week is plunged into deep shadow/ Lighter than the skin of my face." .....from the poem, "Head of a Woman" by Medbh McGuckian

[Duna]

I´m Reading a Song of Ice and Fire III :yawnb:

[thelastmelon]

"Drygt en månad efter Sommarkväll sjunger Cornelis åter kärleksvisor till Bim, men deras relation är på väg att rämna. Misshandeln på Castle Hotel är början till slutet, i ytterligare ett och ett halvt år ska de separera och återförenas."

You understood a lot of that, didn't you? :)
I'll try to translate it for you:

"About a month after Summernight, Cornelis is once again singing love-songs to Bim, but their relationship is falling apart. The abuse on Castle Hotel is the beginning of the end, for another one and a half years they shall separate and reunite."

[Idril]

From World Light by Halldór Laxness:

But when a man is both spiritually and physically ill, one becomes a poet involuntarily; you simply can't help it.

[Harpo Marx]

From War and Peace:

"Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory's object- it's practical application" (Book 9).

[byquist]

"The position of the humanities in our colleges and universities today is discouraging. They stand at the bottom of the hierarchy of authority and prestige. They lack the obvious value, and easy self-confidence, that the natural and social sciences possess ... The technical imperative that rules our lives imprisons the devout and their bemused critics alike ... At the very heart of our civilization, with its vast powers of control, there is an emptiness that science has created and cannot fulfill."

These quotes can't do justice to this persuasive, 2007 book by ex-Head of Yale Law School, not that he necessarily provides the accurate solution. But he covers a very wide swath of concerns:

Education's End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of LIfe, by Anthony T. Kronman

[Princess_1986]

"The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 1

I love the George Orwell quote, Harpo. Some funky quotes on here. It's ironic that we read so many lines of text and there are very few which stick to our mind and spark inspiration.

[HailStorm]

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Pg 28 February 1808, the Stones of York

A great old church in the depths of winter is a discouraging place at the best of times; the cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in its stones and to seep out of them.

[lilydantes]

The invention of printing is the greatest event of history. It is the Revolution's Mother. It is humanity's mode of expressing, totally renewed, it is man's thought shedding one form and arraying itself in another, the complete, definite casting off of the skin of that symbolic serpent which, since Adam, has stood for intelligence.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, p. 168 (Modern Library)

Though I really loved this entire chapter ("This Will Kill That").

[white camellia]

There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition - for why should I not so term it? - served mainly to accelerate the increase itself.

Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

[yewon]

i've just read some of the quotes and they were really interesting!
these days i'm reading "pride an prejudice" by jane austin for 4th time.
here are some quotes i really like i this book:

(the very first sentence of this book)"It is a truth niversally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortun must be in want of a wife"

"pride realtes more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us."

"she was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet"

"you must learn some of my philosophy. think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure"

"i am the happiest creature in the world. perhaps othe people have said so before, but no one in such justice."

[Dark Muse]

It was acutally a while back ago sense I read 1984 but this secne just stayed with me, and I thought it was really powerful and wonderful.

Tierelessely the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, signing and fallen silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more, and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living, or was merely a slave to twenty or thirty grandchildern. Julia had come acorss to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the strudy figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characterstic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occured to him that the body of a woman of fifity, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardend, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid contourless body, like a block of granite and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

"She is beautiful" he murmured

"She is a meter acorss the hips eaisly" said Julia

'That is her style of beauty" said Winston

[Pensive]

Stand upshot upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

- Cry The Beloved Country

[mayneverhave]

...standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for
hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a
tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the
buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than
when, just now, I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I
will turn a corner... but... the goal is in my heart...


- Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time) - Marcel Proust

[Reepicheep]

"I'll sit my four-hundred-pound *** on you and that is not how you want to die."

Odd Thomas--Dean Koonz

[Dori]

"At that point, probably to satisfy himself that I was not a little girl, he glanced at me and blushed up to his ears. I did not understand. I stood before him staring in amazement. He got up, came towards me with an embarrassed air, was horribly confused, said something, seemed to be be apologising for something, perhaps for having only just noticed that I was such a big girl. At last I understood. I don't remember what happened to me then; I was overcome with confusion, lost my head, blushed even more crimson than Pokrovsky, hid my face in my hands and ran out of the room."

This is great example of Dostoevsky's budding talent (which is, of course, a passage from Poor Folk).

[rmd]

"Few people of attainments take easily to a plan of self improvement. Some discover very early their perfection cannot endure the insult. Others find their intellectual pleasure lies in the theory, not the practice. Only a few stubborn ones will blunder on, painfully, out of the luxuriant world of their pretentions into the desert of mortification and reward."

From Voss by Patrick White.

[Viola Kent]

The Name of the Rose is a wonderful book but you must have patience to read it. i took to do it.

I'm reading Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. If someone thinks I should stop reading, I'd apreciate the hands up.


"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it" George Bernard Shaw

[thescholar]

I'm reading the Templar Legacy by Raymond Khoury. yeah, pop novels... im ashamed. anyways:
It has served us well, this myth of Christ.
-Pope Constantine (undisclosed number) :P

[Dori]

"I realized that besides the loss of freedom, besides the forced labor, there is another torture in prison life, almost more terrible than any other---that is, compulsary life in common. Life in common is to be found of course in other places, but there are men in prison whom not everyone would care to associate with and I am certain that every convict felt this torture, though of course in most cases unconsciously." (from The House of the Dead, pages 26--27)

"Swearing, 'wagging your tongue' is allowed. It is to some extent entertainment for all...And indeed the combatants swear at one another rather for entertainment, for the exercise of their linguistic powers...I could not imagine at first how they could abuse one another for pleasure, find in it amusement, pleasant exercise, enjoyment. But one must not forget their vanity. A connoisseur in abuse was respected. He was almost applauded like an actor." (from The House of the Dead, page 31)

I'll be back with more.

[Janine]

The Name of the Rose is a wonderful book but you must have patience to read it. i took to do it.

I'm reading Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. If someone thinks I should stop reading, I'd apreciate the hands up.

Viola Kent, Hi and welcome to Lit Net; I see you are new, from your number of posts. I read "Under the Greenwood Tree", since I have read nearly all of Hardy's novels - one of my goals. I enjoyed it, but it might not be for everyone. It is a very pastoral example of Hardy's work; involves country musician's, correct? They travel from tavern to tavern performing; am I correct in remembering the book; doesn't it take place around Christmas? I think it is one of Hary's lighter novels, and is quite amusing, as well; it is not one of his major works.
Have you read any other's of his? I do recall it being one of the last books of Hardy's, I have read. I think I only have one or two more to read to complete my novel reading of Hardy. I have heard that "The Trumpet Major" is another less noted work, but a very good novel; a friend highly recommended it to me, awhile back. I am never inclined to give up on a book, so I would keep reading; I don't think "UTGT" is that long a book, is it? If you have not read Hardy's most noted novels, you must. They are all good reads. My favorites were "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", "Mayor of Casterbridge", "The Woodlanders", "Jude the Obscure", and "Return of the Native".:thumbs_up

[Dark Muse]

The Viking, by Edison Marshall, pg 193

It was to meet my fate, as a warrior must, that I fought to stay alive. All day we were a merry band, and the thought came to me that every mother's son of us might be Fey. I'd never seen the sky so blue, and the sea so beautiful.

[bluelightstar]

"The only way to avoid the hand of God is to get into it." -- Sula, Toni Morrison

[ashbash1990]

See my Signature...

[Dark Muse]

The Silver Wolf by Alice Borchardt, pg. 223

To the wolf there was no right or wrong, good or evil. There was only the pattern and she was part of the patter. To judge as the woman did was as foregin to her nature as were hope and despair.

To the wolf, the world was a tapestry of things given--sunrises scarlet, then gold; sunsets arrayed in purple shadow and bloody light; plains awash in tall grasses and mountains drifting against blue skies; and gray storms that rose, coalescing seemingly out of nothing in the upper air, then roaming at random, drenching the earth with rain. Spending thier fury in wild bursts of lightening

Life was part of the pattern and death, too, as were blood and pain. She herself had struggled uncountable times, sodden with suffering, down the long, dark path into starless night. But this, too was part of the pattern, part of the seamless tapestry of light and darkness whose only assurance was its own endless ever-changing repetition, always different, yet the same forever.

The pattern was beauty, somehow always in everlasting harmony with itself. Beautuy was! Ugiliness, saddnes, despair, were human judgements imposed by lesser frightend minds on the whole shinning spectrum of reality whose boundries the wolf couldn't even dimly comprehend.

[Pensive]

I just like the rhythm and the dramatic tone of this sentence:

"It is better to burn out than fade away."

- Someone's suicide note from 'Or Not To Be' - A Collection of suicide notes

[igalviola]

Hello everybody.
I am a musician from Belgium and I entered this site because I am looking for some answers in the literature field.
Write now I am doing a research on the similarity in classical music form and classical literature form.
Actually my goal is to see if the sonata form in music (I am tlking about 18 century and the very begining of 19 , mostly beethoven) has a similarity in the roman or novel written in the same period .
So if someone could tell me if he knows some Novels or romans which are considered as "classic" in Literature and has a very wll structured smple and orgenised form i would really apriciate this.

[Lioness_Heart]

"Heaven's net is wide but its mesh is fine

from Heaven's net is wide (obviously this is the basis of the title) by Lian Hearn.

It's a really beautiful book (all of hers are) and has lots of lovely quotes; this is the only one I could remember off the top of my head. Apparently it is an ancient proverb.

I really like it because it's really simple, but you can still read it in loads of different ways.

[quasimodo1]

To Dr. Lewis.

Gloucester, April 2.

DOCTOR,

THE pills are good for nothing; I might as well swallow snowballs to cool my reins. I have told you over and over, how hard I am to move; and at this time of day, I ought to know something of my own constitution. Why will you be so positive? Prithee send me another prescription. I am as lame and as much tortured in all my limbs as if I was broke upon the wheel: indeed, I am equally distressed in mind and body. As if I had not plagues enough of my own, those children of my sister are left me for a perpetual source of vexation; what business have people to get children to plague their neighbours? A ridiculous incident that happened yesterday to my niece Liddy, has disordered me in such a manner, that I expect to be laid up with another fit of the gout; perhaps, I may explain myself in my next. I shall set out to-morrow morning for the Hot Well at Bristol, where I am afraid I shall stay longer than I could wish.
{re-read of an old and humourus favourite} quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

To Sir Watkin Phillips, of Jesus college, Oxon.

Hot-well, April 18.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

I GIVE Mansel credit for his invention, in propagating the report that I had a quarrel with a mountebank’s merry Andrew at Gloucester: but I have too much respect for every appendage of wit, to quarrel even with the lowest buffoonery; and therefore I hope Mansel and I shall always be good friends. I cannot, however, approve of his drowning my poor dog Ponto, on purpose to convert Ovid’s pleonasm into a punning epitaph—deerant quoque Littora Ponto; for, that he threw him into the Isis, when it was so high and impetuous, with no other view than to kill the fleas, is an excuse that will not hold water. But I leave poor Ponto to his fate, and hope Providence will take care to accommodate Mansel with a drier death.

As there is nothing that can be called company at the Well, I am here in a state of absolute rustication. This, however, gives me leisure to observe the singularities in my uncle’s character, which seems to have interested your curiosity. The truth is, his disposition and mine, which, like oil and vinegar, repelled one another at first, have now begun to mix by dint of being beat up together. I was once apt to believe him a complete Cynic; and that nothing but the necessity of his occasions could compel him to get within the pale of society. I am now of another opinion. I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation.

[Dori]

"She had been a comet in the sky, exciting to observe, quick to evaporate." (Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth, and History ~ Timothy Wilson-Smith)

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 4


To Miss Willis, at Gloucester.

Bath, April 26.

MY DEAREST COMPANION,

THE pleasure I received from yours, which came to hand yesterday, is not to be expressed. Love and friendship are, without doubt, charming passions; which absence serves only to heighten and improve. Your kind present of the garnet bracelets, I shall keep as carefully as I preserve my own life; and I beg you will accept, in return, of my heart-housewife, with the tortoiseshell memorandum-book, as a trifling pledge of my unalterable affection.

Bath is to me a new world. All is gaiety, good-humour, and diversion. The eye is continually entertained with the splendour of dress and equipage; and the ear with the sound of coaches, chaises, chairs, and other carriages. The merry bells ring round, from morn till night. Then we are welcomed by the city- waits in our own lodgings: we have music in the Pump-room every morning, cotillons every fore-noon in the rooms, balls twice a week, and concerts every other night, besides private assemblies and parties without number. As soon as we were settled in lodgings, we were visited by the Master of the Ceremonies; a pretty little gentleman, so sweet, so fine, so civil, and polite, that in our country he might pass for the prince of Wales; then he talks so charmingly, both in verse and prose, that you would be delighted to hear him discourse, for you must know he is a great writer, and has got five tragedies ready for the stage. He did us the favour to dine with us, by my uncle’s invitation; and next day ’squired my aunt and me to every part of Bath; which, to be sure, is an earthly paradise. The Square, the Circus, and the Parades, put you in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and pictures; and the new buildings, such as Princes-row, Harlequin’s-row, Bladud’s-row, and twenty other rows, look like so many enchanted castles, raised on hanging terraces.

{quasimodo1}

[Etienne]

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Don Quichotte de la démanche
It's part of a nightmare, horrible images...

"Steven was furious, he was holding the pig by it's ears and hitting it with his head. "Steven! Steven!" Abel was shouting. The pig was letting his ears be twisted and even seemed to enjoy it, corkscrewing it's tail and showing with grace his humid sexual organ."

My translation.

[schadenfreude]

"Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars"

Madame Bovery, Gustave Flaubert

[crazefest456]

"but I remember I preferred the soldier to a philosopher at the time; a preference which life has only confirmed. One was a man, and the other was either more--or less."
Youth - Joseph Conrad

[quasimodo1]

Before I was born, she had gone such lengths in the way of flirting with a recruiting officer, that her reputation was a little singed. She afterwards made advances to the curate of the parish, who dropped some distant hints about the next presentation to the living, which was in her brother’s gift; but finding that was already promised to another, he flew off at a tangent; and Mrs. Tabby, in revenge, found means to deprive him of his cure. Her next lover was lieutenant of a man of war, a relation of the family, who did not understand the refinements of the passion, and expressed no aversion to grapple with cousin Tabby in the way of marriage; but before matters could be properly adjusted, he went out on a cruise, and was killed in an engagement with a French frigate. Our aunt, though baffled so often, did not yet despair. She laid all her snares for Dr. Lewis, who is the fidus Achates of my uncle. She even fell sick upon the occasion, and prevailed with Matt to interpose in her behalf with his friend; but the Doctor, being a shy ****, would not be caught with chaff, and flatly rejected the proposal: so that Mrs. Tabitha was content to exert her patience once more, after having endeavoured in vain to effect a rupture betwixt the two friends; and now she thinks proper to be very civil to Lewis, who is become necessary to her in the way of his profession.
{excerpt from Chapter 5}

[sreeja]

I start reading .I start to read Shakespearian drama.The first book i got for reading is Julius Caesar.Brutus is my favorite character.

[white camellia]

Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.

Things are naturally contrary, that is, cannot exist in the same object, insofar as one is capable of destroying the other.

Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.

The endeavor, wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.

from The Road to Inner Freedom
Baruch Spinoza
Edited and with an introduction by
Dagobert D. Runes

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 10


To Dr. Lewis,

London, June 2.

YES, Doctor, I have seen the British Museum; which is a noble collection, and even stupendous, if we consider it was made by a private man, a physician, who was obliged to make his own fortune at the same time: but great as the collection is, it would appear more striking if it was arranged in one spacious saloon, instead of being divided into different apartments, which it does not entirely fill. I could wish the series of medals was connected, and the whole of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms completed, by adding to each, at the public expence, those articles that are wanting. It would likewise be a great improvement, with respect to the library, if the deficiences were made up, by purchasing all the books of character that are not to be found already in the collection. They might be classed in centuries, according to the dates of their publication, and catalogues printed of them and the manuscripts, for the information of those that want to consult, or compile from such authorities. I could also wish, for the honour of the nation, that there was a complete apparatus for a course of mathematics, mechanics, and experimental philosophy; and a good salary settled upon an able professor, who should give regular lectures on these subjects.

But this is all idle speculation, which will never be reduced to practice. Considering the temper of the times, it is a wonder to see any institution whatsoever established, for the benefit of the public. The spirit of party is risen to a kind of phrenzy, unknown to former ages, or rather degenerated to a total extinction of honesty and candour. You know I have observed, for some time, that the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation: every rancorous knave, every desperate incendiary, that can afford to spend half a crown or three shillings, may skulk behind the press of a newsmonger, and have a stab at the first character in the kingdom, without running the least hazard of detection or punishment.

[protagonist]

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing" - Macbeth

[Dori]

"Don't trust a horse in the field, or your wife in your house." ("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

"...the Ten Commandments seem to be used only in order to pass the priest's examination, and even then are not regarded as very important, not nearly so much as the rule for the use of ut* in conditional sentences." *In order that (Latin). ("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

"It is a marvelous thing how full of illusion is the notion that beauty is an advantage. A beautiful woman says all sorts of foolishness, you listen and you don't hear any foolishness, but what you hear seems to you wisdom itself. She says and does vulgar things, and to you it seems lovely. Even when she does not say stupid or vulgar things, but is simply beautiful, you are convinced that she is miraculously wise and moral." ("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 12


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

London, June 10.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

IN my last, I mentioned my having spent an evening with a society of authors, who seemed to be jealous and afraid of one another. My uncle was not at all surprised to hear me say I was disappointed in their conversation. ‘A man may be very entertaining and instructive upon paper (said he), and exceedingly dull in common discourse. I have observed, that those who shine most in private company, are but secondary stars in the constellation of genius. A small stock of ideas is more easily managed and sooner displayed, than a great quantity crowded together. There is very seldom and thing extraordinary in the appearance and address of a good writer; whereas a dull author generally distinguishes himself by some oddity or extravagance. For this reason, I fancy that an assembly of Grubs must be very diverting.’

My curiosity being excited by this hint, I consulted my friend Dick Ivy, who undertook to gratify it the very next day, which was Sunday last. He carried me to dine with S—, whom you and I have long known by his writings. He lives in the skirts of the town, and every Sunday his house is open to all unfortunate brothers of the quill, whom he treats with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert’s entire butt beer. He has fixed upon the first day of the week for the exercise of his hospitality, because some of his guests could not enjoy it on any other, for reasons that I need not explain. I was civilly received in a plain, yet decent habitation, which opened backwards into a very pleasant garden, kept in excellent order; and, indeed, I saw none of the outward signs of authorship, either in the house or the landlord, who is one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage, and above dependence. If there was nothing characteristic in the entertainer, the company made ample amends for his want of singularity.

[AdoreroDio]

He is a women.

She had prayed for the moon to rise. But now she found thehalf-light of the incipient moon more terrifying then darkness.The world was now peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady gaze and then formed again in new shapes.

Yam stood for manliness and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.

In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.

- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 13


To Sir Watkin Phillips, of Jesus college, Oxon.

London, June 10.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

THE moment I received your letter, I began to execute your commission. With the assistance of mine host at the Bull and Gate, I discovered the place to which your fugitive valet had retreated, and taxed him with his dishonesty. The fellow was in manifest confusion at sight of me, but he denied the charge with great confidence, till I told him, that if he would give up the watch, which was a family piece, he might keep the money and the clothes, and go to the devil his own way, at his leisure; but if he rejected this proposal, I would deliver him forthwith to the constable, whom I had provided for that purpose, and he would carry him before the justice without further delay. After some hesitation, he desired to speak with me in the next room, where he produced the watch, with all its appendages, and I have delivered it to our landlord, to be sent you by the first safe conveyance. So much for business.

I shall grow vain, upon your saying you find entertainment in my letters; barren, as they certainly are, of incident and importance, because your amusement must arise, not from the matter, but from the manner, which you know is all my own. Animated, therefore, by the approbation of a person, whose nice taste and consummate judgment I can no longer doubt, I will chearfully proceed with our memoirs. As it is determined we shall set out next week for Yorkshire, I went to-day in the forenoon with my uncle to see a carriage, belonging to a coach-maker in our neighbourhood. Turning down a narrow lane, behind Long-acre, we perceived a crowd of people standing at a door; which, it seems, opened into a kind of a methodist meeting, and were informed, that a footman was then holding forth to the congregation within. Curious to see this phaenomenon, we squeezed into the place with much difficulty; and who should this preacher be, but the identical Humphry Clinker. He had finished his sermon, and given out a psalm, the first stave of which he sung with peculiar graces. But if we were astonished to see Clinker in the pulpit, we were altogether confounded at finding all the females of our family among the audience. There was lady Griskin, Mrs. Tabitha Bramble, Mrs. Winifred Jenkins, my sister Liddy, and Mr. Barton, and all of them joined in the psalmody, with strong marks of devotion

[Dori]

"Ask an experienced coquette who has set herself the task of entrapping a man, which she would prefer to risk: being detected in falsehood, cruelty, even immortality, in the presence of the onewhom she is trying to entice, or to appear before him in a badly made or unbecomig gown,---and everytime she would choose the first."

("The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo Tolstoy)

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 15


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

Harrigate, June 23.

DEAR PHILLIPS,

THE very day after I wrote my last, Clinker was set at liberty. As Martin had foretold, the accuser was himself committed for a robbery, upon unquestionable evidence. He had been for some time in the snares of the thief-taking society; who, resenting his presumption in attempting to incroach upon their monopoly of impeachment, had him taken up and committed to Newgate, on the deposition of an accomplice, who has been admitted as evidence for the king. The postilion being upon record as an old offender, the chief justice made no scruple of admitting Clinker to bail, when he perused the affidavit of Mr. Mead, importing that the said Clinker was not the person that robbed him on Blackheath; and honest Humphry was discharged. When he came home, he expressed great eagerness to pay his respects to his master, and here his clocution failed him, but his silence was pathetic; he fell down at his feet, and embraced his knees, shedding a flood of tears, which my uncle did not see without emotion. He took snuff in some confusion; and, putting his hand in his pocket, gave him his blessing in something more substantial than words. ‘Clinker (said he), I am so well convinced, both of your honesty and courage, that I am resolved to make you my life-guard-man on the highway.’

He was accordingly provided with a case of pistols, and a carbine to be slung a-cross his shoulders; and every other preparation being made, we set out last Thursday, at seven in the morning; my uncle, with the three women in the coach; Humphry, well mounted on a black gelding bought for his use; myself a- horseback, attended by my new valet, Mr. Dutton, an exceeding coxcomb, fresh from his travels, whom I have taken upon trial. The fellow wears a solitaire, uses paint, and takes rappee with all the grimace of a French marquis. At present, however, he is in a riding-dress, jack-boots, leather breeches, a scarlet waistcoat with gold binding, a laced hat, a hanger, a French posting-whip in his hand, and his hair en queue.

[lavendar1]

Then they came upon it from a turn in the road and they stopped and stood with the salt wind blowing in their hair where they’d lowered the hoods of their coats to listen. Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it…He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I’m sorry it’s not blue, he said. That’s okay, said the boy.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 17


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

Newcastle upon Tyne, July 10.

DEAR WATT,

WE made a precipitate retreat from Scarborough, owing to the excessive delicacy of our ’squire, who cannot bear the thoughts of being praetereuntium digito monstratus.

One morning while he was bathing in the sea, his man Clinker took it in his head that his master was in danger of drowning; and, in this conceit, plunging into the water, he lugged him out naked on the beach, and almost pulled off his ear in the operation. You may guess how this atchievement was relished by Mr. Bramble, who is impatient, irascible, and has the most extravagant ideas of decency and decorum in the oeconomy of his own person. In the first ebullition of his choler, he knocked Clinker down with his fist; but he afterwards made him amends for this outrage, and, in order to avoid the further notice of the people, among whom this incident had made him remarkable, he resolved to leave Scarborough next day.

We set out accordingly over the moors, by the way of Whitby, and began our journey betimes, in hopes of reaching Stockton that night; but in this hope we were disappointed. In the afternoon, crossing a deep gutter, made by a torrent, the coach was so hard strained, that one of the irons, which connect the frame, snapt, and the leather sling on the same side, cracked in the middle. The shock was so great, that my sister Liddy struck her head against Mrs. Tabitha’s nose with such violence that the blood flowed; and Win Jenkins was darted through a small window, in that part of the carriage next the horses, where she stuck like a bawd in the pillory, till she was released by the hand of Mr. Bramble. We were eight miles distant from any place where we could be supplied with chaises, and it was impossible to proceed with the coach, until the damage should be repaired. In this dilemma, we discovered a black-smith’s forge on the edge of a small common, about half a mile from the scene of our disaster, and thither the postilions made shift to draw the carriage slowly, while the company walked a-foot; but we found the blacksmith had been dead some days; and his wife, who had been lately delivered, was deprived of her senses, under the care of a nurse, hired by the parish. We were exceedingly mortified at this disappointment, which, however, was surmounted by the help of Humphry Clinker, who is a surprising compound of genius and simplicity. Finding the tools of the defunct, together with some coals in the smithy, he unscrewed the damaged iron in a twinkling, and, kindling a fire, united the broken pieces with equal dexterity and dispatch. While he was at work upon this operation, the poor woman in the straw, struck with the well- known sound of the hammer and anvil, started up, and, notwithstanding all the nurse’s efforts, came running into the smithy, where, throwing her arms about Clinker’s neck, ‘Ah, Jacob! (cried she) how could you leave me in such a condition?’

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 19


To Dr. Lewis.

Edr. July 18.

DEAR LEWIS,

THAT part of Scotland contiguous to Berwick, nature seems to have intended as a barrier between two hostile nations It is a brown desert of considerable extent, that produces nothing but heath and fern; and what rendered it the more dreary when we passed, there was a thick fog that hindered us from seeing above twenty yards from the carriage. My sister began to make wry faces, and use her smelling-bottle; Liddy looked blank, and Mrs. Jenkins dejected; but in a few hours these clouds were dissipated; the sea appeared upon our right, and on the left the mountains retired a little, leaving an agreeable plain betwixt them and the beach; but, what surprised us all, this plain, to the extent of several miles, was covered with as fine wheat as ever I saw in the most fertile parts of South Britain. This plentiful crop is raised in the open field, without any inclosure, or other manure than the alga marina, or sea-weed, which abounds on this coast; a circumstance which shews that the soil and climate are favourable; but that agriculture in this country is not yet brought to that perfection which it has attained in England. Inclosures would not only keep the grounds warm, and the several fields distinct, but would also protect the crop from the high winds, which are so frequent in this part of the island.

[Chicopac]

Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in... some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention...

From Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[Scheherazade]

"We've just spent a Saturday morning - Kathleen, her mother and me - helping out at a Mile of Pennies in King's Square for the Junior NSPCC. I'm more than happy to help out - banking up good will and good deeds with the Lamb, for although He is meek and mild He is also (inexplicably) part of the trio that can consign you to the Inferno."

from Behing the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 22


To Miss Laetitia Willis, at Gloucester.

Glasgow, Sept. 7.

MY DEAREST LETTY,

NEVER did poor prisoner long for deliverance, more than I have longed for an opportunity to disburthen my cares into your friendly bosom; and the occasion which now presents itself, is little less than miraculous. Honest Saunders Macawly, the travelling Scotchman, who goes every year to Wales, is now at Glasgow, buying goods, and coming to pay his respects to our family, has undertaken to deliver this letter into your own hand. We have been six weeks in Scotland, and seen the principal towns of the kingdom, where we have been treated with great civility. The people are very courteous; and the country being exceedingly romantic, suits my turn and inclinations. I contracted some friendships at Edinburgh, which is a large and lofty city, full of gay company; and, in particular, commenced an intimate correspondence with one miss R—t—n, an amiable young lady of my own age, whose charms seemed to soften, and even to subdue the stubborn heart of my brother Jery; but he no sooner left the place than he relapsed into his former insensibility. I feel, however, that this indifference is not the family constitution. I never admitted but one idea of love, and that has taken such root in my heart, as to be equally proof against all the pulls of discretion, and the frosts of neglect.

[quasimodo1]

2. Humphry Clinker as satire
“Satire”:
Dr Johnson: “a poem [or prose] in which wickedness or folly is censured”;

John Dryden: “the purpose of satire is the amendment of wickedness or folly”.

An active MORAL purpose: presupposes the engagement of this text in the society around it, which it is trying to change, to reform, or at least to criticise.

{comments on Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker from this link: http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergrd/scottish_lit_2/Handouts/ri_humphryclinker.htm



is ON a breakdown of traditional distinctions of rank or status in British society (in Bath and London) as a result of huge flow of wealth into Britain as a result of colonial trade and the wars that have been fought to expand it:
All these absurdities arise from the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept all away, even the very dregs of the people. Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as the very focus of observation—Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation; usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder that their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity and presumption . . . [A]ll of them hurry here to Bath, because here, without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land.

. . .[T]his will ever be the case, till the streams that swell this irresistible torrent of folly and extravagance, shall either be exhausted, or turned into other channels . . .

(Matt Bramble, Bath, April 23)

happens THROUGH a lack of any PHYSICAL gap between Bramble and the world around him. Bramble is physically CONTINUOUS with the society he criticises: he is in pain because it is decaying: he is sick because it is sick.
I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation.

(Jery, Bristol, April 18)

I find my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally—that is to say, every thing that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in my body . . .

(Bramble, London, June 14)

is summed up in the image of the divisions between bodies dissolving in the waters of the spa at Bath, like the divisions between ranks dissolving in the “flood” of wealth from colonies:
. . . [W]e know not what sores may be running into the water while we are bathing, and what sort of matter we may thus imbibe . . .

I can't help suspecting, that there is, or may be, some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below . . .

(Matt Bramble, Bath, April 28)

3. Matthew Bramble in Scotland
Bramble enjoys physical recovery on arrival in Scotland. Why?

To make Scotland look good. Generally represented here as a site of the traditional social hierarchies, of intact sentimental bonds between masters and servants, being eroded in the south.
Scots unpopular in mid-eighteenth century England as a result of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, and an unpopular Scottish Prime Minister (the U.K.’s first), Lord Bute: Smollett ran a pro-Bute newspaper. Horace Walpole: “a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots.”

See also proven loyalty to Britain of Lismahago in contrast to toleration of a known French spy by the fashionable set in London: “Britain”, a common British identity, emerging from shared project of Empire: a good effect of the empire discovered in contact with Scots, to counteract the bad effects encountered in England.

But in Scotland the physical continuity of Bramble with the society around him also broken.
In England, one of the aspects of modernity satirised is modern science’s calling into question the naturalness of our spontaneous responses to things:

. . . that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose . . . In short, he used many learned arguments to persuade his audience out of their senses; and from stench made a transition to filth, which he affirmed was also a mistaken idea, in as much as objects so called, were no other than certain modifications of matter, consisting in the same principles that enter into the composition of all created essences, whatever they may be . . .

(Jery, Bristol, April 18)

In this Smollett echoes Swift’s similar ridicule of trying to put nature in reverse:

His employment from his first coming into the Academy was an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance from the Society of a vessel filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel.

(Gulliver's Travels III.v)

But in Edinburgh, attitudes to excrement are NOT used by Bramble in this way as a measure of the corruption of a society. The custom of emptying chamber-pots into the street at night he classes as

—A practice to which I can by no means be reconciled; for notwithstanding all the care that is taken by their scavengers to remove this nuisance every morning by break of day, enough still remains to offend the eyes, as well as other organs of those whom use has not hardened against all delicacy of sensation.

The inhabitants seem insensible to these impressions, and are apt to imagine the disgust that we avow is little better than affectation; but they ought to have some compassion for strangers, who have not been used to this kind of sufferance . . .

(Bramble, Edinburgh, July 18)

That is, as part of a set of customs, specific to the society in which Bramble finds himself. He is no longer the satirist, continuous with the society around him: he has become instead a detached (sociological) observer of that society, understood as a coherent, knowable, whole, from which he stands apart.

Bramble and Jery’s letters discuss both the distinct nature of Scottish Law, education, and religion, and the modernisation of Scotland with the rise of Glasgow as a commercial centre, agricultural improvement, industry, and colonisation.


But also using the CATEGORIES of Enlightenment historiography to understand this change. E.g. Highland society is based
on something prior to the feudal system, about which the writers of this age have made such a pother, as if it was a new discovery, like the Copernican system. Every peculiarity of policy, custom, and even temperament, is affectedly traced to this origin . . . The connection between the clans and their chiefs is, without all doubt, patriarchal.

(Bramble, Sept 6.)

The feudal system marks that stage of human history, prior to the commercial stage, when the economy is based on agriculture and the power on the ownership of land, with the whole culture and legal systems that go with this; the patriarchal system marks the stage before this, when production is based on herding animals (a pastoral economy). These categories, these distinctions, are straight out of the Scottish speculative historians such as Adam Ferguson and William Robertson.

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 25


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. at Oxon.

Oct. 3.

DEAR KNIGHT,

I BELIEVE there is something mischievous in my disposition, for nothing diverts me so much as to see certain characters tormented with false terrors. We last night lodged at the house of sir Thomas Bullford, an old friend of my uncle, a jolly fellow, of moderate intellects, who, in spite of the gout, which hath lamed him, is resolved to be merry to the last; and mirth he has a particular knack in extracting from his guests, let their humour be never so caustic or refractory. Besides our company, there was in the house a fat- headed justice of the peace, called Frogmore, and a country practitioner in surgery, who seemed to be our landlord’s chief companion and confidant. We found the knight sitting on a couch, with his crutches by his side, and his feet supported on cushions; but he received us with a hearty welcome, and seemed greatly rejoiced at our arrival. After tea we were entertained with a sonata on the harpsichord by lady Bullford, who sung and played to admiration; but sir Thomas seemed to be a little asinine in the article of ears, though he affected to be in raptures, and begged his wife to favour us with an arietta of her own composing. This arietta, however, she no sooner began to perform, than he and the justice fell asleep; but the moment she ceased playing, the knight waked snorting, and exclaimed, ‘O cara! what d’ ye think, gentlemen? Will you talk any more of your Pargolesi and your Corelli?’ At the same time, he thrust his tongue in one cheek, and leered with one eye at the doctor and me, who sat on his left hand. He concluded the pantomime with a loud laugh, which he could command at all times extempore. Notwithstanding his disorder, he did not do penance at supper, nor did he ever refuse his glass when the toast went round, but rather encouraged a quick circulation, both by precept and example.

[quasimodo1]

Chapter 26


To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.

Oct. 4.

DEAR WATKIN,

I YESTERDAY met with an incident which I believe you will own to be very surprising. As I stood with Liddy at the window of the inn where we had lodged, who should pass by but Wilson a-horseback! I could not be mistaken in the person, for I had a full view of him as he advanced; I plainly perceived by my sister’s confusion that she recognized him at the same time. I was equally astonished and incensed at his appearance, which I could not but interpret into an insult, or something worse. I ran out at the gate, and seeing him turn the corner of the street, I dispatched my servant to observe his motions, but the fellow was too late to bring me that satisfaction. He told me, however, that there was an inn, called the Red Lion, at that end of the town, where he supposed the horseman alighted, but that he would not inquire without further orders. I sent him back immediately to know what strangers were in the house, and he returned with a report that there was one Mr. Wilson lately arrived. In consequence of this information I charged him with a note directed to that gentlemen, desiring him to meet me in half an hour in a certain field at the town’s end, with a case of pistols, in order to decide the difference which could not be determined at our last rencounter: but I did not think proper to subscribe the billet. My man assured me he had delivered it into his own hand; and, that having read it, he declared he would wait upon the gentleman at the place and time appointed.

[AuntShecky]

This comes from Ch. Forty-Six of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler (1903) in which Ernest has evoked
a bit of a "sensation" at the University over an essay he'd
written with the angle that Greek dramatists were under-rated.

The speaker is Overton, the book's narrator:

"[T]his was his one idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not another thing left to write about. . ."

". . .He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him someday, and that the development of this would in turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket, but it took him a long time to find out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities.

"Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is parallelled in the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends or an action or indeed anything, there being a unity
in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought that ideas came into clever people's heads by a kind of spontaneous germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the course of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he well knew he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he thought it was."

[Dark Muse]

From World Enough and Time by Robert Warren, Ch. 9, pg. 323

"Ah, that is the thing to fear, not the lie the world tells as a lie, but the lie the world holds as its truth."

[quasimodo1]

This memoir by Gunter Grass is a revelation; the writer of "The Tin Drum" speaks of his life in Germany both before and after the war. From the first chapter entitled "Skins Beneath the Skin"..."Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way. When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disquised."

[Janine]

Interesting quote Quasimodo; so true it is.

Dark Muse, that is good quote from you, also.

Afraid that is as far back as I read tonight...too tired to read them all.

[subterranean]

He is a women.

She had prayed for the moon to rise. But now she found thehalf-light of the incipient moon more terrifying then darkness.The world was now peopled with vague, fantastic figures that dissolved under her steady gaze and then formed again in new shapes.

Yam stood for manliness and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.

In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.

- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe


I have read only until the part where Okonwo decided to follow the tribe's command and killed the boy (Ikemefuna).

[HunterBrown1968]

"Envy and Arrogance and Avarice, Are the three sparks that have all hearts enkindled." (Canto VI, lines 74-75) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation.

"Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire." (Canto IV, lines 41-42) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation.

"He (Adam) learned Spanish words for food and pleasure, and he learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it. He developed a love for poor people he could not have conceived if he had not been poor himself. And by now he was an expert tramp, using humility as a working principle." (Chapter 7 from "East of Eden")

[genoveva]

"The books are junk, the paint peels, the cellar stinks, the teachers call you nigger, and the windows fall in on your heads." p. 33
Jonathan Kozol, Death At An Early Age

[quasimodo1]

From chapter 2, "Encapsulations"....."One word evokes the other: Schulden, Schuld, debts, guilt. Two words so close and so deeply rooted in the soil of the German language. But while debts can be mitigated by installment payments, long-term as they may be (witness my mother's clientele), guilt--whether proven, presumed, or consealed--remains, ticking on and on, and holds its place, even on journeys to nowwhere".

[quasimodo1]

from "Encapsulations", ..."But because so many kept silent, the temptation to great to discount one's own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself all but abstractly, in the third person: he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent...and what's more, silent within, where there is plenty of room for hide and seek."

[Beijing-Doll]

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

[jen182]

^like that quote^

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."

J.D. Salinger-Franny and Zooey

[loggats]

She completely avoided the trap of sentimentality in writing about animals. Though her pets were obviously close favourites, she recorded their deaths or misadventures coolly in her journal. And she seems to have had a special affection for the memory of her great-grandfather Abraham Crompton, who used to pick snails off an ivy-covered wall in his garden and eat them alive.

Beatrix Potter: the ironist in arcadia

secret gardens,humphrey carpenter

[Sara Almqvist]

"En algún lugar de la mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..."

Now that I have nothing to do (No school!), I decided to read "El Quijote" (by Miguel de Cervantes), and that lovely quote is the beginning of the novel...and, I guess, one of my favourite beginnings ever!

[quasimodo1]

Gunter Grass, quote from "Peeling the Onion" from Chapter two...Encapsulations.....speaking of himself much younger..."I observe him reading. It's the only thing he can do for any length of time." ....."Books have always been his gap in the fence, his entry into other worlds." from Chapter 2, Encapsulations

[karo]

"Ever wonder,"'Switters asked, "why people get so worked up over whale hunts, yet object very little to the killing of cattle? It's because whales are rare and intelligent and untamed, whereas cows are commonplace and stupid and domesticated." Presumably, he was referring to the manner in which the powers that be, with the greedy compliance of the media and the eager assistance of evangelicals, were busily bovanizing humanity, seeking to produce a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and beyond basic job skills, not too smart; two legged cows that could be easily milked and, when necessary, guiltlessly slaughtered. This was his meaning, however, he did not belabor her with it.

[DavidM]

Tao Te Ching

"When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can find their own way" (Lao Tzu Chapter 65).

The Souls of Black Folk, re-reading this one.

"they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world" (W.E.B. Du Bois 104).

[dongbei]

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

[karo]

….There are certain channels of communication that operate outside the frequencies of the most prying investigators. A hundred blackbirds will evacuate a tree precisely at the same second – without a discernible signal of any kind. A variety of orchid, lacking nectar as an enticement but needing to be pollinated, attracts male bees by emitting odours like that of a female bee. A wasp will bore for an hour into the hard wood of a tree at the exact spot where hides a tiny grub in whose body she will lay her eggs: there is no outward sign that the grub is there, yet the wasp never misses. At the disposal of the “lower animals” are invisible clocks and computers about which science can only speculate. Similarly, scientists have discovered and recorded “laws” to which electricity, gravity and magnetism adhere – but they have practically no understanding of what these forces are or why. It would seem that there exists in the space-time grid a system of natural order, a mathematics of energy whose “numbers” are even more of a riddle to us than their progressions. It is this arithmetic of consciousness that more simple men call the “supernatural”. The mystery of migrating butterflies, the mystery of gravity and dreams are but operating arms of the Great Mystery, the perpetuation of which sustains us all. If that declaration has a taste of corn about it, so be it. Language grows a bit sticky in areas such as these. However, concerns of this nature can be quite practical and concrete, as we shall see. It is in the realm of High Mystery that certain men and women are destined to act out their lives.

[quasimodo1]

Gunter Grass, part one, "Encapsulations" ....."Still, the case contained Dostoevsky's 'Possessed', Wilhelm Raabe's 'Sparrow Street Chronicle', Schiller's 'Collected Poems' and Selma Lagerlof's 'Gosta Berling'. Something by Sudermann stood side by side with Hamsun's 'Hunger', Keller's 'Green Henry' next to his 'Holiday from Myself'. Fallada's 'Little Man' and 'What Now' was between Raabe's 'Hunger Pastor' and Storm's 'The White Horseman'. Dahn's 'Battle for Rome' was most likely the support for the illustrated volume with the title 'Rasputin and Women', which I later gave to a certain character to read as an antidote to Goethe's 'Elective Affinities'..."

[bouquin]

Maybe we remember, anyway, by selectively forgetting, and vice versa ... Then again, some of the things you try most to forget come back and ambush you, often in your calmest moments.

- from The Bird Artist by Howard Norman.

[ben.!]

'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: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.' - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

The opening is just so awesome. :-D

[quasimodo1]

" ....That is an issue neither onion nor amber cares about. They want accurate information about other things, about what else has been encapsulated, about what has been swallowed in shame, about secrets in varying disguise, about nits nesting in sackhair. Eloquently avoided words. Slivers of thought. Things that hurt. Even now..."

[Dori]

"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won't take it."


From Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
(Part I, Chapter 1, Section 5)

[quasimodo1]

from Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass........................."Soon thereafter I witnessed an event that should have made the downfall of the German Reich evident--the organized chaos of defeat moving slowly, then with dispatch, and finally at break-net speed. Was I able to recognize what things ere coming to? Did I realize what was going on with us, with me? Did the never-endinng activity, the all-consuming need for a ladle of soup and a crust of bread, along with fears of various magnitudes, leave any room for insight into the general situation? Was the seventeen year old at all conscious of the beginning of the end, of the gradually increasing dimensions of what was later called the collapse?"................from chapter III

[Tersely]

I can't describe to you how chapfallen and angry my cousin looked. She sniffed once or twice, and then said, rather bitterly, in a subdued tone:- "Well, now; I hope you are pleased?"

-Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

[bouquin]

... the mind can keep its freshness to the last, and ... it is only fools that are overbored. There was a way of never being bored, and the wise man's duty was to find it out... one grows tired of one's self sooner than of anything else in the world... One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently occupied; one was always idle when one's occupation had not a high aim. One was idle, therefore, when one was working simply for one's self... Ennui was at the end of everything that did not multiply our relations with life.

[Hira]

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

-- Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death - the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without - cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

~~ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

[knightss]

"The sea of blood will rise until it reaches every one of us and submerge all who stayed out of the war. The revolution is the flood."

-Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Pantheon Books, 182)

[1n50mn14]

"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicillian when death is on the line.'"

-The Princess Bride, William Godman/S.Morgenstern (Del Ray, 156)

[Dori]

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Part II, Chapter 5, Section 5)

[quasimodo1]

Gunter Grass from "Peeling the Onion" Chapter 5, "Guests at Table" ..."Not a single one of the ten thousand starved to death, of course, but the want of food gave us an ascetic appearance. Even those not so inclined underwent a spiritual transformation. My new spiritual look must have suited me: my enlarged eyes saw more than was before them, choirs rejoicing beyond the senses. And since hunger brought home the maxim 'Man does not live by bread alone' not only as camp cynicism but also as consolatory bromide, many of us felt an increased desire for spiritual food"

[Igetanotion]

I actually just finished this book a few days ago, but there were two things that I thought were very much worth quoting. (I underline a lot in my books.. :goof: )

They are both from Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal"

"The proud husband told the reporter ' My wife and I have a saying that you can tell the health of a marriage by the number of teeth marks on your tongue.' I wonder, when I'm around such people, What are they being punished for? Thirty-four years. One stands in awe of the masochistic rigor required."

and

"The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. Your grandparents go long before your parents, and your parents go long before you."

the first one cracks me up. :lol:

[Abs]

"And I am treating my poor heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted. Tell no one of this; there are people who would it take it amiss."

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Von Goethe

:thumbs_up

[Igetanotion]

"So it goes." - Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

OH MY!!!! That is one of my favorite books, I must have read it a dozen times. I am having that put on my gravestone.
just my name and "So it goes" in the middle. Great quote!:thumbs_up

[bouquin]

Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

- from the short story Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield

[Hira]

The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the children laugh.

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:

"Damned Italians! coming over here!"

As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being -- that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:

"Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!"

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

From Eveline ~ The Dubliners, James Joyce


Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Part II, Chapter 5, Section 5)

That is a beautiful line, Dori!

[Lulim]

In the middle of January, schoolwork turned its attention to letter-writing. After learning the basics, each student was to write two letters, one to a friend and one to somebody in another class.
Liesel's letter from Rudy went like this:

Dear Saumensch,

Are you still as useless at football as you were the last time we played? I hope so. That means I can run past you again just like Jesse Owens at the Olympics …

When Sister Maria found it, she asked him a question, very amiably.

Sister Maria's Offer: 'Do you feel like visiting the corridor, Mr. Steiner?'

Needless to say, Rudy answered in the negative, and the paper was torn up and he started again.

[The Intended]

From "Youth," by Joseph Conrad:

"Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within . . ."

Joseph Conrad is the only author that can make me emotional from sheer mastery of language. I can't read this story without bursting into tears.

[Anza]

It was a bit disconcerting this side of Felicity, like having a pet shark that thinks itself a goldfish."
A Great and Terrible Beauty

[Simao]

Last night I bought like five books one of them was A Portrait of Dorian Gray. It seems like a good book but that is only from ten pages read so I don't know yet.

[Dark Muse]

The Book Of Shadows James Rese

What finer tribute might a man know than to be mistrusted by the stupid for being clever, envied by the inept for making good, loathed by the dull for his wit, by the boors for his breeding an by the ugly for his successes?

[NikolaiI]

"the Joyous Cosmology," by philosopher, thinker and writer, Alan Watts

The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems to be, the more I am moved to marvel at the ingenuity with which divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this cosmic joie de vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so reassuring—nothing around here but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I were to step up and say, "Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be.* When people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the unconscious—"You know....You know!"

[NikolaiI]

" I recall the words of an ancient Tantric scripture: "As waves come with water and flames with fire, so the universal waves with us." Gestures of the gesture, waves of the wave—leaves flowing into caterpillars, grass into cows, milk into babies, bodies into worms, earth into flowers, seeds into birds, quanta of energy into the iridescent or reverberating labyrinths of the brain. Within and swept up into this endless, exulting, cosmological dance are the base and grinding undertones of the pain which transformation involves: chewed nerve endings, sudden electric-striking snakes in the meadow grass, swoop of the lazily circling hawks, sore muscles piling logs, sleepless nights trying to keep track of the unrelenting bookkeeping which civilized survival demands.

How unfamiliarly natural it is to see pain as no longer a problem. For problematic pain arises with the tendency of self-consciousness to short-circuit the brain and fill its passages with dithering echoes—revulsions to revulsions, fears of fear, cringing from cringing, guilt about guilt—twisting thought to trap itself in endless oscillations. In his ordinary consciousness man lives like someone trying to speak in an excessively sensitive echo-chamber; he can proceed only by doggedly ignoring the interminably gibbering reflections of his voice. For in the brain there are echoes and reflected images in every dimension of sense, thought, and feeling, chattering on and on in the tunnels of memory. The difficulty is that we confuse this storing of information with an intelligent commentary on what we are doing at the moment, mistaking for intelligence the raw materials of the data with which it works. Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we mistake the double image for two selves—mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering. "
Same book

[bouquin]

The following is a line from Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter . It sort of reflects my sentiment of the moment:

It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.

[optimisticnad]

This made me laugh so much:

'At any rate they were an amazingly ugly gang....'

THe Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G.Wells

[Dark Muse]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to bewaiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then almostat the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standimng far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the floor far away and begining again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfation shook his soul to know he had not yielded nor undone all.

[islandclimber]

"I'm a bachelor of myself, of course I understand... Forward. I shall quickly... Good players do not take a long time to think. Forward. I caught just a glimpse of your spouse- a juicy little piece, no two ways about it- what a neck, that's what I like... Hey, wait a minute, that was an oversight, allow me to take my move back. Here, this is better. I am a grat aficionado of women, and the way they love me, the rascals, you simply wouldn't believe it. You were writing to your spouse there about her pretty eyes and lips. Recently, you know, I had... Why can't my pawn take it? Oh, I see. Clever, clever. All right, I retreat. Recently I had sexual intercourse with an extraordinarily healthy and splendid individual. What pleasure you experience, when a large brunette... What is this? That's a snide move on your part. You must warn your opponent, this won't do. Here, let me change my last move. So. Yes, a gorgeous, passionate creature- and, you know, I'm no piker myself, I've got such a spring that- wow! Generally speaking, of the numerous earthly temptations, which, in jest, but really with the utmost seriousness, I intend to submit gradually for your consideration, the temptation of sex... No, wait a minute, I haven't decided yet if I want to move that piece there. Yes, I will. What do you mean, checkmate? Why checkmate? I can't go here; I can't go there; I can't go anywhere. Wait a minute, what was the position? No, before that. Ah, now that's a different story. A mere oversight. All right, I'll move here. Yes, a red rose between her teeth, black net stockings up to here, and not-a-stitch besides-that's really something, that's the supreme... and now, instead of the raptures of love, dank stone, rusty iron, and ahead- well, you know yourself what lies ahead. Now this I overlooked. And what if I move otherwise? Yes, this is better. The game is mine, anyways- you make one mistake after another. What if she was unfaithful to you- didn't you hold her in your embraces? When people ask me for advice I always tell them, 'Gentlemen, be inventive. There is nothing more pleasant, for example, than to surround oneself with mirrors and watch the good work going on there- wonderful! Hey! Now this is far from wonderful. Word of honour, I thought I had moved to this square, not to that. So therefore you were unable... Back, please. Simultaneously I like to smoke a cigar and talk of insignificant matters, and I like her to talk too- there's nothing to be done, I have a certain streak of perversion in me... Yes, how grievous, how frightening and hurtful to say farewell to all this- and to think that others, who are just as young and sappy, will continue to work and work... ah! I don't know about you, but when it comes to caresses I love what we French wrestlers call 'macarons': You give her a nice slap on the neck, and, the firmer the meat... First of all, I can take your night, secondly, I can simply move my king away; all right- there. No, stop, stop, I'd like to think for a minute after all. What was your last move? Put that piece back and let me think. Nonsense, there's no checkmate here. You, it seems to me- if you do not mind my saying so- are cheating: this piece stood here, or maybe here, but not there, I am absolutely certain. Come, put it back, put it back..."

Mr. Pierre, talking at Cincinattus while they play chess in prison...

Nabokov --- 'Invitation to a Beheading'

cheers

[Alexei]

As you can see by my signature I am reading "Against nature". While I was reading it I stumbled on this passage, which I want to share:


"The gardeners brought still other varieties which had the appearance of artificial skin ridged with false veins, and most of them looked as though consumed by syphilis and leprosy, for they exhibited livid surfaces of flesh veined with scarlet rash and damasked with eruptions. Some had the deep red hue of scars that have just closed or the dark tint of incipient scabs. Others were marked with matter raised by scaldings. There were forms which exhibited shaggy skins hollowed by ulcers and relieved by cankers. And a few appeared embossed with wounds, covered with black mercurial hog lard, with green unguents of belladonna smeared with grains of dust and the yellow micas of iodoforme."

"Against nature" by Karl Joris Huysmans

I was surprised by this description which sounds so "out of the box" in comparison with what I usually hear. I was captured by it.

[superunknown]

'Your identification cards?' She was gazing in amazement at Koroviev's pince-nez, and also at Behemoth's primus and Behemoth's torn elbow.
'A thousand pardons, but what identification cards?' asked Koroviev in surprise.
'You're writers?' the citizeness asked in her turn.
'Unquestionably,' Koroviev answered with dignity.
'Your identification cards?' the citizeness repeated.
'My sweetie...' Koroviev began tenderly.
'I'm no sweetie,' interrupted the citizeness.
'More's the pity,' Koroviev said disappointedly and went on: 'Well, so, if you don't want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don't have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of his novels and you'll be convinced, without any identification card, that you're dealing with a writer. And I don't think he even had any identification card! What do you think?' Koroviev turned to Behemoth.
'I'll bet he didn't,' replied Behemoth, setting the primus down on the table beside the ledger and wiping the sweat from his sooty forehead with his hand.
'You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.
'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!'

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

[superunknown]

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

[ben.!]

Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.

The Time Machine - H. G. Wells

[bouquin]

Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.
~ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (by Michael Chabon)

[quasimodo1]

Gunter Grass Peeling the Onion "In the debate among the gods of the existentialist

doctrine of salvation, a debate ranging over years and borders, I took sides--first gingerly,

then vehemendtly--with Camus. But I went further: mistrusting all ideologies and rejecting

all faiths, I made stone rolling my daily discipline. I liked that Sisyphus. Damned by the

gods, as sure of the absurdity of human existance as he was of the sun's coming up and

going down, and thus aware that the stone he rolled up the hill would not stay put--he

became a saint to me, a saint I could worship. A hero beyond hope or despair. A man made

happy by a restless stone. A man who never gives up."

[Kafka's Crow]

She was my incubus, but she filled my house. I was like a dazed fly alone in the empty rooms.

Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author Act I

[Hira]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to bewaiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then almostat the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standimng far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the floor far away and begining again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfation shook his soul to know he had not yielded nor undone all.

Hey Dark Muse, how did you find the book? Are you still reading it? Read it several weeks ago, truly liked it.

[Mockingbird_z]

The catcher in the rye
It's not too bad when the sun's out but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
and this one:
Who wants flowers when you are dead? Nobody.

[goodmanbrown]

From Jim Harrison's Memoir "Off to the Side"

On writers and drinking:

"For instance, Hemingway scholars have not been quite up to the fact that his accident-proneness was a result of getting pie-eyed everyday after his morning work"

[thom]

"My thesis is that the language of all poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry."
Robert Graves - The White Goddess

[quasimodo1]

O fleeting soul of mine, my body's friend and guest, whither goes thou, pale, fearful, and pensive one? Why laugh not as of old?
[Lat., Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis!
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, frigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis joca?]
- Hadrian (Adrian), Aelius Publius Hadrianus Aelius,
Ad Animam,
according to Aelius Spartianus
{introductory expression in Latin, From "The Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar}

[quasimodo1]

From "The Memoirs of Hadrian" (first chapter, Animula Vagula Blandula) "Already certain portions of my life are like dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy in its entirety. I can hunt no longer: if there were no one but me to disturb them in their ruminations and their play the deer in the Etrurian mountains would be at peace. With the Diana of the forests I have always maintained the swift-changing and passionate relations which are those of a man with the object of his love: the boar hunt gave me my first chance, as a boy, for command and for encounter with danger: I fairly threw myself into the sport, and my excesses in it brought reprimands from Trajan."

[quasimodo1]

Marguerite Yourcenar..."Memoirs of Hadrian" From personal notes titled "Reflections on the Composition" "This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F. ...and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to efface the personal. But even the longest dedication in too short and too comonplace to honor a friendship so uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique: that in the whole adventure of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even inn the entire life of some fortunate writers, there must have been sometimes, in the backround, perhaps, someone who will not let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain, out of fatigue; someone who would re-read with us for the twentieth time, if need be, a questionable page; someone who takes down for us from the library shelves th heavy tomes in which we may find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse rthem long after weariness has made us give up: someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes, our ideas; who shares with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless work which both require, never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque."

[bouquin]

There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him.
(Chapter 9)

To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.
(Chapter 13)

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age.
(Chapter 13)

And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life.
(Chapter 13)

Nothing is too bloody much. You just have to take it and fight out of it and now stop prima-donnaing and accept the fact...
(Chapter 14)

How simple it is when one knows nothing.
(Chapter 14)

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
(Chapter 43)

[karo]

"You will never know the truth, and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones."

Iris Murdoch

[quasimodo1]

from "Memoirs of Hadrian" chapter title..."Varius Multiplex Multiformis" "And it was then that the wisest of my good geniouses came to my aid: Plotina. ... Both of us had a passion for adorning, then laying bare, our souls, and for testing our minds on every touchstone. She leaned toward Epicurean philosophy, that narrow but clean bed whereon I have sometimes rested my thought. The mystery of the gods, which haunted me, did not trouble her, nor had she my ardent love for the human body. She was chaste by reason of her disgust with the merely facile, generous by determination rather than by nature, wisely mistrustful but ready to accept anything from a friend, even his inevitable errors. Friendship was a choice to which she devoted her whole being; she gave herself to it utterly, and as I have done only to my loves. She as known me better than anyone has; I have let her see what I carefully concealed from everone else; for example, my secret lapses into cowardice. I like to thinnk that on her side she has kept almost nothing from me. No bodily intimacy ever existed between us; in its place was this contact of two minds closely intermingled."

[AdoreroDio]

"Something well said is something well said, something said superbly is a poem."
- Reality of Fiction

[quasimodo1]

from "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar Chapter: Tellus Stabilita

"I should say outright that I have little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken,

and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip

easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. Respect for ancient laws

answers to what is deepest rooted in human piety, but it serves also to pillow the

inertia of judges. The oldest codes are a part of that very savagery which they

were striving to correct: even the most venerable among them are the product of

force."

[Andro]

I just finished up a rereading of Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five." Kilgore Trout is one of my favorite characters and this quote is in reference to one of the books he published.

"Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer. So it goes."

[bouquin]

...forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

[Scheherazade]

...forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.


That was the first Fowles book I read (about 20 years ago) and loved it. Hope you enjoy it too! :)

When you finish reading, maybe you can post a review for us?

[dum_spiro_spero]

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning."
Haruki Murakami "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

[ben.!]

'He made out that he was the only real horrorshow prestoopnick in the whole zoo, going on that he'd done this and done the other and killed ten rozzes with one crack of his rooker and all that cal. But nobody was impressed, O my brothers.' - A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.

[kelby_lake]

'why was too black for the newspaper to print and too deep for Giovanni to tell'

[aeroport]

But there is reason to suspect that a people are waning to decay and ruin, the moment that their life becomes fascinating either to the poet's imagination or the painter's eye.
Chapter XXXII: "Scenes By the Way"

One of two or three passages in this book that might be called 'funny.'

[Kirby]

I won't give you all of the details, but I will tell you that the Candide & his fellow traveler are found sleeping on the ground by 'Oreillons'. The Oreillons have Candide, who is wearing a Jesuit hat, and his fellow traveler tied up, as they all begin to cry out, one and all, "A Jesuit! a Jesuit! we shall be revenged; we shall have excellent cheer; let us eat this Jesuit; let us eat him up." Needless to say it put a big smile on my face.

[SirRaustusBear]

Sure enough, below the big embankment, along the river, in a little street of old houses, youths were standing outside or sitting in doorways, chatting with one another across the road and asking about the battle. Until the bullets hit them in the head, they couldn't help being curious, even excited, by it all.

[Pseudōnumos]

I won't give you all of the details, but I will tell you that the Candide & his fellow traveler are found sleeping on the ground by 'Oreillons'. The Oreillons have Candide, who is wearing a Jesuit hat, and his fellow traveler tied up, as they all begin to cry out, one and all, "A Jesuit! a Jesuit! we shall be revenged; we shall have excellent cheer; let us eat this Jesuit; let us eat him up." Needless to say it put a big smile on my face.

I think an even more memorable part of Candide would have to be "I was in this state of weakness and languor, between life and death, when I felt myself touched by something which moved over my body. Opening my eyes, I saw a white man, rather attractive, who was groaning and saying under his breath: O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni (Oh what a misfortune to have no testicles!)

[djy78usa]

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool. -George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, from a collection of his essays.

In the essay he describes a time that he shot an elephant, which he did not really want to shoot, in colonial Burma. He only shot it because that is what the "natives" expected him to do after the elephant killed an Indian resident. He would look like a fool if he grabbed his rifle, headed down to the paddy where the elephant was, and then left without having killed it.

Earlier in the essay he mentions that the worst thing that could happen to a white man in the Asian colonies was being laughed at by the local population. When he is contemplating what would happen if the elephant charged him, he says he is not scared of the thought of dying, just the thought of how his dying would reflect on the Empire:


The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong, those two thousannd Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

[Mockingbird_z]

Won't you let me try to make up a little for all I've failed to do in the past?
(Painted Veil by S. Maugham)

[Camán]

" Start bravely, not to reason but to act.
As soon as you begin to act you will immediately become aware
of the necessity of justifying your actions."

Stanislavski - An Introduction

[JaneB]

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens

"Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mamnals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plent of time for silence. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

[Sir Bartholomew]

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure to be talked of.

- Jane Austen, Emma

[Lioness_Heart]

'What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?'
(Last line of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell)

[Dark Muse]

The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne

Chapter XVI: Leave-Takings


When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred past with any show of those common-place civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse. Being dead henceforth to him, and he to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtsey with eyes that were inpenetrable beneath the glaze and film. We passed, therefore, as if mutuall invisible.

[Sir Bartholomew]

Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world! - and unfortunately, there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late. Miss Smith, Persuasion (Austen)

[tractatus]

This is very strong expression.

‘Yet when six o’clock comes and I touch my hat to the commissionaire, being always too effusive in ceremony since I desire so much to be accepted; and struggle, leaning against the wind, buttoned up, with my jaws blue and my eyes running water, I wish that a little typist would cuddle on my knees; I think that my favourite dish is liver and bacon; and so am apt to wander to the river, to the narrow streets where there are frequent public-houses, and the shadows of ships passing at the end of the street, and women fighting. But I say to myself, recovering my sanity, Mr Prentice at four; Mr Eyres at four-thirty. The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.’
The Waves , Woolf

[naomi moon]

"...je suis las de tuer tout tes amants, c'est toi que je tuerai."
"J'ai toujours pensait que tu me tuerais. La premiée fois que je t'ai vu, je venais de rencontrer un prétre à la porte de ma maison. Et cette nuit, En sortant de Cordoue, n'as tu rien vu? Un liévre a passé entre les pieds de ton cheval. C'est écrit." Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.
It was said by Carmen to Don José.

[bounty]

a young man named adam, on the run from the law, trying to survive in the desert..."To starve was nothing, but to eat while starving was hell!"

[mickitaz]

"Great events have incalculable results" pg 8 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo

[Scheherazade]

"It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one."

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

[Scheherazade]

"[The soldiers] moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they has evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure."

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

[Joreads]

I know how but I do not know why

1984 by George Orwell

[CognitiveArtist]

Hi, it's nice and comfortable to be here in this forum :) I'm currently read the eccentric Strindberg's A Madman's Defense and here's a passage from it:

"And while I, completely absorbed in my daily toil, lived unsuspectingly from day to day, a false legend took shape and form, grounded on nothing but the talk of the envious and the rumormongering of the café crowd. And I, idiot that I was, believed everybody except myself. Ah!..."

It's a paranoid and melodramatic piece, but not without it's charm.

[Domer121]

"But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her but once in his life!"
~ THe unbearable lightness of being~ Milan Kundera

[Dark Muse]

A Passage To India~ E.M Forster


They removed their turbans, and one put a lump of butter on his forehead, and waited for it to slide down his nose into his mouth. Before it could arrive, another stole up behind him, snatched the melting morsel, and swallowed it himself. All laughed exultantly at discovering that the divine sense of humour coincided with their own. "God si love!" There is fun in heaven. God can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs away from beneath His own posteriors, set His own turbans on fire, and steal His own petticoats when He bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment. All spirit as well as all matter must participate in salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle is incomplete.

[Janine]

A Passage To India~ E.M Forster

Dark Muse, I love that book; I like everything I have read by Forster. Is it required reading for you course? I love the movie adaptation, too. In fact, I own it; stars Judy Davis, so it is an older film, but a true classic, directed by the late David Lean. Enjoy your reading, DM.

Here is a quote from Willa Cather's short novel ~ "Alexander's Bridge":


After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without obtrusions of ugliness or change.

I just love that description of someone's personal study.

[Dark Muse]

Dark Muse, I love that book; I like everything I have read by Forster. Is it required reading for you course? I love the movie adaptation, too. In fact, I own it; stars Judy Davis, so it is an older film, but a true classic, directed by the late David Lean. Enjoy your reading, DM.


Yes it is one of the books required for my Brit. Lit. class. I am throughly enjoying the novel and only have but a few pages left from it.

[Janine]

Yes it is one of the books required for my Brit. Lit. class. I am throughly enjoying the novel and only have but a few pages left from it.

Good for you DM. It is a wonderful book! Have you read any others by Forster? I went through a stage of reading his books. I love "A Room With a View"...it actually makes me laugh out loud; it is not a long book, either.

[Dark Muse]

No, I have not yet read any of his other books

[Janine]

No, I have not yet read any of his other books

I only read "Howard's End" and "A Room with a View"....I loved them both...and also, "Passage to India"...they all were fine reads!

[cipherdecoy]

"Justice. . . limps along, but it gets there all the same."

In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez.

[andave_ya]

"Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didn't crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever."

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.

[bouquin]

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.


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

And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.


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

How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!


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

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.


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

... hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.


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

... beauty ... flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident.


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

"You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good."


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

... the good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.

[Pyrrho]

"[The soldiers] moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they has evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure."

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Finished that one just about two weeks ago. But I found it much too emotional... Had its good parts though.

[Scheherazade]

Finished that one just about two weeks ago. But I found it much too emotional... Had its good parts though.I have written a review of the book here:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34988

If you like, you can add yours as well :)

[Pyrrho]

I am not yet confident enough to post a review. :) But I have to agree largely with yours. While the parts about the war were quite good, the bit about Elizabeth is very cliché. When he writes about her affair and feminism I had the impression that I read all of it before...and not necessary in the great books.

Sorry. I meant 'necessarily'. Writing in English is pretty difficult.

[Dark Muse]

The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bown

Chapter 4


Most mornings, Lilian waited for Portia in the old cemetery off Paddington Street: they liked to take this short cut on the way to lessons. The cemetery, overlooked by windows, has been out of touch with death for some time: it is at once a retreat and a thoroughfare not yet too well known. One or two weeping willows and tombs like stone pavilions give it a prettily solemn character, but the gravestones are all ranged round the walls like chairs before a dance, and half way acorss the lawn a circular shelter looks like a bandstand. Paths run from gate to gate, and shrubs inside the paling seclude the place from the street-it is not sad, just cosily melancholic. Lilian enjoyed the melancholy; Portia felt that what was here was her secret every time she turned in at the gate.

[bouquin]

" ... that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed."

[Tiny Dancer]

my favourite quotes are from a book called Twilight (it is so sad)

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."




AND





Darkness is so predictable, don't you think?" He smiled wistfully.

"I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars."

[Dark Muse]

Madame Bovary~ Gustave Flaubert


"I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all those others with thier mummeries and thier juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Surpreme Being; in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed use here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to chruch to kiss silver plates and fatten out of my pocket a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one I know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even comtemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and Beranger! I am for the profression of faith of the Sayvoyard Vicar, and the immoratal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden withy a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves and completly opposed moreover, to all physcial laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in torpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them"

[Page Sniffer]

From In the Monitor's Turret , journal entry by Samuel Dana Greene, 1862:
"...We left New York harbor in tow of the tug-boat Seth Low at 11A.M., of Thursday, the 6th of March. On the following day a moderate breeze was encountered, and it was at once evident that the Monitor was unfit as a sea-going craft. Nothing but the subsidence of the wind prevented her from being shipwrecked before she reached Hampton Roads. The berth-deck hatch leaked in spite of all we could do, and the water came down under the turret like a waterfall. It would strike the pilot-house and go over the turret in beautiful curves, and it came through the eye-holes in the pilot-house with such force as to knock the helmsman completely round from the wheel. The waves also broke over the blower-pipes, and the water came down through them in such quantities that the belts of the engines slipped, and the engines consequently stopped for lack of artificial draught, without which, in such a confined place, the fires could not get air for combustion..." pg 265, American Sea Writing, Library of America.

The Monitor still had to go on against these odds and do battle with the Confederate Navy operating from Norfolk, Virginia in the Hampton Roads, Chesapeke Bay area during our War Between the States aka, Civil War. Can you imagine what was in the minds of the crew of the Monitor during this near death attempt of just trying to stay afloat on the way to battle?

[byquist]

Practice Nonchalance. Never seem to be working too hard . . . Even when something demands a lot of sweat, make it look effortless . . ."

from The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Wish I'd come across this kind of book a long time ago; would have saved a lot of time and mistakes. Recommend it.

[CognitiveArtist]

Stendhal The Red and the Black first paragraph from the chapter 'Entry into Society'

(square brackets are translator's, round brackets are Stendhal's)


Julien stood dumbfounded in the middle of the courtyard.
'Do try to look as if you had your wits about you,' said Father Pirard; 'you have these horrible ideas, and then you act just like a child! What's happened to Horace's nil mirari [:nil admirari 'do not marvel at anything']? (Never show any enthusiam.) Just think that this tribe of lackeys, on seeing you established here, will try to make fun of you; they will see in you an equal who has been unjustly put above them. Beneath outward appearences of good nature, kind advice, and a desire to guide you, they will try to get you to put your foot in it in a big way.'
'I defy them to,' said Julien, biting his lip, and he resumed all his wariness.

[white camellia]

Punishment, according to our conception, should bear some proportion to the offence. Why then eternal punishment for the temporary offences of so frail a creature as man?

Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (http://18th.eserver.org/hume-suicide.txt)
David Hume

[Dark Muse]

The Initiate Brother, Sean Russle

Pg. 175

Chapeter Eight


Walls: they were everywhere and everywhere they went unoticed-not that they weren't resepcted, that was not the case-they were simply not considered for what they were; the Signficant Pattern.

But it had always been so. Even a thousand years before, the Lord Botahara had spoken of walls: "Between themselves and the weak the strong build walls, fearing that the weak will learn of thier own strength. So it is that the poor are shut out into the wide world with all of its uncertainity but also with all of its purity and beauty. Whose palace garden compares to the perfection of the mountain meadows? So thinking to shut out the poor and the weak, the strong suceed only in walling themselves in. Such is the nature of illusion."

[BREWNING]

I'm reading The Merry-Go-Round by Joshua Bruening...

You can find it at amazon / barnesandnoble . com

It's worth checking out!

[bouquin]

"Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness ..."


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

What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell... It is important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.

[behindblueeyes]

"It was a way of giving herself permission to be entirely heedless in her escapades. And then she made the most of it, repeatedly."
-Emma, Mme. Bovary

[Miarose]

I'm reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi for just about the hundredth time... I can't get over how good of a book it is, even as I get older. (I'm reading an online version this time though, I got it in ebook (http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=162199) form off this cool site.)
Some of my favourite quotes from Life of Pi:

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation"

"I discovered at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. It's not something evident, in my experience. Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others--and I am one of those-- never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. It maybe nothing more than life-hungry stupidity"

and my absolute favourite:

"The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity–it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud."

[Aiculík]

"Eyes mark the shape of the city.
Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entitty created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to teh ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding."

Openin paragraph of Murakami's After Dark. When I read it in the bookstore I knew I'll love it and bought it immediately. And so far, book meets my high expectations. :)

[patrickbeverley]

"This book sums up my lifelong effort to discover and test what is involved and required for successful child-rearing—that is, the raising of a child who may not necessarily become a success in the eyes of the world, but who on reflection would be well pleased with the way he was raised, and who would decide that, by and large, he is satisfied with himself, despite the shortcomings to which all of us are prey."
Bruno Bettelheim, A Good Enough Parent

[EastofEden]

John Steinbeck's East of Eden....its hard to convey just how powerful these words are when they have been removed from the central story

"The ways of sin are curious...I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up." (p. 166)

"The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time and so did the brothels." (p. 215)

"I believe that when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side, you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other - cold, lonely, greatness. There you make your choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?....Isn't it strange? A father wanting to condemn his son to greatness! What selfishness that must be." (p. 263)

and of course, the most triumphant moment of the whole book,

"Don't you see? The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you call sin ignorance. The King James translations makes a promise in "Thou shalt", meaning that men will most surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word timshel - "Thou mayest" - that gives a choice. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if it is true that thou mayest - it is also true that thou mayest not." (p. 301)

[Hypercrit Htd]

Mr. Steinbeck no historian. The first church not arrive same time as whorehouse. People had temple, religion many century before it. Historical fact show it were Greeks who invented whorehouse, exploited foreign women. That your democracy-that your failure-that the decline of your civilization.

[Hypercrit Htd]

after that Greek introduced whore,porn to western world.

[aeroport]

There were hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a connexion more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them in life.

'The Altar of the Dead' - Henry James

[patrickbeverley]

Mr. Steinbeck no historian. The first church not arrive same time as whorehouse.
I think the "Far West" part is important. Anyway, of course Steinbeck wasn't a historian. He was a writer, and the central point of that sentence is not the exact historical accuracy, but the comparison of the religious and the sexual experience that Steinbeck makes.


That your democracy-that your failure-that the decline of your civilization.
Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

[JBI]

I think the "Far West" part is important. Anyway, of course Steinbeck wasn't a historian. He was a writer, and the central point of that sentence is not the exact historical accuracy, but the comparison of the religious and the sexual experience that Steinbeck makes.


Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.

Prostitution is a sign of democracy. In authoritative regimes it is possible to actually disallow prostitution, to the point where women (or men more modernly) will not practice it, for fear of the punishment, despite its capital necessity. But in democracy, the attempt to liberalize everyone involves allowing people control over their own bodies, and in that sense, the right to make a living wherever they want as long as nobody (usually including themselves) is harmed.

Even Pope John Paul II realized that it should not be legislation that stops prostitution, but the fact that society doesn't need to create women in the state where they do prostitute themselves (this is of course, sexually biased, assuming women do not have the strength to not be prostitutes, and that all prostitutes hate their job).

Prostitution is older than the church, and even was made legal during the dark ages by the church (even going as far as having state and church run brothels), on the prompting of the writings of St. Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo, the famous autobiographer). In truth, the catholic church holds that soliciting a prostitute is better than masturbating, and therefore, to not damn male souls to hell, prostitutes were seen as integral to society.

As for democracy playing in with it, really prostitution has nothing to do with democracy, if people are given control over their bodies, than prostitution only has to do with economics, and the welfare of the prostitutes in question.

[bouquin]

If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.


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I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which ... is home at the moment.



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"... Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky."


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... if the Lord can't inspire you to leave off sinning any other way, then, it's His business to scare the dickens out of you.


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God works, as is very well known, in mysterious ways. There is just nothing you can name that He won't do, now and then. Oh, He will send down so much rain that all his little people are drinking from one another's sewers and dying ... Then he will organize a drought to scorch ... so whoever did not die of fever will double over from hunger.


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To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story ...

[Hypercrit Htd]

I think the "Far West" part is important. Anyway, of course Steinbeck wasn't a historian. He was a writer, and the central point of that sentence is not the exact historical accuracy, but the comparison of the religious and the sexual experience that Steinbeck makes.


Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.


Prostitution BEGAN with democracy- Greece c.sixth century B.C.E. History show every indication that the western world experience nothing like it before that time.That probably due to class competition-upper class men having slave. Foreign women , children were enslave in brothel for that purpose.

You the bloody fool-study history before you make accusations!

[Hypercrit Htd]

Prostitution is a sign of democracy. In authoritative regimes it is possible to actually disallow prostitution, to the point where women (or men more modernly) will not practice it, for fear of the punishment, despite its capital necessity. But in democracy, the attempt to liberalize everyone involves allowing people control over their own bodies, and in that sense, the right to make a living wherever they want as long as nobody (usually including themselves) is harmed.

Even Pope John Paul II realized that it should not be legislation that stops prostitution, but the fact that society doesn't need to create women in the state where they do prostitute themselves (this is of course, sexually biased, assuming women do not have the strength to not be prostitutes, and that all prostitutes hate their job).

Prostitution is older than the church, and even was made legal during the dark ages by the church (even going as far as having state and church run brothels), on the prompting of the writings of St. Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo, the famous autobiographer). In truth, the catholic church holds that soliciting a prostitute is better than masturbating, and therefore, to not damn male souls to hell, prostitutes were seen as integral to society.

As for democracy playing in with it, really prostitution has nothing to do with democracy, if people are given control over their bodies, than prostitution only has to do with economics, and the welfare of the prostitutes in question.

Organize prostitution BEGAN with democracy so it have more to do with it than might be suppose. The Greek saw it as way for poor men to have slave. It never question because no one question slavery. There were no prostitute in Rome until Greek introduced the practice. Prostitution not about simple economics-it about economic slavery.

[coolestnerdever]

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

I love Jane Austen.

[Argus]

From The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler:

"In a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at Battersby in after years the diary which he kept on the first of these occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by generation after generation of prigs and impostors."

Butler is hilarious and I wish I had read those lines before I studied art history.

[thelastmelon]

I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm very much enjoying the dialogues between the man and the boy:

"They're going to kill those people, arent they?
Yes.
Why do they have to do that?
I dont know.
Are they going to eat them?
I dont know.
They're going to eat them, arent they?
Yes.
And we couldn't help them because then they'd eat us too.
Yes.
And that's why we couldn't help them.
Yes.
Okay."

[Virgil]

I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm very much enjoying the dialogues between the man and the boy:

"They're going to kill those people, arent they?
Yes.
Why do they have to do that?
I dont know.
Are they going to eat them?
I dont know.
They're going to eat them, arent they?
Yes.
And we couldn't help them because then they'd eat us too.
Yes.
And that's why we couldn't help them.
Yes.
Okay."

I can't wait to start Melon. I'll probably start this weekend. Thanks for the inspiration. :)

[Logos]

....

But he said none of these things. He was an Afghan, with an Afghan's dignity. He was not used to explaining himself. Or perhaps he saw little purpose in presenting his point of view to these foreigners. For reasons of his own, the singer had stated simply the practice of his own culture. He stood there under darkening trees, .... and what he said was "Afghans do not sing in the garden."
--from Ann Jones' Kabul In Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan (2006)

[Scheherazade]

....

But he said none of these things. He was an Afghan, with an Afghan's dignity. He was not used to explaining himself. Or perhaps he saw little purpose in presenting his point of view to these foreigners. For reasons of his own, the singer had stated simply the practice of his own culture. He stood there under darkening trees, .... and what he said was "Afghans do not sing in the garden."
--from Ann Jones' Kabul In Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan (2006)This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for so long... Along with couple of other books based on Afghanistan.

[Logos]

Oh well! put it on the top of your pile! because it's an amazing non-fiction work about, ermmmm, current politricks :D Very informative and enlightening, but profoundly sad about the state of education programs in Afghanistan ;)

[Dori]

"What an idiot!"
from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

[Madame la Fere]

"I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself."
The Count of Monte Cristo
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness."
Also from The Count of Monte Cristo

[Logos]

"It was the men that made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads."

--p. 202, "Lying Under the Apple Tree", from Munro's The View From Castle Rock

:lol:

[Scheherazade]

"It was the men that made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads."

--p. 202, "Lying Under the Apple Tree", from Munro's The View From Castle Rock

:lol::D




__________________

[quasimodo1]

"The story we tell of these circumstances (largely at the prompting of Rilke's own letters) goes something like this: Afer more than a decade of free, uninterrpted productivity, Rilke was gradually drawn by his work on "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" into a realm of conflict and self-doubt--to such a degree that after that prose work's publication in 1910 he found himself directionless and existentially exhausted, a beginner unable to begin, feeling more and more estranged from the "task" of poetry and yet looking to it increasingly for some difinitive, life-answering statement." from the introduction by Edward Snow, Uncollected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke

[Tersely]

I asked her what was wrong. "It's Jeannot." Her voice was toneless. "His mother says he can't play with me anymore."
"Oh?" Neutrally. "What does she say?"
"She says I'm a bad influence." She flickered a dark glance at me. "Because we don't go to church. Because you opened on Sunday."
You opened on Sunday.

-Chocolat

[Idios_Daemon]

"I believe in Him who is conscious of Himself in me only."
--The Possessed, by F. Dostoyevsky.:thumbs_up

[byquist]

How's this for genius?:

"This matter of distribution is important, because two of the rules for a valid syllogism involve distribution of terms and because many of the fallacies in deductive reasoning are the result of an inference being drawn from undistrbuted terms."

Ed Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student -- great for beach reading, sure.

[Dark Muse]

Catch-22 Joseph Heller


"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. "There's nothing mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about-a country bumpkin, a clumsy bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Surpreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phelgm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control thier bowl movmeents? Why in the world did He ever create pain?


What a colossal immortal blunderer! When you consider the oppertunity and power He had to really do a job, and than look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead. His sheer incompotence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never met a payroll. Why no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!"

[bouquin]

"And what we fear we often rage against."


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"Nobody, nobody in their right mind would go back to them hard, hard times. People was only kind because life was so dirty you couldn't afford to have any enemies. It was all swim or all sink. A situation that makes people very sweet."


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Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure.

[FranzKafka]

"Three things a man needed: faith, practice, and luck."-Bukowski

[muchado22]

"You know, I, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory like perfume and it never faded never got stained. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and, and live the memory all over again."- "Rebecca"

[Muhammad Sarhan]

20 years on love road , but it still unknown
one time I was killer, but more than time I was killed
20 years love book , but I still on first it page !
"Nizar Qabbany "
arabic poet

[wizrd]

"I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, i loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight." - H.H.

fell in love with it as soon as i read it. im finished reading it now. :] great book.

[Dark Muse]

Youth, Beautiful Youth Hermann Hesse


To be up and about outdoors at night, beneath the silent sky and beside quietly flowing water, is always mysterious and stirs the soul to its very depths. At such times we are close to our origins; we feel a kinship with animals and plants, feel dim memories of a primeval life before houses and town were built, when man, the homeless wanderer, could regard the woods, streams, mountains, wolves, and hawks as his equals and could love them as friends or hate them as deadly foes. Night also removes our customary sense of community life, when lights are no longer heard, one who is still awake feels solitary and sees himself parted from others and thrown upon his own resources.

[Dark Muse]

I hate to post twice in a row, but I just came upon this quote in my reading and found it very interesting.

The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco


Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.