"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
Printable View
"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
A Passage To India~ E.M Forster
Quote:
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
Here is a quote from Willa Cather's short novel ~ "Alexander's Bridge":
I just love that description of someone's personal study.Quote:
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Janine
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
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!Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
"Justice. . . limps along, but it gets there all the same."
In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez.
"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.
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.
Finished that one just about two weeks ago. But I found it much too emotional... Had its good parts though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
I have written a review of the book here:Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyrrho
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=34988
If you like, you can add yours as well :)
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.
The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bown
Chapter 4
Quote:
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.
" ... that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed."
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."
Madame Bovary~ Gustave Flaubert
Quote:
"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"
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?
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.
Stendhal The Red and the Black first paragraph from the chapter 'Entry into Society'
(square brackets are translator's, round brackets are Stendhal's)
Quote:
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.
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
David Hume
The Initiate Brother, Sean Russle
Pg. 175
Chapeter Eight
Quote:
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."
I'm reading The Merry-Go-Round by Joshua Bruening...
You can find it at amazon / barnesandnoble . com
It's worth checking out!
"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.
"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
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 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."
"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. :)
"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
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)
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.
after that Greek introduced whore,porn to western world.
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
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.Quote:
Mr. Steinbeck no historian. The first church not arrive same time as whorehouse.
Don't be such a bloody fool. Prostitution exists everywhere: it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy.Quote:
That your democracy-that your failure-that the decline of your civilization.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by patrickbeverley
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.
If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.
------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------
"... 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."
------------------------------------------------------
... 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.
-------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by patrickbeverley
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!
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
"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.
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.
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."