"Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigour."
From The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
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"Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigour."
From The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
That is such a wonderful sentence! Thank you for sharing it :thumbs_up:DQuote:
Originally Posted by prendrelemick
'It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?' (94)
-Finnegans Wake
I am sitting over coffee and cigarets at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.
"It's like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now."
"The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”
"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
"Many that live deserve death and many that die deserves life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so quick to deal out death and judgement for even the very wise cannot see all ends."
"Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped."
- The Lord of The Rings, J.R.R Tolkien.
Intriguing! Where does this come from?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack_Aubrey
I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honour the wood they rest upon.
I know it's going to rain.
Clouds have been playing with the blue style of the sky all day long, moving their heavy black wardrobes in, but so far nothing rain has happened.
************************************************** *********************
What an abstract thing it is to take your clothes off in front of a stranger for the very first time. It isn't really what we planned on doing. Your body almost looks away from itself and is a stranger to this world.
We live most of our lives privately under our clothes, except in a case like Vida whose body lived outside of herself like a lost continent, complete with dinosaurs of her own choosing.
'I'll turn the lights out,' she said, sitting next to me on the bed.
I was startled to hear her panic. She seemed almost relaxed a few seconds before. My, how fast she could move the furniture about in her mind. I responded to this by firmly saying, 'No, please don't.'
Her eyes stopped moving for a few seconds. They came to a crashing halt like blue aeroplanes.
'Yes,' she said. 'That's a good idea. It will be very hard, but I have no other choice. I can't go on like this forever.'
She gestured towards her body as if it were far away in some lonesome valley and she, on top of a mountain, looking down. Tears came suddenly to her eyes. There was now rain on the blue wings of the aeroplanes.
Then she stopped crying withoun a tear having left her eyes. I looked again and all the tears had vanished. 'We have to leave the lights on,' she said. 'I won't cry. I promise.'
I reached out and, for the first time in two billion years, I touched her. I touched her hand. My fingers went carefully over her fingers. Her hand was almost cold.
'You're cold.' I said.
'No,' she said. 'It's only my hand.'
She moved slightly, awkwardly towards me and rested her head on my shoulder. When her head touched me, I could feel my blood leap forward, my nerves and muscles stretch like phantoms towards the future.
My shoulder was drenched in smooth white skin and long bat-flashing hair. I let go of her hand and touched her face. It was tropical.
'See,' she said, smiling faintly. 'It was only my hand.'
It was fantastic trying to work around her body, not wanting to startle her like a deer and have her go off running into the woods.
I poetically shifted my shoulder like the last lines of a Shakespearen sonnet (Love is a babe; then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow.) and at the same time lowered her back onto the bed.
She lay there looking up at me as I crouched forward, descending slowly, and kissed her on the mouth as gently as I could. I did not want that first kiss to have attached to it the slightest gesture or flower of the meat market.
I found this really funny:
"Her bosom is still a pavement she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness."
And then I found it sad and pathetic.
RED- I.A.Sealy
I just started reading this book. I liked the following line in which the narrator describes the colour of a girl's tracksuit:
"...expressly chosen, that shade of blue, to dampen any ardour in the onlooker and possibly in the wearer too. It's not exactly Virgin Mary blue but nor is it water-nymph aqua, or odalisque turquoise, or even a crackling protopunk electric blue. It's by no means that bacchanalian midnight blue that verges on purple, nor a savage sadomasochistic bruised-eye indigo, and it's a long way from the gentian violet of the orgiast.
No. It's a straight-out daytime sky blue, bland as a button."
And later:
"Zach stares helplessly through the window like a prisoner who, after years in his cell, finds there are no bars."
"Call me Ishmael."
Take a guess at that one ;)
Between books at the moment, so as always I like to browse through my dog-eared copy of Homer's Iliad.
Paris had also been quick and had not lingered in his lofty house. Directly he had put on his splendid armour with its trappings of bronze, he hurried off through the town at full speed, like a stallion who breaks his halter at the manger where they keep and fatten him, and gallops off across the fields in triumph to his usual bathing-place in the delightful river. He tosses up his head; his mane flies back along his shoulders; he knows how beautiful he is; and away he goes, skimming the ground with his feet, to the haunts and pastures of the mares. So Paris, priam's son, came down hot foot from the citadel of Pergamus, resplendent in his armour like the dazzleing sun, and laughing as he came.
The Iliad: (trans E V Rieu)
If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.
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She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.
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"Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it... It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."
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"It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying."
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"Most of the time we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do... But the other is better... If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them."
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"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."
Anne of Green Gables - L.M.Montgomery
I love the way she describes the most simple things:)Quote:
Pretty? Oh pretty doesn't seems the right word to use. Nor beautiful either. They don't go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful- wonderful. It's the first thing I ever saw that couldn't be improved upon by imagination.
Foucault's Pendulum by Umerto Eco
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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one is free to take it and run with it. At the end they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, through, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what is happening, it is too late.
"The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can."
- Howards End.
I'm reading it for my English Literature A-Level. Fantastic book so far. Page 173/293
Le premier jardin
Anne Hébert
Quote:
Au matin, il a fallu demander à Céleste de partir. Elle a sauté hors du lit comme si elle avait un ressort au creux des reins.
—Des draps frais, c’est doux à mort mais, à la longue, ça risque de me faire perdre mon âme, je pars.
Elle a laissé la moitié de ses bagages dans la chambre.
Maximum Ride - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
James Patterson
Quote:
I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!
Dostoyevski's The Gambler...
Quote:
Do you know that I shall kill you one day? I shall kill you not because I shall cease to love you or be jealous, I shall simply kill you because I have an impulse to devour you.
Yes Howards End is a fantastic book, but not my favourite..
I just finished Midnight's children and one of the memorable quotes is
"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me"
Quite a clever book really
In his little room, with its door of communication blocked with a
wardrobe, his frame of mind remained as uncomfortable as the chair in
which he was seated. His heart ached with a dull, unpleasant
sensation, with a sort of oppressive emptiness.
"The devil take those who first invented balls!" was his reflection.
"Who derives any real pleasure from them? In this province there exist
want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls! How absurd,
too, were those overdressed women! One of them must have had a
thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the
overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her
neighbour. Yes, we all know why bribes are accepted, and why men
become crooked in soul. It is all done to provide wives--yes, may the
pit swallow them up!--with fal-lals. And for what purpose? That some
woman may not have to reproach her husband with the fact that, say,
the Postmaster's wife is wearing a better dress than she is--a dress
which has cost a thousand roubles! 'Balls and gaiety, balls and
gaiety' is the constant cry. Yet what folly balls are! They do not
consort with the Russian spirit and genius, and the devil only knows
why we have them. A grown, middle-aged man--a man dressed in black,
and looking as stiff as a poker--suddenly takes the floor and begins
shuffling his feet about, while another man, even though conversing
with a companion on important business, will, the while, keep capering
to right and left like a billy-goat! Mimicry, sheer mimicry! The fact
that the Frenchman is at forty precisely what he was at fifteen leads
us to imagine that we too, forsooth, ought to be the same. No; a ball
leaves one feeling that one has done a wrong thing--so much so that
one does not care even to think of it. It also leaves one's head
perfectly empty, even as does the exertion of talking to a man of the
world. A man of that kind chatters away, and touches lightly upon
every conceivable subject, and talks in smooth, fluent phrases which
he has culled from books without grazing their substance; whereas go
and have a chat with a tradesman who knows at least ONE thing
thoroughly, and through the medium of experience, and see whether his
conversation will not be worth more than the prattle of a thousand
chatterboxes. For what good does one get out of balls? Suppose that a
competent writer were to describe such a scene exactly as it stands?
Why, even in a book it would seem senseless, even as it certainly is
in life. Are, therefore, such functions right or wrong? One would
answer that the devil alone knows, and then spit and close the book."
(dead souls, n.gogol)
When i was in middle school, this book inspired me very much. Nowadays, I picked up it again, and it still inspires me. ;):DQuote:
Originally Posted by Sk8ynat
Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.
Arms and the Man
(Bernard Shaw)
"in abstract love for humanity one must always love no one but oneself" from the idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. truely an amazing novel.
Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason. We can conceive of St.Paul or even our Lord Himself drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking a cigarette, or a churchwarden. Earnest could not deny this, and admitted that Paul would almost certainly have condemned tobacco in good round terms if he had known of its existence.
--The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
'Truth hath no confine'
-Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
'Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.'
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'Be honest and poor, by all means - but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich.'
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'I must look down upon any thing contented with obscurity when it might rise to distinction.'
‘I have no notion of two sisters wearing the same clothes, the same flaunting meretricious gawds, the same tortured Gorgon curls low over their brutish criminal foreheads; it bespeaks a superfetation of vulgarity, both innate and studiously acquired.’
from H.M.S Surprise by Patrick O’Brian
For lovers of literature, and sea stories, Patty O is freakin sweet. As you can tell, his humor can be wicked.
'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Death of Virgil: A Novel by Hermann Broch, Translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer.
This is one long stream of conscious of Virgil's (yes, the Roman poet) last hours before his death. It supposed to be a great novel by an Austrian writer, but frankly I'm not finding it so great. Well, here's a sample sentence.
Yes, that sentence is that long. :sick: And that is a typical sentence in the book. In fact that's one of the better ones. One sentence actually went for almost two pages long. I don't know if I'm going to finish this novel. Perhaps I'll have to slug through.Quote:
The heavy portal of fear had sprung open and behind it the cavern of horror reared up, mighty, and all-encompassing. Something unkown, fearful, ghastly, assailing him simultaneously from within and without, ripped him up; a sudden malignant outbreak, superlatively painful, tore him aloft with all the devastating, convulsive, stiflingly desperate force inherent in the first lightening-and-thunderclap of a rising storm; thus chokingly it drove into him, death-dealing, death-threatening, yet the seconds follwed hard upon each other enriched in flashes the empty space between them with that inconceivable thing called life, and it seemed to him as if hope blinked up once again in those flashes while, with the fleetness of breath or a glance, he was being torn aloft in the clutch of the iron hand; it seemed to him that all this was happening so that the neglected, the lost, the unfinished might still be retrieved if only in this instant of renewed second wind; overcome as he was by pain, by fear, by torpor, he knew not whether it was hope or no hope, but he did know that every second of new-lived life was needful and momentous, he knew he had been hounded for the sake of this up-flickering of life, whether it lasted a short or a long time, chased up and away from the couch of torpor; he knew he had to escape the breath-lack of the narrow-walled and shut-in room, that once more he must send his glance outward, turned away from himself, turned away from the zones of himself, turned away from the dreary field of death, that once more, for a single time, perhaps for the last time, he must come to comprehend the vastness of life, he must, oh he must again behold the stars; and starkly lift up from the bed, held in the clutching fist that gripped into his whole body and yet grasped him from without, he moved himself with stiff-jointed legs, like a marionette conveyed on wires, uncertainly as though on stilts, back to the window against the frame of which he leaned exhausted, a little bent over because of his weakness but despite this held upright so that, as with elbows drawn back he satisfied his hunger for air with deep regular breaths, his being might disclose itself anew, participating in the breath-stream of the yearned-back spheres.
LOL, Vigil, I'm curious to know how many pages that novel has!
I'm reading Pickwick Papers.
:lol:Quote:
'I am ruminating,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'on the strange mutability of human affairs.'
'Ah! I see- in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, sir?'
'An observer of human nature, sir,' said Mr. Pickwick.
'Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get. Poet, sir?'
'My friend, Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn.' said Mr. Pickwick.
'So have I,'said the stranger. 'Epic poem,- ten thousand lines- revolution of July- composed it on the spot- Mars by day, Apollo by night,- bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.'
There are two types of human - kind and animalistic. First will try to achieve happiness for him and for the whole world; and a second one will try achieve his happiness but he will be ready to destroy happiness of all the world for that.
A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemmingway.Quote:
At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night. When the young men serenaded only the flute was forbidden. Why, i had asked. Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night. The peasant all called you "Don" and when you met them they took off their hats. His father hunted everyday and stopped to eat at the houses of peasant. They were always honored. For a foreigner to hunt he must present a certificate that he had never been arrested. There were bears on the Gran Sasso D'Italia but it was a long way. Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good because they fed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses. After a while i went to sleep.
"It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into th golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the wierdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy."
-Page 300 from the Historian by Elizabeth Kostovo
A book I just finished Blind Voices by Tom Reamy...
The boys tiptoed to the cot, barely breathing. A noise reached their ears, a rustling of bedclothes, and a darker darkness rose from the cot. Jack made a little squeeking noise deep in his throat and they backed away until they bumped against the wall.
"Angel?" Finney said in an almost inaudible whisper.
There was movement from the cot. A match struck, momentarily blinding them. They squinted and pressed against the wall. The match moved to a candle. The lighted candle was lifted and the light fell on a mass of snakes writhing over a pair of glittering eyes.
Finney and Jack shrieked and grabbed each other. They hid their eyes, turned their backs and hunkered against the wall, feeling their flesh already turning to stone. Medusa sat on the cot, watching them curiously.
Finney slowly raised his arm and peeked out with one eye. Jack's arm was only an inch away. It looked , not a bit like stone. Then Jack's arm lowered slightly, uncovering his round eye.They stared at each other in amazement. They turned hesitantly, ready to flee if necessary, and saw the Medusa sitting motionless on her cot watching them.
"I looked at her and I didn't turn to stone," Jack said with a slow exhalation.
"I guess that part of it was just a myth after all," Finney said with some disappointed, "but she's certainly a real Medusa all right."
"How do you know?" Jack asked doubtfully. "She didn't turn us to stone."
Finney sighed and looked at him sideways. "If she was a fake she'd take her snakes off before she went to bed, wouldn't she?"
Jack twisted his mouth, thinking seriously. "Yeah, you're right," he said. "She's a real Medusa, sure enough."
They looked around the wagon. The mermaid floated in her tank, possibly asleep, but appearing to be dead. Beyond her the snake woman lay coiled in her cage.
"Look, Finney!" Jack hissed in excitement. "The Snake Goddess! I want to get a closer look."
"We're supposed to be looking for Angel, Jack," Finney said impatiently, feeling slightly betrayed.
"We've got time to look at the Snake Goddess, haven't we?" Jack demanded, arching his eyebrows.
Finney rolled his eyes and nodded reluctantly.
"Excuse me, ma'am," Jack said to the Medusa, his voice cracking. "Pardon us for bustin'in. We were lookin' for Angel and we got the wrong wagon. Is it all right if we take a closer look at the Snake Goddess?"
"And could you tell us which wagon Angel is in?" Finney added.
The Medusa looked from one to the other, moving her whole head instead of just her eyes. Her face showed only curiousity. Jack and Finney looked at each other.
Jack jerked his head and they moved cautiously to the snake woman's cage, casting wary glances at the Medusa. The snake woman was asleep, but stirred at their approach, candlelight sparkling dully on her gun-metal scales. Medusa followed them with her fascinated gaze, moving nothing but her head. Finney and Jack knelt down and pressed their faces against the bars. The snake woman looked back at them, her silver hair cresting over her head like a startled cockatoo. Her coils shifted slightly and she moved closer to them, her head making quick, birdlike movements. She watched them for a moment, then reached out her little hand and placed it delicately on Jack's brown grubby fingers, grasping one of the bars.
"Hey!" he breathed. "She likes me."
He suddenly reached up and unfastened the latch of the cage.
"You shouldn't do that," Finney protested.
"Ssssssh!" Jack hissed and opened the cage door. The snake woman looked at him expectantly. Jack reached his hand in.
Then Medusa stood up and went to them, leaning over to see what they were doing. Finney and Jack both jerked their heads around and stared into the nest of snakes two inches from their noses. Jack slammed the cage door and they bolted. They clattered across the wagon floor and clumped down the steps and were in the street before they even slowed down.
Medusa turned and watched them go with startled eyes. She heard a squeak behind her and twisted her head around. The door of the snake woman's cage opened slowly under its own weight. One hinge made a thin, rusty protest. The snake woman watched the opening door and swayed slightly. She hesitated for a moment, then flowed from the cage, across the floor, through the wagon door and down the steps, holding her little arms before her, rushing to the meet the night.
Medusa watched her leave and nothing moved but her head.
I'll probably post another episode later from the novel.
''Ideas will come; if you think about things enough.''
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath
Kress and van Leewen, 2006 'Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design'
Quote:
Real authors and real readers we cannot ultimately know. This bracketing out of real authors and real readers carries the risk of forgetting that texts, literary and artistic texts as much as mass media texts, are produced in the context of real social institutions, in order to play a very real role in social life – in order to do certain things to or for their readers, and in order to communicate attitudes towards aspects of social life and towards people who participate in them, whether authors and readers are consciously aware of this or not.
Almost five hundred, and I've read a little over a hundred. I can't make up m mind if I should continue.Quote:
Originally Posted by mona amon
Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth: That all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her upon the treacherous, slavish shore.
Is that worth a read?Quote:
Originally Posted by bazarov
Yes, of course.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Hill