How is that book? I should read it, but haven't gotten around to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by jinjang
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How is that book? I should read it, but haven't gotten around to it.Quote:
Originally Posted by jinjang
I would compare that with the book Middlemarch by George Eliot, but shorter, less number of characters and events. It is about the whole life of Daisy Goodwill who marries two times and becomes a successful columnist on gardening and others. The author describes well Daisy's inner developments. I would disappoint you if I say, except a few quotes and events, I may not read it again. I will remember it with warmth.
The Name of the Rose was written in the 14th century by Umberto Eco. It was originally written in Italian, and it is a murder-mystery type of book set at a monastery.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynne Fees
(that my be over-reducing it a bit-- but it gives you an idea.) ;)
"generally we call cruelty that which we do not have the heart to endure, while that which we endure easily, which is ordinary to us, does not seem cruel. thus what we call cruelty is always that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it as soon as it is ours. such weakness suppress nothing but make it a difficult task for anyone who seeks in these byways the hidden movement of the human heart."
"this is not an apology for horrible things, it is not a call for their return. but in this inexplicable impasse where we move in vain, these interruptions - which are only seemingly promises of resolution, which in the end promise us nothing but to be caught in the trap - contain all the truth of emotion in the instant of ravishment: that is, emotion, if the sense of life is inscribed therein, cannot be subordinated to any useful end. emotion that is not tied to the opening of horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night. art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts art without harm at the height of the worst and reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the opening onto all possibility. that is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the vicinity of death."
georges bataille - the cruel practice of art
Those were great quotes and I will add that book in my reading list. I just started rereading Death in Venice by Mann.Quote:
Originally Posted by weltanschauung
Introduction by Michael Cunningham to "Death in Venice by Thomas Mann"
"A novel in its earliest form, before it begins to be rendered into language, is a cloud of sorts that hovers over the writer's head, a mystery born with clues to its own meanings but also, at its heart, insoluble. One hopes- a novel is inevitably an expression of unreasonable hopes- that the finished book will contain not only characters and scenes but a certain larger truth, though that truth, whatever it may be, is impossible to express fully in words. It has to do with the fact that writer and reader both know, beneath the level of active consciousness, something about being alive and being mortal, and that that something, when we try to express it, inevitably eludes us. We are creatures whose innate knowledge exceeds that which can be articulated. Although language is enormously powerful, it is concrete, and so it can't help but miniaturize, to a certain extent, that which we simply know. All the writers I respect want to write a book so penetrating and thorough, so compassionate and unrelenting, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the spectacle of life itself. And all writers I respect seem to know (though no one likes to talk about it) that our efforts are doomed from the outset. Life is bigger than literature."
check this out: http://www.sauer-thompson.com/essays...elPractice.pdfQuote:
Originally Posted by jinjang
ive heard a lot about death in venice, the book. i did watch the movie and was very disappointed at the acting, though.
"A degenerate. A filthy degenerate! Arthus, please, for my sake. I know. I know. Leave your brother alone. Please. Brother???) -- O god, theyll bug me. They know I cant stay down. They know it. Nothing to see. To look at. Why me? Why wont somebody help me. I dont want to be alone. I cant stand it. Please help me. At least Goldie has bennie. I cant stay down. Always alone. O jesus, jesus jesus...why me??? Mommy? Mommy? O god I need something. Those sick johns. Always? I dont want to be straight. I just need something. I/ll go crazy. Theyre keeping me down. Down. Why do they want to kill me?"
-Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.
(All punctuation is straight out of the book--I had to backspace so many times to type it correctly!):)
I've been reading "Heart of Darkness" these past few days. The description at the beginning of the book struck me as being very beautiful:
"The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun"
- god, i wish i could write like that! It just brings the most vivid, beautiful images to mind.
Happy people exist too. Why should not they?
...
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.
...
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you.
from American Pastoral by Philip Roth
"I consider anybody who borrows a book instead of buying it, or lends one, a twerp. When I was a student at Shortridge High School a million years ago, a twerp was defined as a guy who put a set of false teeth up hes rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs.
But I hasten to say, should some impressionable young person here tonight, at loose ends and from a dysfunctional family, resolve to take a shot at being a real twerp tomorrow, that there are no longer buttons on the back seats of taxi-cabs. Times change!"
Armageddon Revisited, Kurt Vonnegut
"We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have more money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him."
"I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with 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 completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws"
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Agony and the Ecstasy ~ Irving Stone
Quote:
His first lesson had been that the power and the durablity lay in the stone, not in the arms or tools. The stone was master; not the mason. If ever a mason came to think he was master, the stone would oppose and twart him. And if a mason beat his stone and an ignorant contadino might beat his beasts, the rich warm glowing breathing material became dull, colorless, ugly; died under his hand. To kicks and curses, to hurry and dislike, it closed a hard stone veil around its soft inner nature. It could be smashed by violence but never forced to fullfill. To sympathy, it yielded: grew even more luminous and sparkling, acheived fluid forms and symmetry.
"Something stronger than herself forced her to him"
- Madame Bovary
From Passing by Nella Larsen
Quote:
She didn't like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudly as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all soft, as like April, as possible.
From the Watchmen graphice novel:
"The world will look up and shout 'save us!', and I'll look down and whisper, "No."
-Rorscach
P.G.7.
"I reached down to feel my knee, but it wasn't there. I reached further and found my knee in my shin." A Farewell to Arms
I think you mean "the story takes place in the 14th century"? Because The Name of the Rose was published in 1980...Quote:
Originally Posted by K.K.
I hate intro posts so I figured that this would be a good place to start on the forum :)
"...I felt compassion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for a millennia though we are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of an old cry. Sending their white messages millions of years, only to be crumpled up by the waves."
--Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
"If he is not the word of God, God never spoke."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-Hunter S. Thompson
He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No one asks your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.
--The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
"I was always embarassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot ... and we had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, ...and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything."
from A Farewell to Arms
"Orthographical
Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry."
- James Joyce, Ulysses
"I am that very insect, brother, and those words are precisely about me. And all of us Karamazovs are like that, and in you, an angel, the same insect lives and stirs up storms in your blood. Storms, because sensuality is a storm, more than a storm! Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it's undefinable, and cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles."
- The Brothers Karamazov
Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?
-Netherland by Joseph O'Neil
"Als Oskar nach Hause kam, stand das Mittagessen schon auf dem Tisch: Falschen Hasen gab es mit Salzkartoffeln, Rotkohl und zum Nachtisch Schokoladenpudding mit Vanillesoße. Matzerath ließ kein Wörtchen hören. Oskars Mama war während des Essens mit den Gedanken woanders. Dafür gab es am Nachmittag einen Familienkrach wegen Eifersucht und Polnischer Post. Gegen Abend bot ein erfrischendes Gewitter mit Wolkenbruch und wunderschön trommelndem Hagel eine längere Vorstellung. Oskars erschöpftes Blech durfte ruhen und zuhören."
- Die Blechtrommel, Günter Grass
Just for fun, I went to Google Translate and translated this from German to French to English:Quote:
Originally Posted by lichtrausch
"Oskar at home, lunch was already on the table: faux rabbit with salt, there were potatoes, red cabbage and chocolate sauce dessert vanilla pudding. Matzerath suggested no word. Oskars Mom was in dinner with the thoughts elsewhere. To do this, there was the afternoon, a family of noise because of jealousy and the Polish position. In the evening, offered a refreshing with storm clouds break and beautiful trommelndem hail a long presentation. Oskars exhausted plate could rest and listen. "
That virtue which requires to be ever guarded, is scarcely worth the sentinel
- Vicar of Wakefield by, Oliver Goldsmith
From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Quote:
As for the certain greif he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being ahere to humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He loved now the soft, delicate vegitation, that was so cool and perfect. He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state.
Quote:
What a dread he had of mankind, of other people! It amounted almost to horror. To a sort of dream terror--his horror of being observed by some other poeple. If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegitation and be quite happy and unquestioned, by himself.
I have been reading Tanith Lee's 'Saint Fire' and 'Faces Under Water'. Eloquent books with beautiful cadence. The matrix of the words is just lovely.
Not baggage now, but bleeding men were being carried up the passages and stairs of Santa Lallo Lacrima's sister-house.
The nuns pressed back against stone walls. They were in awe. Less at the gravity of wounds, the largess of damage, than at this general peacefulness. Even men writhing in agony, turning to say through pain-black lips, "Bless you, sister, for your charity."
I love Birkin! Almost everything he says captures the essence of my own beleifs and philsophy at least in regaurds to the human race.
From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrecne
Quote:
Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human begins hanging on the bush--and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall apples. It isn't true that they have any significance--their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.
Quote:
I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do. Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest and charity is the greatest--and see what they are doing all the time. By their own works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.
Quote:
It's a lie to say that love is the greatest. You might as well say that hate is the greatest, since the opposite of everything balances. What people want is hate--hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love, they get it. They distill themselves with nitro-glycerine, all the lot of them, out of very love. It is the lie that kills. If we want hate let us have it--death, murder, torture, violent destruction--let us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished to-morrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of moral lies.
Quote:
Do you think that creation depends on man! It merely doesn't. There are the trees and the grass and the birds. I much prefer to think of a lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. Man is a mistake, he must go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels to go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't interrupt them--and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.
This just sums up the essence of the misantrhope so perfectly.Quote:
If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvelously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation--like the ictchyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;--things straight out of the fire.
Quote:
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
The Moon and Sixpence - W. Somerset MaughamQuote:
I asked myself whether there was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action.
Quote:
The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.
Flann O'Brien: "The Third Policeman". I love this book so much!Quote:
'The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.'
'Is it about a bicycle?'
From Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Quote:
Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without and real significance.How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be found? No flowers grow on busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a rotary motion, mechanized, cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for in life--it was the same in countries, and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look out onto the great dark sky of death with emotion, as one had looked out the class room window as a child, and seen perfect freedom on the outside. Now one was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner in this sordid vast edifice of life, and there is no escape, save in death.
But what a joy! What gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea they turned into a murderous alley, and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they claimed too, shared it up, parceled it out to certain owners, they trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep between spiky walls to the labyrinth of life.
But the great dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in the face of it.
How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward too. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that his remained to look forward to, the pure inhumanness of death.
Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward to like heirs to their majority.
Hasek: Good Soldier SvejkQuote:
"So they've done it to us," said the cleaning woman to Mr. Svejk. "They've
killed our Ferdinand."
Svejk had been discharged from military service years ago when a military
medical commission had pronounced him to be officially an imbecile. Now, he
was making his living by selling dogs, ugly mongrel mutants that he sold as
purebreds by forging their pedigrees. In addition to this demeaning
vocation, Svejk also suffered from rheumatism and was just now rubbing his
aching knees with camphor ice.
"Which Ferdinand, Mrs. Muller?" he asked. "I know two Ferdinands. One is the
pharmacist Prusa's delivery boy, who drank up a whole bottle of hair potion
once by mistake. And then, I know one Ferdinand Kokoska, who collects dog
turds. Neither one would be much of a loss."
"But Mr. Svejk! They killed the Archduke Ferdinand, the one from Konopiste,
the fat one, the religious one."
I'm reading Oryx and Crake and I really like these quotes:
"These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away."
"Why is it that he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?"