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"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
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}
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."
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."
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)
"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
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."
"Something well said is something well said, something said superbly is a poem."
- Reality of Fiction
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."
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."
...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! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by bouquin
When you finish reading, maybe you can post a review for us?
"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"
'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.
'why was too black for the newspaper to print and too deep for Giovanni to tell'