"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
"Books don't offer real escape but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw." David Mitchell
"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
Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts? - Faulkner
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: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
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.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.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
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
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.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.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.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.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.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.The Moon and Sixpence - W. Somerset MaughamI 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.
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!'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
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.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Hasek: Good Soldier Svejk"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?"
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