“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
"there are times when what is to be said looks out for the past at you - looks out like someone in a window and you in the street as you walk along. Past hours, past acts take on an uncanny isolation; between them and you who look back on them now there is no continuity" young adam by trocchi.
builds a bit of tension and suspense for what is ultimately a poor novel
"“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
comfy as fuck
bump
you read any books?
"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."
DeLillo is so based.
> literally anything other than Lolita
Kys
>Quoting one of the least impressive sections that is popular only because it's the first and last part tumblr girls read
>Adam awoke from a pretty awesome dream. He was in line at the post office and girl behind the counter was topless. 'How are they losing so much money every year?' He wondered. She'd been blonde, but somehow faceless, as if he used up all his dream power on her absurdly endowed chest. What was that, an F cup? He had a package for her, all right, and a potentially hazardous one at that.
"At least whatever was wrong was recent, Ray kept telling himself, he realized."
This is the true hidden gem GOAT opener.
Do you judge an opening based on your first impression or on subsequent readings? I'm more partial to the latter I think.
Not
>Watashi-wa Ishmael desu
What other books have Bible references in the very first sentence?
>It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
«Arma virumque canō, Trōiae quī prīmus ab orīs Ītaliam, fātō profugus, Lāvīniaque vēnit lītora, multum ille et terrīs iactātus et altō vī superum saevae memorem Iūnōnis ob īram; multa quoque et bellō passūs, dum conderet urbem, inferretque deōs Latiō, genus unde Latīnum, Albānīque patrēs, atque altae moenia Rōmae.»
Gave me goosebumps and I haven't even read the book
"This was not digging a hole, it was a competition, a fight, a battle of man versus earth."
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
>trying so hard to assert dominance that you forget the original point of the thread
>Only one enemy remained; two, if you counted God.
What is this from, it's perfect.
sauce
names ishmael bitch
I'm gonna strangle you.
>Call me Isaac
-Benito Cereno the Scrivener