ITT: Passages that made you cry

ITT: Passages that made you cry.
>But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos' eyes
>the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away

>And she rubbed the whole bundle of matches quickly against the wall, for she wanted to be quite sure of keeping her grandmother near her. And the matches gave such a brilliant light that it was brighter than at noon-day: never formerly had the grandmother been so beautiful and so tall. She took the little maiden, on her arm, and both flew in brightness and in joy so high, so very high, and then above was neither cold, nor hunger, nor anxiety--they were with God.

>Dearesd diary, today I did nothing... Again.
The end.

Desu

Io e ’ compagni eravam vecchi e tardi
quando venimmo a quella foce stretta
dov’Ercule segnò li suoi riguardi
acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta:
da la man destra mi lasciai Sibilia,
da l’altra già m’avea lasciata Setta.
"O frati", dissi "che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l’occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente,
non vogliate negar l’esperienza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza

>sunset found her squating over the grass

>His head was towards her, but his eyes were fixed on something far in the distance, his face alight with the vision: the Kingdom of Summer. It was only the briefest of moments and then the light flickered and died. Taliesin slumped forward, the reins still in his hands.

He crept along till he finally found another car to settle in behind. After a while in his rearview mirror he saw somebody else fall in behind him. He was in a convoy of unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness. It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free.
Doc wondered how many people he knew had been caught out tonight in this fog, and how many were indoors fogbound in front of the tube or in bed just falling asleep. Someday—he figured Sparky would confirm it—there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.
He cut in the Vibrasonic. KQAS was playing Fapardokly’s triple-tongue highway classic “Super Market,” ordinarily ideal for driving through L.A—though with traffic conditions tonight Doc might have to settle for every other beat—and then there were some Elephant’s Memory bootleg tapes, and the Spaniels’ cover of “Stranger in Love,” and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, which Doc realized after a while he’d been singing along with. He looked at the gas gauge and saw there was still better than half a tank, plus fumes. He had a container of coffee from Zucky’s and almost a full pack of smokes.
Now and then somebody signaled a right turn and cautiously left the line to feel their way toward an exit ramp. The bigger exit signs overhead were completely invisible, but sometimes it was possible to see one of the smaller ones down at road level, right where the exit lane began to peel away. So it always had to be one of those last-possible-minute decisions.
Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he’d take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets. He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he’d lose the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide. Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he’d have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.

When I got back Frank was there to and Joe was telling him about it and then Gimpy came in and they told him about it and he said theyd get rid of Klaus. They were gonna tell Mr Donner to fire him. I told them I dint think he should be fired and have to find another job because he had a wife and a kid. And besides he said he was sorry for what he did to me. And I remember how sad I was when I had to get fired from the bakery and go away. I said Klaus shoud get a second chance because now he wouldnt do anything bad to me anymore.
Later Gimpy came over limping on his bad foot and he said Charlie if anyone bothers you or trys to take advantage you call me or Joe or Frank and we will set him strait. We all want you to remember that you got frends here and dont you ever forget it. I said thanks Gimpy. That makes me feel good.

Its good to have frends...

I remained standing by the door. Adolf signed to me to go. As I was opening the door, Frau Klara
waved to me with her outstretched hand. I shall never forget the words which the dying woman
then uttered in a whisper. "GustI," she said -- usually she called me Mr. Kubizek, but in that hour
she used the name by which Adolf always called me -- "go on being a good friend to my son when I'm no longer here. He has no one else."

With tears in my eyes I promised, and then I went. This was the evening of December 20.

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours’ time by Mrs. Dursley’s scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley... He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: “To Harry Potter — the boy who lived!”

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers."
-John Irving

What is this from?

flowers for algernon

Why does this make you cry?

The kid rose and looked about at this desolate scene and then he saw alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down.

He made his way among the corpses and stood before her. She was very old and her face was gray and leathery and sand had collected in the folds of her clothing. She did not look up. The shawl that covered her head was much faded of its color yet it bore like a patent woven into the fabric the figures of stars and quartermoons and other insignia of a provenance unknown to him. He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her and that she should join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.

He knelt on one knee, resting the rifle before him like a staff. Abuelita, he said. No puedes escucharme?

He reached into the little cove and touched her arm. She moved slightly, her whole body, light and rigid. She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years.

When Karenin died.

In Absalom, Absalom! when Shreve asks Quentin why he hates the south and Quentin, although denying it, realizes it's true.

In TSatF when Benjy says I hate Rain. I hate everything.

Faulkner is goat.

This. Faulkner has such a great ability to represent a character's mindset in a compelling way.

Also, this part of Robert Lowell's Skunk Hour:

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

After I had my body riven through
By two mortal thrusts, I gave up my soul
Weeping to Him who pardons willingly.

"Horrible was the depth of my transgressing,
But infinite goodness has its arms so wide
That it embraces all who turn to it.

"Had but the pastor of Cosenza, sent
By Clement at that time to hunt me down,
Carefully read the bidding in God’s book,

"The bones of my body would be resting
Still by the bridgehead near Benevento,
Under the guard of a mound of heavy stones.

"Now rain drenches them and wind shifts them,
Outside my kingdom, by the Verde river,
Where he has moved them with extinguished tapers.

"None ever is so lost by curse of clergy
But that eternal Love can yet return,
As long as hope retains a trace of green."

>He had forced a virgin.

"The Sun will not rise for some time," Isao said to himself, "and I can't afford to wait. There is no shining disk climbing upward. There is no noble pine to shelter me. Nor is there a sparkling sea."
He stripped off the remainder of his upper garments, but, as his body tensed, the cold seemed to vanish. He unfastened his trousers, exposing his stomach. As he drew his knife out of its sheath, he heard cries and the sound of running footsteps from the direction of the orchard above.
"The ocean. He must have got away in a boat," one pursuer called out shrilly.
Isao drew in a deep breath and shut his eyes as he ran his left hand caressingly over his stomach. Grasping the knife with his right hand, he pressed its point against his body, and guided it to the correct place with the fingertips of his left hand. Then, with a powerful thrust of his arm, he plunged the knife into his stomach. The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

Esther31 was no doubt expecting my following request, and I had to wait only two minutes, the time it took for her to tap on her keyboard, to discover the last poem Daniel had addressed to Esther before taking his life; the very one that had driven Marie23 to abandon her home, her habits, her life, and leave in search of a hypothetical neohuman community:

My life, my life, my very old one
My first badly healed desire,
My first crippled love,
You had to return.

It was necessary to know
What is best in our lives,
When two bodies play at happiness,
Unite, reborn without end.

Entered into complete dependency
I know the trembling of being,
The hesitation to disappear,
Sunlight upon the forest's edge

And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.

Speech at the Stone from TBK. Even thinking about it makes me tear up, just the most beautiful, tragic, and heartwarming conclusion to a plot.

Finally, true autumn came: the air became a cold wind; leaves rustled in a dry tone, even though they were not dry leaves; the entire earth took on the color and the impalpable form of a vague swamp. What had been a final smile faded in a fatigue of eyelids, in an indifference of gestures. And thus everything sentient, or that we imagine sentient, intimately hugged its own farewell to its bosom. A whirling sound in an atrium fluctuated across our awareness of any other thing. It was pleasant to convalesce in order to truly feel life.
But the first rains of winter, which came in the already harsh autumn, washed away these halftones, seemingly without respect. High winds, screeching around fixed objects, swirling things it had caught up, dragging movable things along, raised up, between sporadic blasts of rain, absent words of anonymous protest, sad and almost angry sounds of a despair without a soul.
And finally autumn was over in cold and ash. It was a winter autumn that came now, a dust turned completely into mud, but at the same time, something good that the cold of winter brings—a hot summer ending, spring just around the corner, autumn defining itself as winter, finally. And in the high air, where the faded colors no longer recalled either heat or sadness, everything was favorable to the night and to indefinite meditation.
That's how it all was for me before I thought it. Today, if I write it down, it's because I remember it. The autumn I have is the autumn I lost.

Tolstoy's diary is filled with quotes like this one:

"Did nothing all day"

"Wake up late. Was in a bad mood. Spend the day chasing girls. Lost 500 rubles at cards. Never again."

"Promised last night that I would never play cards again, but just today I have lost another 300 rubles. I need to change my life"

"All day in bed. Did nothing. Thought nothing. Wrote nothing."

and etc, etc, etc.

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

Damn. Never even read that book, but this passage tore me up.

kek

That's actually kind of comforting user, thanks for sharing.

Ah, Faustus.
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
O, I'll leap up to my God!--Who pulls me down?--
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!--
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!--
Where is it now? tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no!
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me!
You stars that reign'd at my nativity,
Whose influence hath alotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,
Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven!

[The clock strikes the half-hour.]

Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past user.
O God,
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransom'd me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd!
O, no end is limited to damned souls!
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd
Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven.

[The clock strikes twelve.]

O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!

[Thunder and lightning.]

O soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!

[Enter Devils.]

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books!

[Exit Devils with Faustus.]

This. :'(

"Sure. It’s been hopeless for a long time, from the very beginning. You will never represent, Raphael, a young girl’s erotic dream. You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you. It’s already too late, in any case. The sexual failure you’ve known since your adolescence, Raphael, the frustration that has followed you since the age of thirteen, will leave their indelible mark. Even supposing that you might have women in the future - which in all frankness I doubt - this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough. You will always be an orphan to those adolescent loves you never knew. In you the wound is already deep; it will get deeper and deeper. An atrocious, unremitting bitterness will end up gripping your heart. For you there will be neither redemption nor deliverance. That’s how it is."

>No "MEPHISTOPHELES!" at the end

trash version

At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings -- the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky -- Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

A man walked up to them -- probably a keeper -- looked at them and walked away. And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. They saw a steamer come from Theodosia, with its lights out in the glow of dawn.

"There is dew on the grass," said Anna Sergeyevna, after a silence.

"Yes. It's time to go home."

They went back to the town.
Still my favourite short story of all time.

>He stretched his arms towards his child, but the boy cried and nestled in his nurse's bosom, scared at the sight of his father's armour, and at the horse-hair plume that nodded fiercely from his helmet.

fucking Hector seriously

Book?

The Velveteen Rabbit. It's a children's story, sometimes considered to be one of the finest ever written.

Context?

well that hit hard. what's the source?

Don't be cross, Amanda,
Amanda, don't be cross,
For when you're cross, Amanda,
I feel an albatross
Around my neck, or dank gray moss,
And my eyes assume an impervious gloss.
Amanda, Dear Amanda,
Don't be cross.

Do not frown, Amanda,
Amanda, do not frown,
For when you frown, Amanda,
I wamble like a clown,
My mouth is stuffed with eiderdown,
And I spatter coffee upon your gown.
Amanda,
Dear Amanda,
Do not frown.

Don't clam up, Amanda,
Amanda, do not clam,
For when you clam, Amanda,
I don't know where I am.
What is it that I did you damn?
Shall I make amends for a sheep, or a lamb?
Amanda,
Dear Amanda,
Do not clam.

Please be gay, Amanda,
Amanda, please be gay,
For when you're gay, Amanda,
The stars come out by day,
The police throw parking tags away,
And I want to kick up my heels and bray.
Amanda,
Dear Amanda,
Please be gay.

The last page in Skylark when she's crying in bed

Houellebecq. Atomized iirc

Is this some kind of spoilers thread?

It's from Extension of the Domain of Struggle also known as Whatever, but Elementary Particles is still worth the fare

> “I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.”

My mistake

LIKE A DOG
I
K
E

A

D
O
G

My God.

better without it :^)

>I shall see, not only those men I have mentioned earlier, but also my own Cato, no better or more devoted man ever lived. Yet it was I who burned his body on the pyre instead of he mine, as would have been fitting. Men say I have borne his death bravely. No, I have felt great pain; but I console myself with the thought that our separation is temporary.

"Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’”

>Because the shore is stony, and the steps jostle and pinch, but do not sink, I am stumbling towards a seam in time, here, where sky swallows sea: Let me come close enough to see that you are unreachable; tell me that this arrested falling, my progress, is movement toward tendency, so that I may reach evanescence and transparency—impermeable transparency; show me that my suffering grows because it is constant, while I diminish; make me see the tenderness in this terror—the permanence of my fragility; allow me to draw force from this endlessness, where step blurs into slide, and difference becomes commonness; enable my inexhaustibly; show me that I am the template to corroborate time, moving so quickly that I cannot see the change: You are the shadow on the inconceivable edge of me: be attainable, but impossible; prove my finitude, extended infinitely; make me see that as I suffer, I continue; make of my evanescence something everlasting.

>The mind cued its awful projections. It all showed no resolve, no regard for his soft humanity, no tenderness for his afflicted heart. Loneliness–a constant in his life's progression, a backseat-dwelling being accosting his direction, pointing its ugly finger down beaten roads of squalor, personal withdrawal, shame-inducing ritual, shooing away any connection, no matter how close their mutual disconnect arrived at a junction, relegating his tired mind to a cynical abatement of true desire. He felt cheated most days, and on others he just accepted whatever fell on his lap with no semblance of a smile or sigh. He wanted someone, any one soul, to hold his tired head, as if their sole purpose was to do so, to save his heart from whatever brewed in his mind, to hold him as close as their own, to tell the kid inside that he did good, just once, and that any notion of the self-imposed was, indeed, wrong, and that he, like anyone else, was human too. Just once.

It didn't make me cry but it did make me feel something
Great passage

>As the ambulance pulled away, Cassie remembered the smell of onions from her grandmother's kitchen.

first, body by melanie rae thon

When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying at the thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. With a great effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their point of view.

“Yes, to them it must seem sad!” he thought. “But how simple it is.

“The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father feedeth them,” he said to himself and wished to say to Princess Mary; “but no, they will take it their own way, they won’t understand! They can’t understand that all those feelings they prize so—all our feelings, all those ideas that seem so important to us, are unnecessary. We cannot understand one another,” and he remained silent.

The Trojans are depicted in an undeniably sympathetic light. That image of Andromache smiling through her tears, it stayed with me forever. Am I alone in this?

>With this, glorious Hector held out his arms to take his son, but the child, alarmed at sight of his father, shrank back with a cry on his fair nurse’s breast, fearing the helmet’s bronze and the horsehair crest nodding darkly at him. His father and mother smiled, and glorious Hector doffed the shining helmet at once and laid it on the ground. Then he kissed his beloved son, dandled him in his arms, and prayed aloud: ‘Zeus, and all you gods, grant that this boy like me may be foremost among the Trojans, as mighty in strength, and a powerful leader of Ilium. And some day may they say of him, as he returns from war, “He’s a better man than his father”, and may he bear home the blood-stained armour of those he has slain, so his mother’s heart may rejoice.’

>With this he placed the child in his dear wife’s arms, and she took him to her fragrant breast, smiling through her tears. Her husband was touched with pity at this, and stroked her with his hand, saying: ‘Andromache, dear wife, don’t grieve for me too deeply yet. None will send me to Hades before my time: though no man, noble or humble, once born can escape his fate. Go home, and attend to your tasks, the loom and spindle, and see the maids work hard. War is a man’s concern, the business of every man in Ilium, and mine above all.’

Stop posting that shit picture

Plebs.

Also,
>am I alone in this
, he asks. Well what do you think, user?

...only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come call'd Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier far.

>let the earth pile over my dead body before I hear your screams as they drag you away.

Book 6 fucking shreds

apparently they don't contain enough wisdom to teach you how to count lmao

...

absolutely. There's something touching in that moment Quentin's Father gifts him the watch.
"...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

"Savage!" called the first arrivals, as they alighted from their machine. "Mr. Savage!"

There was no answer.

The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open and walked into a shuttered twilight. Through an archway on the further side of the room they could see the bottom of the staircase that led up to the higher floors. Just under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.

"Mr. Savage!"

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east. …

>Now common soldiers strolled through the park, gently swinging the calloused hands of their housemaid sweethearts - hands that fitted snugly in their own thick palms. From this coarseness something sweet might yet be born. Little parlour maids, buxom cooks and sluttish Soldier-Suzies in grubby dresses came arm in arm with these rough peasant lads who'd curse in the barracks, be clouted and clapped in irons by their sergeants, but now ambled along quite harmlessly.
>Their blue eyes were glazed with dumb delight, caring about nothing, no one. Their boyish faces and pug noses red with schnapps, they looked like lost orphans, wandering dreamily through some enchanted garden of love, the women leading them onwards. Every now and then the couples stopped and gazed deep into one another's eyes. They sat down on wooden benches near the bushes, waiting for it to grow completely dark.
>How squalid it all was, here and at the theatre too, among the shabby props and decorations. There was no justice in the world, no justice anywhere. Everything was meaningless. Nothing mattered at all.
>Akos reeled with hatred, staring at the couples with an open mouth.

The sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.

That was the period which began with his feeling as ordinary and
anonymous as a convalescent making slow progress. He didn't love-
apart from, one could say: loving life. The simple love of his sheep
didn't affect him; like light falling through clouds, it was scattered
all about him and shimmered softly upon the meadows. Following in the
innocent trail of their hunger, he strode silently over the pastures
of the world. Strangers saw him on the Acropolis and for a long while
perhaps he was one of the shepherds at Les Baux and saw petrified time
outlasting that noble family, which, despite all their hard-won
victories under the numbers seven and three, was not able to defeat
the sixteen rays of its own stars. Or should I picture him at Orange,
resting against the rustic triumphal arch? Should I see him in the
soul-haunted shade of Alyscamps where among the tombs that lie open
like the tombs of the resurrected, his eyes pursue a dragonfly?

No matter. I see more than just him. I see his whole existence, which
was then taking up the long love to God, the silent goalless toil of
it. For he who had wanted to hold himself back forever was once more
overcome by the increasing inability of his heart to wish it
otherwise. And this time he hoped his wish would be granted. His
entire being that through his long solitude had become more foreseeing
and unwavering, promised him that He who now dominated his thoughts
knew how to love with a love that was penetrating and radiant. But
while he yearned to be loved at last so masterly, his emotion which
was accustomed to things far off, understood the utter remoteness of
God. There were nights when he had a mind to hurl himself into space
towards God; hours full of discovery when he felt strong enough to
dive back to the Earth and pull it up on the storm-tide of his heart.
He was like someone who hears a wonderful language and feverishly
resolves to write poetry in it. Still ahead of him lies the dismay he
will experience at how difficult the language is; he was unwilling at
first to believe that you could spend your whole life shaping your
fist trial sentence only to find they didn't make sense. He launched
himself into learning it like a runner starting a race, but the
denseness of what had to be surmounted slowed him down. Anything more
humiliating than this apprenticeship didn't bear thinking about. He
had found the philosopher's stone and now he was being forced to
ceaselessly convert the swiftly made gold of his good fortune into the
lumpen lead of patience. He who had adapted himself to space now
dragged hiself like a worm through crooked passageways without egress
or direction. Now that he was learning, with so much difficulty and
worry, to love, he was shown how careless and trivial all the love had
been which he'd supposed he'd achieved. How nothing could have come
from that kind of love because he hadn't begun to work on it and turn
it into a reality.
1/2

the fact that they were taken as past virtually put them in the
future. To really involve himself in all this once more was the reason
why this erstwhile stranger returned home. We don't know if he stayed
there: all we know is that he went back.

*(his) patience to put up with a soul

Those telling the story make an effort at this point to remind us
about the house as it was; for by then only a short time had elapsed,
only a small amount of measured time; everyone in the house would be
able to say how much. The dogs are grown old but they're still living.
Reportedy one of them howled. Everyone leaves what they're doing.
Faces appear at the windows, old faces and grown up faces, all of them
showing a touching likeness to faces remembered. And in one very old
face recognition bursts forth. Recognition? Is it really just
recognition?--Forgiveness . Forgiveness for what?--Love. My God: love.

He, the one they recognised, no longer thought--his mind being so
occupied--that love might still exist. With all that was happening at
the time it's understandable that the only thing they would tell of
later was what he did, the incredible action he performed, which no
one had seen before: the gesture of supplication, in which he threw
himself down before them, imploring them not to show love. Alarmed by
this and shaking they raised him to his feet. They interpreted his
impulsive behaviour in their own way, while at the same time forgiving
him. He must have found it indescribably liberating to find that
they'd all misunderstood him, despite his desperately explicit manner.
It was likely they'd let him stay. As the days passed he came to see
more clearly that the love they were so vain about and which they
secretly encouraged in one another did not affect him. He almost had
to smile at the trouble they took and it became obvious that their
concern for him could not amount to much.

What did they know about who he was? He was now so terribly difficult
to love, and he felt there was only the One who was capable of it. But
He was not yet willing.

>O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!

That was a rough one desu

based

>''The weight of the gun in Jason's hand surprised him. 'How heavy,' he wondered, 'is the human soul?''

Excellent taste. Purgatorio is the most emotional of the trilogy by far.