Post excerpts of literature – poetry, prose, a single verse, a paragraph, a soliloquy, a dialogue exchange, no matter – that you find beautiful.
I will start:
>“No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure,
>Than a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.”
I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are,-
The only worth all granting.
In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down, but here there are no loads, and the ground too, unfit for loads, and the light too, down towards an end it seems can never come. For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night. These things, what things, come from where, made of what?
At that point, impatient to know his own origin, Aureliano skipped ahead. Then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. He did not notice it because at that moment he was discovering the first indications of his own being in a lascivious grandfather who let himself be frivolously dragged along across a hallucinated plateau in search of a beautiful woman who would not make him happy. Aureliano recognized him, he pursued the hidden paths of his descent, and he found the instant of his own conception among the scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset bathroom where a mechanic satisfied his lust on a woman who was giving herself out of rebellion. He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations. Only then did he discover that Amaranta ?rsula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.
Bvmp
>because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude
BRAVO MARQUEZ
The last day had come. The doomsday was at hand. The stars of heaven were falling upon the earth
like the figs cast by the fig-tree which the wind has shaken.
The sun, the great luminary of the universe, had become
as sackcloth of hair. The moon was blood-red. The firmament
was as a scroll rolled away. The archangel Michael, the
prince of the heavenly host, appeared glorious and terrible
against the sky. With one foot on the sea and one foot on
the land he blew from the archangelical trumpet the brazen
death of time. The three blasts of the angel filled all the universe.
Time is, time was, but time shall be no more. At the
last blast the souls of universal humanity throng towards
the valley of Jehoshaphat, rich and poor, gentle and simple,
wise and foolish, good and wicked. The soul of every human
being that has ever existed, the souls of all those who shall
yet be born, all the sons and daughters of Adam, all are assembled
on that supreme day. And lo, the supreme judge is
coming!
The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Rimbaud is lovely.
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our own will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus
Bump
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. - Sam Taylor Coleridge
Wish you fucking brainiacs would post the source of the quotes.
So far so good, and now Milena calls you with a voice that pierces your heart as strongly as it does your reason.Of course Milena doesn’t know you, she has been blinded by a few stories and letters; she is like the sea, as strong as the sea with its masses of water, crashing down with all their might, but nonetheless by some mistake, following the whim of the dead and above all distant moon. She doesn’t know you and perhaps her wanting you to come is an augury of truth. You can be certain your actual presence will no longer blind her. Is this why you don’t want to go, tender soul, because that is exactly what you fear?
>Aeschylus
ma nigga
I always wonder how so early in history a poet like he - as metaporical exuberant as Shakespeare - could have emerged.
He is not like any other greek poet before or after him. I can see a simlar style only in Shakespeare.
Veeky Forums culture is, for some reason, dead-set against giving sources to anything. pics or extracts.
OP here. Let me give the sources for those I know:
My quote (in the OP) is comes from the opening poem of The Iluminations, by Arthur Rimbaud.
This one is a poem by Tenysson.
This is Molloy, by Becket.
This is from the great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.
This is from Moby Dick
I hink this is from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This is the beautiful ending paragraph from the short story,The Dead, by Joyce (one of the greatest passages in all his work).
You can guess where this one is from,right?
Anyway, if you serach for the lines quoted on Google you will certainly found out the source.
As for not quoting the name of the authors, it is sometimes very interesting and healthy to read something with neutral eyes, without the weight and connotations of the authors name stamped in the writing itself.
The nubile tanned woman cringed as her owner brought forth an erect penis. "I am a nubile woman!" She cried indignantly. "How dare you sex me before my time! Guards!" She called. "Guards!"
Borin, her owner, placed one hand on his penis, and the other on the table and looked at her. "You will be fucked" he said.
"You do not dare to sex me!" laughed the woman, her oiled tan lines gleaming in the low light.
"You will be fucked," said Borin.
"Do not sex me!" wept the plant.
"You will be fucked," said Borin.
I watched this exchange. Truly, I believed the woman would be fucked. She was a woman, and on Gor she had no rights. Perhaps on Earth, in its permissive society, which distorts the true roles of all beings, which forces both woman and owner to go unhappy and constrained, which forbids the fulfillment of owner and woman, such might not happen. Perhaps there, it would not be fucked. But it was on Gor now, and would undoubtedly feel its true place, that of woman. It was female. It would be fucked at will. Such is the way with women.
Borin guided his penis, and muchly fucked the woman. The woman cried out. "No, Master! Do not fuck me!" The master continued to fuck the woman. "Please, Master," begged the tan nubile, "do not fuck me!" The master continued to fuck the woman. It was female. It could be fucked at will.
The supple female sobbed muchly as Borin extracted his penis. It was not pleased. Too, it was wet and sore. But this did not matter. It was female.
"You have been well fucked," said Borin.
"Yes," said the female, "I have been well fucked." Of course, it could be fucked by its master at will.
"I have fucked you well," said Borin.
"Yes, master," said the female. "You have fucked your woman well. I am female, and as such I should be fucked by my master."
The older woman next to the nubile supple tanned woman shuddered. She attempted to cover her small form with her small frail arms and small hands. "I am female," she said wonderingly. "I am of Earth, but for the first time, I feel myself truly womanlike. On Earth, I was able to control my fucking. I often scorned those who would fuck me. But they were weak, and did not see my scorn for what it was, the weak attempt of a small older woman to protect herself. Not one of the weak Earth owners would dare to fuck a female if she did not wish it. But on Gor," she shuddered, "on Gor it is different. Here, those who wish to fuck will fuck their women as they wish. But strangely, I feel myself most womanlike when I am at the mercy of a strong Gorean master, who may fuck me as he pleases."
"I will now fuck you," said Borin, the older woman's Gorean master.
The mature beauty did not resist being fucked. Perhaps she was realizing that such fucking was its master's to control. Too, perhaps she knew that this master was far superior to those of Earth, who would not fuck her if she did not wish to be fucked.
Dont think all ecstasies
Are the same!
Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley.
Make the quarrelling Lapithytes sleep, and Centaurs within lye quiet. Chain up the unruly legion of thy breast. Lead thine own captivity captive, and be Caesar with thy self.
Sir Thomas Browne
Proof that Kafka is such shit for teeny brainlets.
We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralizes, makes potential only, postpones, but which at any moment becomes, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating.
this
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
From Moby Dick
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Probably my favorite description of weather. From Huckleberry Finn:
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—FST! it was as bright as glory, and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs—where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Genesis 1:2
Wow, that's sublime. I don't know how it happened, but Melville seemed to have been struck by a Muse or something by the time he wrote Moby-Dick, as his earlier works (Typee, for instance) are unimpressive and blandly-composed.
Do any of Melville's works compare, even remotely, to Moby Dick?
It's my favourite book and I'd like to read more of his, but never heard anything special.
Pierre is sort of interesting, I would say it 'compares remotely'. Obviously nothing is like Moby Dick
Billy Budd would have been another masterwork, but he died before he could polish it off, and it shows. As it is, it is a sort of unfinished gem. I thought the short story Bartleby the Scrivener very good. But no, Moby-Dick is unparalleled in his oeuvre and few people in the history of the world have written anything to equal it.
>That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
from Moby Dick
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
~ From "Under Milk Wood", Dylan Thomas
Livy's History of Rome
Book 5 Chapter 27
Imagine the lives of people in novels who know that they will die but not that the story will end.
>Imagine the lives of people in novels who know that they will die but not that the story will end.
explain this
Actually, I remembered it wrong.
I think of the innocent lives
Of people in novels who know they’ll die
But not that the novel will end
A Mark Strand poem called "Fiction." It's about transcendence.
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.
JT: Has there been time for Pynchon?
DM: I’ve got an odd bias against him. Possibly in good part because of Dick Poirier calling “V.” the most masterful first novel in the history of literature, or something as silly. Not only ignoring that the book practically couldn’t have been written at all if Pynchon hadn’t devoured “The Recognitions,” but then forgetting that “The Recognitions” happened to be a first novel itself. Which as I say probably colored my response to “Gravity’s Rainbow” too. It’s major, but I think somewhat cartoonish
Gass: I remember Mark Strand sent me a postcard: “Read ‘Invisible Cities.’” This was a long time ago, bless the man! It was the first Calvino I’d read, and I knew literature had changed. I’ve taught that book so many times since—it is so beautifully complex, everything just right. Where are our Americans writing that way? Just let me have that hair-standing-on-end experience.
from Tom O’Bedlam
From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
The spirit that stands by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye,
That of your five sound senses,
You never be forsaken,
Nor wander from yourselves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon,
While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Wallace Steven
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
"So. Want to hang around and join me?"
"Want to watch?"
"Still want to be buddies, Lee?"
It was impossible.
He felt the imperative turning like a waterwheel inside him. Electric energy, roaring water.
There was only one way to relieve the pressure and that was to shoot him and see him die.
alm is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it hideth droll monsters!
Unmoved is my depth: but it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters.
A sublime one saw I today, a solemn one, a penitent of the spirit: Oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness!
With upraised breast, and like those who draw in their breath: thus did he stand, the sublime one, and in silence:
O'erhung with ugly truths, the spoil of his hunting, and rich in torn raiment; many thorns also hung on him—but I saw no rose.
Not yet had he learned laughing and beauty. Gloomy did this hunter return from the forest of knowledge.
From the fight with wild beasts returned he home: but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness—an unconquered wild beast!
As a tiger doth he ever stand, on the point of springing; but I do not like those strained souls; ungracious is my taste towards all those self-engrossed ones.
And ye tell me, friends, that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher!
Should he become weary of his sublimeness, this sublime one, then only will his beauty begin—and then only will I taste him and find him savoury.
And only when he turneth away from himself will he o'erleap his own shadow—and verily! into his sun.
Far too long did he sit in the shade; the cheeks of the penitent of the spirit became pale; he almost starved on his expectations.
Contempt is still in his eye, and loathing hideth in his mouth. To be sure, he now resteth, but he hath not yet taken rest in the sunshine.
As the ox ought he to do; and his happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth.
As a white ox would I like to see him, which, snorting and lowing, walketh before the plough-share: and his lowing should also laud all that is earthly!
Dark is still his countenance; the shadow of his hand danceth upon it. O'ershadowed is still the sense of his eye.
His deed itself is still the shadow upon him: his doing obscureth the doer. Not yet hath he overcome his deed.
To be sure, I love in him the shoulders of the ox: but now do I want to see also the eye of the angel.
Also his hero-will hath he still to unlearn: an exalted one shall he be, and not only a sublime one:—the ether itself should raise him, the will-less one!
He hath subdued monsters, he hath solved enigmas. But he should also redeem his monsters and enigmas; into heavenly children should he transform them.
As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealousy; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Verily, not in satiety shall his longing cease and disappear, but in beauty! Gracefulness belongeth to the munificence of the magnanimous.
His arm across his head: thus should the hero repose; thus should he also surmount his repose.
But precisely to the hero is beauty the hardest thing of all. Unattainable is beauty by all ardent wills.
A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, it is the most here.
To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, ye sublime ones!
When power becometh gracious and descendeth into the visible—I call such condescension, beauty.
And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
All evil do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the good.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful—but internally harder and more sustaining—the higher it riseth.
Yea, thou sublime one, one day shalt thou also be beautiful, and hold up the mirror to thine own beauty.
Then will thy soul thrill with divine desires; and there will be adoration even in thy vanity!
For this is the secret of the soul: when the hero hath abandoned it, then only approacheth it in dreams—the super-hero.—
Thus spake Zarathustra.
yea, steeled cognizance whose leap commits !
do you only read what bloom recs?
Geez this guy can't spell for shit
>The three men were erect. The sight of their arousal was arousing, though Daenerys Targaryen found it comical as well.
I just wanna die before my heart fails from heartbreak or cocktails, and maybe they'll remember me when I'm gone.
>Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.
From Morrissey's autobiography
Somehow, my Mickle Street story had created the wrong tone or put some element into the air that the other guests were forced to ponder. A silence without depth or extension drifted down over us like an invisible black fabric. You would have thought that I had committed a terrible social blunder, courageous in its rudeness. The night sky was dimly visible overhead, and I had had too much to drink, so that when I looked up at it, the stars appeared to be swirling, or blindly racing some sickening stellar soapbox derby, right to left, right to left.
>1633
t. incel
Nigger, no one is more likely to be incel than a Kafka reader, that subversive jew wrote the epitome of disturbed teen fiction.
>There’s always something you’re not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.
-Dellilo. Mao ll
Keep projecting.
seeing non-Mediterraneans in wreaths just further proves that they had nothing to do with the Dorians and Ionians. Those redheads and tawny haired folk in the poetry are either grafts from neighboring celtic tribes who the ancients admired or literally red haired med types which would have had distinct physiognomy from these forest niggers.
In the original Spanish he used "estirpes" which is more like "lineages" than "races". But okay.
I sed stup flaming ok ebony’s name is ENOBY nut mary su OK! DRACO IS SOO IN LUV wif her dat he is acting defrent! dey nu eechodder b4 ok!
fav quote from anna karenina
He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.
There are a tonnnnnne from unbearable lightness of being, too many to post
Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
Wild wind blows across dew-less grasslands
scattering even the most resolute flower
...
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
There was the difference between her and other women that there is between an overcast and a starry sky.
We went to Caddy's room. She sat down at the mirror. She stopped her hands and looked at me.
"Why, Benjy. What is it." she said. "You mustn't cry. Caddy's not going away. See here." she said. She took up the bottle and took the stopper out and held it to my nose. "Sweet. Smell. Good."
I went away and I didn't hush, and she held the bottle in her hand, looking at me.
"Oh." she said. She put the bottle down and came and put her arms around me. "So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn't tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn't, could you. Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont. Just wait till I dress."
Caddy dressed and took up the bottle again and we went down to the kitchen.
"Dilsey." Caddy said. "Benjy's got a present for you." She stooped down and pot the bottle in my hand. "Hold it out to Dilsey, now." Caddy held my hand out and Dilsey took the bottle.
"Well I'll declare." Dilsey said. "If my baby aint give Dilsey a bottle of perfume. Just look here, Roskus."
Caddy smelled like trees. "We dont like perfume ourselves," Caddy said.
And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men – all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?
During the first days they did not come across any appreciable obstacle. They went down along the stony bank of the river to the place where years before they had found the soldier’s armor, and from there they went into the woods along a path between wild orange trees. At the end of the first week they killed and roasted a deer, but they agreed to eat only half of it and salt the rest for the days that lay ahead. With that precaution they tried to postpone the necessity of having to eat macaws, whose blue flesh had a harsh and musky taste. Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. They could not return because the strip that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with a new vegetation that. almost seemed to grow before their eyes. “It’s all right" José Arcadio Buendía would say. “The main thing is not to lose our bearings.?Always following his compass, he kept on guiding his men toward the invisible north so that they would be able to get out of that enchanted region. It was a thick night, starless, but the darkness was becoming impregnated with a fresh and clear air. Exhausted by the long crossing, they hung up their hammocks and slept deeply for the first time in two weeks. When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.
Is this bait?
Probably yes
(but still better than academy-approved hacks like E. E. Cummings)
yes user, everything is bait
Through window and door I could look out unseen on all the bright life of tree and shrub and grass outside. The linnets and rabbits that fled when I approached could neither hear nor scent me there. I watched the storm crow build her nest and rear her young two cubits from my face. I saw the fox trot by with upraised brush; and once that giant fox, taller than all but the tallest hounds, that men call the maned wolf, loped by at dusk on some unguessable errand from the ruined quarters of the south. The caracara coursed vipers for me, and the hawk lifted his wings to the wind from the top of a pine.
A blood black nothingness began to spin.
Began to spin.
Let’s move on to system. System.
Feel that in your body. The system.
What does it feel like to be part of the system. System.
Is there anything in your body that wants to resist the system? System.
Do you get pleasure out of being a part of the system? System.
Have they created you to be a part of the system? System.
Is there security in being a part of the system? System.
Is there a sound that comes with the system? System.
We’re going to go on. Cells.
They were all put together at a time. Cells.
Millions and billions of them. Cells.
Were you ever arrested? Cells.
Did you spend much time in the cell? Cells.
Have you ever been in an instituion? Cells.
Do they keep you in a cell? Cells.
When you’re not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells.
Interlinked.
What’s it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked.
Do they teach you how to feel finger to finger? Interlinked.
Do you long for having your heart interlinked? Interlinked.
Do you dream about being interlinked?
Have they left a place for you where you can dream? Interlinked.
What’s it like to hold your child in your arms? Interlinked.
What’s it like to play with your dog? Interlinked.
Do you feel that there’s a part of you that’s missing? Interlinked.
Do you like to connect to things? Interlinked.
What happens when that linkage is broken? Interlinked.
Have they let you feel heartbreak? Interlinked.
Did you buy a present for the person you love? Within cells interlinked.
Why don’t you say that three times? Within cells interlinked. Within cells interlinked. Within cells interlinked.
Where do you go when you go within? Within.
Has anyone ever locked you out of a room? Within.
Within.
Where do you go to when you go within? Within.
Where is the place in the world you feel the safest? Within.
Do you have a heart? Within.
Stem.
Did you pick asparagus stems?
What comes from something else? Stem.
Have you been to the source of a river? Stem.
When’s the first time you gave a flower to a girl? Stem.
What did she look like? Stem.
Is it a slang word for people’s legs? Stem.
Have you planeted things in the ground? Stem.
Have you ever been in a legal battle? Stem.
Within one stem.
Dreadfully.
Is that an old fashioned word? Dreadfully.
Did you ever want to live in the nineteenth century? Dreadfully.
What’s it like to be filled with dread? Dreadfully.
Do you think you could find out all the answers to all the questions? Dreadfully.
Distinct.
How good are your eyes? Distinct.
Do you have a particular personality? Distinct.
What separates somebody from somebody else? Distinct.
Who do you admire most in the world? Distinct.
What was your most shameful moment? Distinct.
Dreadfully distinct.
Dark.
The mask, and the face beneath.
The crime, and its punishment.
the attic was stocked with a farrago of bric-a-brac, musty tomes, peculiar curios, the musted air stung with the remaining effervesence
of a particularly long & strange journey, a life of hard lessons, ambition, failed endeavors, in a wicked hash of wisdom and humility
When the slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot help but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of this universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.
Bump for hot Greek God
shut the fuck up
C'mon man, E.E. Cummings is terrible.
yew huat mayt?
--------
worms are the words but joy’s the voice
down shall go which and up come who
breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs
deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
—time is a tree(this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough
no u
Then who is the fisherman?
>Does the fact that their music no longer resonates in the halls of our kingdom mean that they've lost their worth?
Applies to more than music.
I don't see how this is good.
When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
From The Brothers Karamazov
"There was a moment on the way where he suddenly wanted to stop Andrei, jump out of the cart, take his loaded pistop, and finish everything without waiting for dawn. But this momenr flew by like a spark. And the troika went flying on, "devouring space," and the closer he came to his goal, the more powerful the thoight of her again, of her alone, took his breath away and drove all the other terrible phantoms from his heart. Oh, he wanted so much to look at her, if only briefly, if only from afar! "She is with him now, so I will only look at how she is with him, wih her former sweetheart, that is all I want. And never before had such love for this woman, so fatal for his destiny, risen in his breast, such a new feeling, never experienced before, a feeling unexpected even to himself, tender to the point of prayer, to the point of vanishing before her. "And I will vanish!" he said suddenly in a fit of hysterical rapture."
Hard to choose just one quote from that chapter
Is that from Book of the New Sun?
So he goes down, and life is busting out of him -
Great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower
Wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel
Like the Earth when the spring rain comes down,
The blessed gifts of god, and the new green
Spear splits the sheath and rips to birth I glory.
-Aeschylus, Agammemnon
>Then Túrin laughed bitterly. 'Awry, awry?' he cried. 'Yes, ever awry: as crooked as
>Morgoth!' And suddenly a black wrath shook him; for his eyes were opened, and the spell
>of Glaurung loosed its last threads, and he knew the lies with which he had been cheated.
>'Have I been cozened, that I might come and die here dishonoured, who might at least
>have ended valiantly before the Doors of Nargothrond?' And out of the night about the
>hall it seemed to him that he heard the cries of Finduilas.
I stop cold each time I reach this point in Turin's tragedy.