/lit/ - Literature

bump. I want some good quotes

"Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?"
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot

“Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.”
― Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle

>>3900486

John 3:16

>>3900538
"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life."

If you are going to quote the Good Book, please include the actual quote. Most ppl aren't going to bother and look up the verse.

>>3900548

Because they're obtuse. One shall not throw pearls to the pigs.

Don't have the book on me at the moment, but when in V. Schoenmaker tells Esther that change is just movement from one diametric opposite to another.

>>3900486
>"If others are so stupid- and i know they are- yet why won't I be wiser?... If one waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long... Men won't change and nobody can alter it and that it's not worth wasting effort over it."


that terrible prose :(

>>3900558
>my exact feelings

>for 600 pages

why would anyone subject themselves to Dostoevsky?

>>3900558
>>3900561

I personally found it to be one of the most engrossing books I've ever read.

"Now and again silence would suddenly set in and all that could be heard was Nastya moving the dead bones, but then train sirens once again sang out in the distance, pile drivers let out long heads of steam, and there were shouting voices from shock brigades who had come up against some obstacle; the air round about was charged unremittingly with the tension of labor being carried out for the common use and benefit of society. ‘Chiklin, why do I feel my mind all the time and there’s no way I can forget it?’ asked Nastya in surprise."
--Andrey Platonov, "The Foundation Pit"

>>3900558
One of you assfaggots mentions the word 'prose' incorrectly again and I'll rip your balls off. Literally. You've been warned.

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame, it comes to the solider, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter" - Jack London

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I live by this

Luke 18:11
I thank you God that I am not like the others

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

>>3900571
>One of you assfaggots mentions the word 'prose' incorrectly

learn english.

i have water in my eyes
and fire in my heart
could i get you a drink
or perhaps a spark?

We lay there for a long time and I was thinking. She was smoking slower and making it last and I thought about my fortune cookie: “The world is your oyster, but you are allergic to shellfish.” It would be a good fortune cookie. Maybe it would be important to someone at just the right time. People put their faith in strange things and give credence to all kinds of unintentional signs and symbols and stars, so why not a slip of paper inside a lump of Chinese dough? It was your fortune after all.

It would be a good fortune cookie, but it would be a better bumper sticker, slapped on the back of an eighteen-wheeler and driven all over the country for people and tourists to see. And in that inevitable twelve-car pileup after the tractor trailer had jackknifed, those same people and tourists would inch by in their cars, staring out their windows, and they’d see “The world is your oyster, but you are allergic to shellfish” on the detached bumper of that totaled wreck, slowly being engulfed by flames. And maybe they would finally understand.

“I thought of a good bumper sticker,” I said.
“Do you even own a car?”
“No,” I said.
And all the world seemed hopeless and against me

>>3900603
source?

>>3900605
I wonder if oysters can commit suicide.

Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem.

Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible!

"These people were worthy of love and admiration in their blind loyalty, in their blind strength and tenacity. With the exception of one small thing, one tiny little thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life." Siddhartha

“I don't want a future, I want a present. To me this appears of greater value. You have a future only when you have no present, and when you have a present, you forget to even think about the future.” -- Simon Tanner from Robert Walser's The Tanners

My liver is bad, well -- let it get worse!

>>3900563
If you personally found it to be engrossing - and i understand you would - yet how could you not find this style the least bit irritating to read? Books should be written well and that it's not something you can convince me otherwise about it.

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."
-- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

>>3900625
Shitty translations != bad prose

"First, therefore, He goes about making up to the people for his previous sins against them. He begins his career as the 'benefactor' of mankind. Since his new benevolence has a practical foundation, that the left hand should not know what the right hand giveth; no, whether he likes it or not, the Jew must reconcile himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he feels the sufferings of the masses and all the sacrifices that he himself is making to combat them."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."


I will never live in 19th century Nantucket and go on a whaling adventure :((((((((((

>>3900625
Ok sure, but who is to say that something is "written well"? We may have differing views of what is "good prose", but does that make either of us correct? I didn't find it irritating because it made sense to me, and the way it was written drew me into the narrative.

"Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door."

God

>>3900618
;_;
Notes from Underground was disturbingly easy to relate to, I found it more of a cautionary tale than anything

>>3900709
/r9k/, the book

“…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing….”

>>3900716
Lolz this is so true.

>>3900825
god damnit i fucking love it

>>3900941
Oh sure that bit is nice, but most of the book is
>patty winters show
>J&B on the rocks
>clothing brands

>>3900716

>>3900646
>Shitty translations != bad prose

even in Russian Doestoevsky has bad prose, according to quite a few critics including Nabokov.

Just how it goes, some people are good story tellers and shitty writers.

>>3900597
But you are, anon.

>>3901040
As a Ruskie I prefer Dostoyevsky to Nabokov by a tremendous margin.

>>3901052
seconded

>>3900553
you just suck in general

>>3900538
"Follow our religion and you will be teh super roxxors!"

>>3900553
that's not being obtuse, that's being lazy. if you're going to insult someone at least do it correctly...

>>3900571
>Literally.
I'll like to see that. Come at me, proseboy

In a private conversation, there is another downside that I find worse, the necessity of continuously speaking: when you are spoken to, you have to answer; and if no word is uttered, the conversation has to be revived. This insufferable constraint alone could've put me off society. I cannot think of anything more awfully awkward than having to speak at once and always.

— Rousseau the socially awkward autist

>>3901040
lol

"This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me." -Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Not only the protagonist Toru Okada, whose quote that is, but also another character, Creta Kano, said: "I used to be a prostitute of the flesh, but now I am a prostitute of the mind. Things pass through me.”

Kinda a hipster feel I guess.

"Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But," and his voice changed and the light went out of his face, - "what is this condition in which I find myself? this joy of living? this exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well call it? It is what comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well. It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence of the ferment - that makes some men think holy thoughts, and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him. That is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast, the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is alive. And - bah! To-morrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays. And I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of fishes. Bah! And bah! again

. - The Sea Wolf
To this day I marvel in awe at what a tremendous gem of a character London accomplished in Wolf Larsen. And it makes me lament the fucking ridiculous ending to the book and the entire love element which he just shoved in there to snap his fingers in the face of and to repudiate Nietzsche.

>>3901709
Yeah, Wolfy was a lot of fun, though a bit too teeny at times (Oh ! Look how unsignificant all things are !). His ennemy/sidekick (the former columnist and writer) was an annoying faggot in comparison.

I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Eerie how we feel exactly the same.

>>3900648
>adventure
>literally everybody dies except for the protagonist
>99% of the book is a long form encyclopedia entry on whales

>>3901709
Ugh. Those two freckles on that girl's face are so fucking disgusting. 4/10 WNF.

>>3901747
The fact you can't remember Hump's name is a testament to how secondary the protagonist was to the creature known as Wolf Larsen.

>>3902087
>The fact you can't remember Hump's name is a testament to how secondary the protagonist was to the creature known as Wolf Larsen.

>>3902101
what?

>>3902139
Buckley Bomb

>>3901923
i only see one freckle and a piercing

>>3901185
I knew there was a reason I never liked Rousseau

>>3901898
Yeah, you feel that.

Turgenev's "Asya" is full of quotes that although dispiriting, seem quite true to me:

But I considered it a duty to give myself over for some while to grief and loneliness - what doesn't youth enjoy doing!

Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking for just a crust.

"So long as one's just dreaming about what to do, one can soar like an eagle and move mountains, it seems, but as soon as one starts doing it one gets worn out and tired."

Meditations, by Aurelius:
"When a man has done thee any wrong, immediately consider with what opinion about good or evil he has done wrong. For when thou hast seen this, thou wilt pity him, and wilt neither wonder nor be angry."

>>3900553
11/10

Amazing and subtle.

>>3900977
also Les Misérables

>>3902276

Billions of years of evolution, just so you could make some cunty comment.

"I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

>>3901923
thats a dude m8

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the wor

>>3900486
nice special snowflake quote

>>3902468

I think being one of the most highly regarded authors of all time does make him a special snowflake.

"I was so tired. It was the unique type of exhaustion that comes from failure on top of failure. Futility and fuckups take a lot out of a man-I should know, since that was pretty much my whole life up to this point."

- David Wong, This Book is Full of Spiders

>>3902496
that hardly describes "op" though.