/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11195662]

What is your favorite passage in all of literature?

[Anonymous No.11195693]

>Sunset found her squatting in the grass...

[Anonymous No.11195700]

>I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.

[Anonymous No.11195723]

>>11195662
My mother is a fish.

[Anonymous No.11195724]

>What?
>Richard M. Nixon

[Anonymous No.11195726]

>>11195700
Absolutely based

[Anonymous No.11195740]

>>11195700
And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Fools fold their hands
and ruin themselves.
Better one handful with tranquillity
than two handfuls with toil
and chasing after the wind.

[Anonymous No.11195741]

"It's not me, its the algorithm."

[Anonymous No.11195753]

Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm- “God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! ‘t is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”

Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces- though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:-

“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats: look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.

[Anonymous No.11195754]

>>11195662
“...just as a man might make, feeling the nail go through his hand and into the wood.”

Simple, true, clear

[Anonymous No.11195760]

>My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I found, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

>My God and I are horsemen galloping in the burning sun or under drizzling rain. Pale, starving, but unsubdued, we ride and converse.

>"Leader!" I cry. He turns his face toward me, and I shudder to confront his anguish.

>Our love for each other is rough and ready, we sit at the same table, we drink the same wine in this low tavern of life.

[Anonymous No.11195762]

>>11195662
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both; Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it, weep over them, you will also regret that; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will also regret that; believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both; whether you believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will also regret that; hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.

[Anonymous No.11195799]

> And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet
fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

[Anonymous No.11195800]

>>11195762
i regret reading that

[Anonymous No.11195816]

>“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”

[Anonymous No.11195867]

>>11195700
https://youtu.be/DT0bnoUXhYg

[Anonymous No.11195874]

>>11195753
This alone is about to bring me to tears. Thank you for convincing me to finally read this.

[Anonymous No.11195881]

>>11195662
I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.

[Anonymous No.11195894]

>>11195816
This book really is pure feel.

[Anonymous No.11195935]

>>11195881
Outstanding

[Anonymous No.11195950]

>>11195753
Shakespeare tier.

[Anonymous No.11195951]

>When all this All doth pass from age to age,
>And revolution in a circle turn,
>Then heavenly justice doth appear like rage,
>The caves do roar, the very seas do burn,
> Glory grows dark, the sun becomes a night,
> And makes this great world feel a greater might.

>When Love doth change his seat from heart to heart,
>And Worth about the wheel of fortune goes,
>Grace is diseased, Desert seems overthwart,
>Vows are forlorn, and Truth doth credit lose,
> Chance then gives law, Desire must be wise,
> And look more ways than one, or lose her eyes.

>My age of joy is past, of woe begun,
>Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace,
>With them that walk against me, is my sun:
>The wheel is turned, I hold the lowest
> What can be good to me since my love is
> To do me harm, content to do amiss?

[Anonymous No.11195983]

>A few light taps upon the window 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 heard the snow falling through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

[Anonymous No.11196004]

>>11195753

Based Moby-Bro.

“Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”

[Anonymous No.11196013]

>>11195800
TL;DR
Really regret it tho

[Anonymous No.11196020]

>>11195983
Can anyone tell me why Ulysses is considered better than this?

[Anonymous No.11196021]

Of what advantage, indeed, is the grand, the immense? The ocean depresses the soul of man, and at the sight of its boundless expanse of billows--an expanse whereon the weary eye is allowed no resting-place from the uniformity of the picture--the heart of man grows troubled within him, and he derives no solace from the roaring and mad rolling of the waves. Ever since the world began, those waves have sung the same dim, enigmatical song. Ever since the world began, they have voiced but the querulous lament of a monster which, everlastingly doomed to torment, utters a chorus of shrill, malicious cries. On the shores of the sea no bird warbles; only the silent gulls, like lost spirits, flit wearily along its margin, or circle over its surface. In the presence of that turmoil of nature the roar even of the wildest beast sounds weak, and the voice of man becomes wholly overwhelmed. Yes, beside it man's form looks so small and fragile that it is swallowed up amid the myriad details of the gigantic picture. That alone may be why contemplation of the ocean depresses man's soul. During periods, also, of calm and immobility his spirit derives no comfort from the spectacle; for in the scarcely perceptible oscillation of the watery mass he sees ever the slumbering, incomprehensible force which, until recently, has been mocking his proud will and, as it were, submerging his boldest schemes, his most dearly cherished labours and endeavours.

[Anonymous No.11196043]

>>11195983
Serious question: why tears here? It's beautiful, sure, and I feel my mortality as much as the next guy, but what is their to cry over for you?

>>11196020
Read them both and, I promise you, it will be immediately apparent. Hell, just read Portrait.

My entry, a single line:
forsan et haec olim meminisse iuavbit

[Anonymous No.11196050]

>>11195662

Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

[Anonymous No.11196053]

>>11196020
dude allusions and shiet

[Anonymous No.11196128]

>>11195760
That is beautiful. Makes me proud to be a catholic :)

[Anonymous No.11196135]

the closing passage of Beckett's How It Is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4B_25sPhdk

[Anonymous No.11196137]

>>11196043
You answered your own question for me. Because its one of the sublimest and hardest hitting reminders of mortality in all of literature. Reading The Dead for the first time was one of the most cathartic experiences I've had with any book. The image of Michael Furey under the tree in the rain always gets to me.

[Anonymous No.11196142]

>>11195753
My god was that beautiful. Every line seemingly perfect in that whirlwind of adventure, bravery, and determination. How I have never read moby dick is a disgrace to me and I hope to read it soon!

[Anonymous No.11196149]

>>11196137
Fair. I feel you. I guess I'm weird in being comforted by shared mortality, but death is as worth crying over as anything

[Anonymous No.11196161]

>>11195760
>>11196128
yikes

[Anonymous No.11196177]

A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

[Anonymous No.11196187]

I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist.
“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”
“No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”
She had never called me honey before.

[Anonymous No.11196188]

>>11196161
No yikes here friend, just enjoyment of a man on a mission :)

[Anonymous No.11196191]

>>11195662
>It is that peculiar soldiers' humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship.

[Anonymous No.11196232]

>>11196177
He could write such bollocks sometimes.

[Anonymous No.11196242]

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; summer born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. Students and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produces a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, someone may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm it must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

[Anonymous No.11196264]

>>11195753
moby-dick is the greatest

[Anonymous No.11196313]

> I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of sluimbers we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been), we remember not that we have dreamed.

[Anonymous No.11196361]

>Only now is the child finally divested of all he has been. His origins are become as remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

[Anonymous No.11196533]

>>11195816
I feel sad that the authors is dead and never experienced his renaissance

[Anonymous No.11196547]

>>11195753
Feckin Elder God - tier

Shakespeare would have been proud to read Melville, would he not have been?

[Anonymous No.11196559]

>>11195881
Okay Kafka is pretty good, I admit I haven’t always understood why he is placed basically at the very top with Joyce and Proust and such.

[Anonymous No.11196572]

>>11196020
When you read the last chapter of Ulysses after reading the previous chapters you will understanding even the ending of “The Dead” cannot reach the immense beauty of the last ~30 minutes of reading Ulysses.

[Anonymous No.11196581]

>Despite the foregoing, the human race by tens of thousands would be knee-deep in the waters around Zanzibar.

[Anonymous No.11196593]

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

[Anonymous No.11196613]

>>11196021
Oblomov is underrated here. Goncharov is much better than Turgenev at the least. His ability to paint a scene is at the talent level that few even among the masters could match. I don’t know if Tolstoy could have written Oblomov’s Dream.

[Anonymous No.11196623]

>>11196177
You won’t get many replies but it’s a really really special ending. Maybe it’s because I went through the humiliation of a girl, and went through a similar moment of just letting go, and of course once you let go they come back immediately and say “oh we could’ve been so perfect together” it almost ties into the Kierkegaard quotation that’s also in this thread... no matter what choice a human makes, they will regret it.

[Anonymous No.11196649]

>>11196242
recognized this quote by the fifth word
when I first started reading classics this was one of the quotes that have stuck with me ever since

[Anonymous No.11196783]

>>11196623
Yep, I (
>>11196177
) had a very similar experience, save the part where the girl mentions how good we could have been... I've just recently become friends with her again and have had to fight my old feelings. So I read TSAR again, lol. Thanks for the (you), though, cool to see that other anons have been affected by the novel in the same ways.

[Anonymous No.11196803]

>>11195724
perfect

[Anonymous No.11196808]

>>11195816
This makes me really want to read this book

[Anonymous No.11196821]

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

[Anonymous No.11196847]

>>11196187
this entire sequence is perfect

[Anonymous No.11197066]

>>11195662
When I had journeyed half of our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.

[Anonymous No.11197236]

>>11196783
It’s a great book.

Simple but one of my favorites. The first three to four chapters with the whore and the dancing and Jake and Brett riding in the taxi around Montmartre together are amazing. The story about the black boxer, and the fishing trip, Pamplona, the bulls, it’s novel with a special place in my heart. It’s not so complicated as the things /lit/ loves but the characters are real, the words are so carefully chosen, and the details he chooses to give the reader are perfect.

Right now I’m reading some of his short stories and really remembering that simplicity and precision that his sentences carry.

[Anonymous No.11197347]

Rothchild’s Fiddle by Chekhov. All of it

[Anonymous No.11197356]

>>11195693
this

[Anonymous No.11197376]

the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon. In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.

[Anonymous No.11197390]

Faust: “So still I seek the force, the reason governing life’s flow; and not just its external show.”
Devil: “The governing force? The reason? Some things cannot be known; they are beyond your reach even when shown.”
Faust: “Why should that be so?”
Devil: “They lie outside the boundaries that words can address; & man can only know those thoughts which language can express.”
Faust: “What? Do you mean that words are greater yet than man?”
Devil: “Indeed they are.”

Faust: “Then what of longing, affection, pain or grief. I can’t describe these, yet I know they are in my breast. What are they?”
Devil: “Without substance, as mist is.”
Faust: “In that case man is only air as well. [reads] What has made me thirst then to be instructed in those things that are more than thirst allows?”
Devil: “Your thirst is artificial, fostered by the arrogance in you. So look no further than all your human brothers do: sleep, eat, drink, and let that be sufficient.”
Faust: “Liar and foul traitor, where are the pulse and core of nature you promised to reveal? Where?”
Devil: “Faustus you lack the wit to see them in every blade of grass.”

[Anonymous No.11197620]

>>11195753
this is why atheists will never compete

[Anonymous No.11197626]

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
“Come!”
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he
would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
“Come!”
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas
she sent a cry of anguish.
“Eveline! Evvy!”
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on
but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her
eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

[Anonymous No.11197701]

>>11196808
Do it, that quote is one of many great ones

[Anonymous No.11197706]

>>11195662
“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?”

Truly for I feel.

[Anonymous No.11197710]

>>11196559
He died young and left much of his work unfinished and unpublished. The critical press of his time wasn't able to laud him and build the roots needed for posterity.

[Anonymous No.11197714]

"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 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."

[Anonymous No.11197717]

As soon as that majestic force,
which had already pierced me once
before I had outgrown my childhood, struck my eyes,
I turned to my left with the confidence
a child has running to his mamma
when he is afraid or in distress
to say to Virgil: 'Not a single drop of blood
remains in me that does not tremble--
I know the signs of the ancient flame.'
But Virgil had departed, leaving us bereft:
Virgil, sweetest of fathers,
Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation.
And not all our ancient mother lost
could save my cheeks, washed in the dew,
from being stained again with tears.

[Anonymous No.11197723]

>>11197706
fuck that, he wasnt even happy and probably regretted his decision to give up his wealth. It was an insincere gesture, driven onward by his ego.

[Anonymous No.11197732]

>>11197706
Are you not able to read? " I think I have found what is needed for happiness", there is no talk about HIS happiness.

[Anonymous No.11197735]

>>11197723
was directed to you >>11197732

[Anonymous No.11197888]

wow there isn't a single interesting passage in this entire thread. this thread and the recent summer stack thread are showing some horrible taste on /lit/ desu

[Anonymous No.11197892]

>>11197888
Excellent contribution.

[Anonymous No.11197902]

>>11197892
Sorry. Shall I post another Moby-Dick extract that we've all read a hundred times?

[Anonymous No.11197908]

>>11197902
Not necessarily. Just post something that you find interesting and that you think will add something of value to the thread.

[Anonymous No.11197917]

>>11197888
It's actually a good quote thread and a great overall. Have you not been much on /lit/ lately? What do you consider a good thread?

[Anonymous No.11197938]

>>11197908
But he did anon. His contribution is nothing just like always in his Life.

[Anonymous No.11197954]

>>11197917
I remember the selections in other threads used to be a lot more unpredictable and diverse. That's all I'm saying really.

[Anonymous No.11197956]

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”

[Anonymous No.11197983]

>Jim not that way Jim. That’s no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let’s see you bend at the healthy knees. Let’s see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling’s set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She’s never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It’s Marlon Brando’s fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with there own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You’ll know Brando when you watch him, and you’ll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair’s rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and lie there, ill-used. With the over-clumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant. Your mother is of that new generation that moves against life’s grain, across its warp and baffles. She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn’t understand him, is what’s ruined her for everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and even low-level public-park knock-around tennis. Ever see your mother with a broiler door? It’s carnage, Jim, it’s to cringe to see it, and the poor dumb thing thinks it’s tribute to this slouching slob-type she loved as he.

[Anonymous No.11197990]

>>11197954
There's diverse and then there's good. I wonder if this applies to anything else...

[Anonymous No.11197994]

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

[Anonymous No.11198016]

>>11197994
I was waiting for someone to post this. So good.

[Anonymous No.11198034]

>>11197994
Absolutely manic brilliance tbqh.

It really amazes me that it's possible to write something like this without being on LSD or speed.

[Anonymous No.11198045]

>>11195662
Adam telling the angel the story of his first waking moments and memories and thoughts after being given life in the Garden of Eden, from Milton's Paradise Lost.

[Anonymous No.11198132]

>>11196177
Too bad that's not the original ending but the one modified by Fitzgerald. HEMINGWAY'S A HACK

[Anonymous No.11198135]

>>11195762
it's kinda basic desu

[Anonymous No.11198205]

>>11198135
Nobody will ever read your shit, not because you're a misunderstood or overlooked genius, but because you're an unoriginal retard who can't form complete sentences much less coherent thoughts, desu

[Anonymous No.11198277]

>>11195983
Could tell immediately it was Joyce and I haven't even finished Portrait yet, his style is so distinctive. Now I see why people were rating him as one of the best to ever write prose

[Anonymous No.11198317]

>>11198205
nice projection

[Anonymous No.11198344]

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor
had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse
to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper
all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to
tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in
vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a
peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory
end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy. What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-
gods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu
Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! Where the Baddelaries partisans are still
out to mathmaster Malachus Micgranes and the Verdons cata-
pelting the camibalistics out of the Whoyteboyce of Hoodie
Head. Assiegates and boomeringstroms. Sod's brood, be me fear!
Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykill-
killy: a toll, a toll. What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired
and

[Anonymous No.11198385]

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now.

[Anonymous No.11198403]

MRS PUGH:
Persons with manners,

SECOND VOICE:
snaps Mrs cold Pugh,

MRS PUGH:
do not nod at table.

FIRST VOICE:
Mr Pugh cringes awake. He puts on a soft-soaping smile: it is sad and grey under his nicotine-eggyellow weeping walrus Victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory of Doctor Crippen.

MRS PUGH:
You should wait until you retire to your sty,

SECOND VOICE:
says Mrs Pugh, sweet as a razor. His fawning measly quarter-smile freezes. Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist's den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrons and phials brimful with pox and the Black Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker wife.

MR PUGH
I beg your pardon, my dear,

SECOND VOICE
he murmurs with a wheedle.

[Anonymous No.11198491]

They tenderly lifted Toad into the motor-car and propped him up with soft cushions, and proceeded on their way.

When Toad heard them talk in so kind and sympathetic a way, and knew that he was not recognised, his courage began to revive, and he cautiously opened first one eye and then the other.

‘Look!’ said one of the gentlemen, ‘she is better already. The fresh air is doing her good. How do you feel now, ma’am?’

‘Thank you kindly, Sir,’ said Toad in a feeble voice, ‘I’m feeling a great deal better!’ ‘That’s right,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now keep quite still, and, above all, don’t try to talk.’

‘I won’t,’ said Toad. ‘I was only thinking, if I might sit on the front seat there, beside the driver, where I could get the fresh air full in my face, I should soon be all right again.’

‘What a very sensible woman!’ said the gentleman. ‘Of course you shall.’ So they carefully helped Toad into the front seat beside the driver, and on they went again.

Toad was almost himself again by now. He sat up, looked about him, and tried to beat down the tremors, the yearnings, the old cravings that rose up and beset him and took possession of him entirely.

‘It is fate!’ he said to himself. ‘Why strive? why struggle?’ and he turned to the driver at his side.

‘Please, Sir,’ he said, ‘I wish you would kindly let me try and drive the car for a little. I’ve been watching you carefully, and it looks so easy and so interesting, and I should like to be able to tell my friends that once I had driven a motor-car!’

The driver laughed at the proposal, so heartily that the gentleman inquired what the matter was. When he heard, he said, to Toad’s delight, ‘Bravo, ma’am! I like your spirit. Let her have a try, and look after her. She won’t do any harm.’

Toad eagerly scrambled into the seat vacated by the driver, took the steering-wheel in his hands, listened with affected humility to the instructions given him, and set the car in motion, but very slowly and carefully at first, for he was determined to be prudent.

The gentlemen behind clapped their hands and applauded, and Toad heard them saying, ‘How well she does it! Fancy a washerwoman driving a car as well as that, the first time!’

Toad went a little faster; then faster still, and faster.

He heard the gentlemen call out warningly, ‘Be careful, washerwoman!’ And this annoyed him, and he began to lose his head.

The driver tried to interfere, but he pinned him down in his seat with one elbow, and put on full speed. The rush of air in his face, the hum of the engines, and the light jump of the car beneath him intoxicated his weak brain. ‘Washerwoman, indeed!’ he shouted recklessly. ‘Ho! ho! I am the Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes! Sit still, and you shall know what driving really is, for you are in the hands of the famous, the skilful, the entirely fearless Toad!’

[Anonymous No.11198503]

>>11198403
thomas was a genius

[Anonymous No.11198559]

One of my faves:

‘the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalised; outlines were sharp and life-like, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces! It was not any mere artist’s interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all—he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense—in conception and in execution—a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.

[Anonymous No.11198636]

>>11198205
You really should relax. He's written better things than the addressed quote.

[Anonymous No.11198656]

>>11195700

Ugh. Can we not post genre fiction? please and thank you.

[Anonymous No.11198945]

>>11197376
This is just "Alas, poor Yorrick" in 'murican.

[Anonymous No.11198953]

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.

[Anonymous No.11199359]

>>11197888
this
& checked

[Anonymous No.11199362]

>my mother is a fish

[Anonymous No.11199482]

The opening paragraph of As I Lay Dying where Darl describes how he and Jewel are walking in front of each other.

[Anonymous No.11199563]

You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.

[Anonymous No.11199579]

Han kom som ett yrväder en aprilafton och hade ett höganäskrus i en svångrem om halsen.

[Anonymous No.11199623]

>>11195662
>For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

[Anonymous No.11199715]

>>11199623
>>11198953
>nietzsche
stop

[Anonymous No.11199792]

>>11199715
don't insult my hero REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Anonymous No.11199868]

>>11199482

If it's Faulkner it's gotta be TSATF.

>I saw them. Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind. Caddy. Caddy.

I know what you're wondering. You're wondering how Benjy Compson (I.Q. 73 on a good day with a skinful of nootropics) manages to rise to such heights of lyricism. The answer is, he's inspired. Caddy is where it's at.

[Anonymous No.11199960]

>"The only thing that really counts in a man is his get-up-and-go..."

[Anonymous No.11200021]

Vi tvingas söka oss till andra ord
som kan förminska allt och krympa allt till tröst.
Ett oanständigt ord blir ordet Stjärna,
anständigt skötets namn och kvinnas bröst.
En oanständig kroppsdel blir vår hjärna
som deporterat oss till Hades höst.

[Anonymous No.11200038]

>>11200021
vem?

[Anonymous No.11200056]

>>11200038
Martinsson, Aniara.

Hela boken är packad med nämnvärda stycken. Du borde definitivt läsa den om du ej ännu gjort det.

[Anonymous No.11200071]

>>11200021
>>11200038
Stycket blir ännu bättre i kontext, eftersom Aniara och dess besättning slängts iväg ifrån sin kurs och är dömda att evigt sväva genom rymdens mörker utan destination. Boken handlar i princip om hur besättningen hanterar ensamheten och vetskapen om att de aldrig mer kommer sätta sin fot utanför rymdskeppet.

[Anonymous No.11200075]

>>11199362
Unironically the best chapter in the entire book.

[Anonymous No.11200078]

Probably the whole BS 1960 Jim not that way Jim chapter of Infinite Jest

[Anonymous No.11200105]

>>11195741
Underrated

[Anonymous No.11200141]

>>11199482
YES

I started Light in August and was reminded of how incredible Faulkner starts off AILD. What is it about that paragraph? Why is it so fucking great?

I remember reading it a hundred times trying to figure it out and couldn't pinpoint it. Is it the logic of their movements being delineated? Is it his syntax?

Talk to me anon

[Anonymous No.11200145]

>>11195753
Welp time to reread Moby Dick

[Anonymous No.11200191]

>>11200078
>>11197983

[Anonymous No.11200305]

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.

[Anonymous No.11200394]

>>11200141

It's not overwhelmingly great but it's good.

The main reasons it's good are:

a) It nails Darl's character right from the start. He's a super-empathetic person who is always imagining what it's like from other peoples' perspectives. Here he's imagining someone facing the other way looking at him & Jewel approaching. It's very rare to instinctively assume another physical view-point like this.

b) It sets up the basic tension between Jewel and Darl. Jewel is walking *behind* Darl but you can still see Jewel larger than Darl even though, according to perspective, he ought to appear smaller, being in the distance. In the same way, as a character, he looms over Darl even though he's "behind" him chronologically (he's a lot younger). This is amplified when he overtakes Darl by walking through the store-house.

[Anonymous No.11200506]

>>11200394
Well yes these are what I meant from the logic of their movements i.e. the power dynamics and perspectives.

It's more than good, it's great. The English major explanation doesn't do it justice. There's something intagibly great about it

[Anonymous No.11200532]

>>11200506

Well, to add to those two points -

In "On Becoming A Novelist" John Gardner talks about the opening of Moby Dick as a supreme example of "the authoritative voice" - Melville is absolutely, unmistakably sure of who he is and the story he's going to tell, and we trust him because he so clearly has everything under control.

The opening of AILD has that same kind of authority. Faulkner said that's (sort of) how he felt writing it - he knew completely how it was going to go before he started, and he knew it was going to be a tour-de-force.

[Anonymous No.11200772]

>>11200532
how do you know so much sonny

[Anonymous No.11200841]

>>11195700
King James Bible version is better
>I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

And Ecclesiastes 2:10-2:11
>And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour.
>Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

[Anonymous No.11200872]

>>11195662
Long as fuck but the most chilling passage by far.

“Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated? the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. ‘Where is God gone?’ he called out. ‘I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? —for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife—who will wipe away the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!’—Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. ‘I come too early,’ he then said, ‘I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling—it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star—and yet they have done it!”.

[Anonymous No.11200875]

>>11200841
>>11195700
I love David Hume's response to Ecclesiastes:
>But the Asiatic manners are as destructive to friendship as to love. Jealousy excludes men from all intimacies and familiarities with each other. No one dares bring his friend to his house or table, lest he bring a lover to his numerous wives. Hence all over the east, each family is as much separate from another, as if they were so many distinct kingdoms. No wonder then, that Solomon, living like an eastern prince, with his seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines, without one friend, could write so pathetically concerning the vanity of the world. Had he tried the secret of one wife or mistress, a few friends, and a great many companions, he might have found life somewhat more agreeable. Destroy love and friendship; what remains in the world worth accepting?

[Anonymous No.11200879]

I can't remember any specific quotes from any books I like, am I a brainlet or something...

[Anonymous No.11200904]

>>11200872
Also a favourite of mine, an opening passage:

My mother died today.
Or maybe it was yesterday.
I don't remember.

[Anonymous No.11200968]

>>11200904
>translation
Try 'Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.' This is a very interesting read on the translation of what should be a very simple line
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation-what-the-first-line-of-the-stranger-should-be

[Anonymous No.11201008]

>>11200968
Ah, I see. My mistake.

[Anonymous No.11201020]

>>11200841
I usually always prefer the King James, but the NIV translation is just beautiful.

[Anonymous No.11201261]

>>11195723
how is high school going for you?

[Anonymous No.11201312]

>>11195662
A hostile spear, a new frontier, the end is near
There's no surrender
The lines must hold, their story told, Rorke's Drift controlled

[Anonymous No.11202425]

>>11195799
Came here to post this

[Anonymous No.11202433]

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

[Anonymous No.11202436]

>>11195662
"The Sun is but a morning star."
Also that passage about birds from the same book.

[Anonymous No.11202444]

>>11202436
>Crtl-F
>"Sun"
>1/16
Is the Sun THAT significant?

[Anonymous No.11203512]

>>11198344

great

[Anonymous No.11203906]

>>11195662
“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”

[Anonymous No.11204551]

>>11195662
"Loleeta, life of my lice, lure of my limbs. My tit, my tat; my filly, my floozy; my whim, my quim. The tippity tip of my twisty tongue on her twitchy twat, squirmingly squishing: skree, skree! Dolita, dotted line on my slacks in the morning. Look at thith thudden lithp."

[Anonymous No.11204584]

>>11195662

1/2

Listen, son; I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside.
There are things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a twoel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.
At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and I frowned, and said in reply, “Hold your shoulders back!”
Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road, I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before you boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, form a father!
Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you want?” I snapped.
You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs.

[Anonymous No.11204589]

>>11204584

2/2

Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to your for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years.
And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!
It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing buy a boy – a little boy!”
I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.

[Anonymous No.11204806]

>>11195724
There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one...
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev'ry stone...

Now everybody -

[Anonymous No.11205299]

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

[Anonymous No.11205985]

>>11200394
I'd like to add, it reveals the characters--Darl, the ponderous and philosophical one, taking the indirect path around the building, Jewel, the man of action, walking directly through it--from the very first scene, and foreshadows their fates.

[Anonymous No.11206011]

>>11195662
Balrog

[Anonymous No.11206132]

>>11195740
>ne travaillez jamais

get out of my country reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[Anonymous No.11206401]

Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!

[Anonymous No.11206543]

>>11195874
Prepare to be disappointed

[Anonymous No.11206588]

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?

His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words.

It was unlike anything I ever heard.

Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound.

A sound you could smell.

This man worked for the carnival,you dig?

And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act.

After a while, the ass started talking on its own.

He would go in without anything prepared...

and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teethlike...

little raspy incurving hooks and started eating.

He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it...

but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street...

shouting out it wanted equal rights.

It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it.

And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth.

Finally, it talked all the time, day and night.

You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up...

beating at it with his fists...

and sticking candles up it, but...

nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him...

"It is you who will shut up in the end, not me...

"because we don't need you around here anymore.

I can talk and eat and shit."

After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparentjelly...

like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth.

He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands...

like burning gasoline jelly and grow there.

So, finally, his mouth sealed over...

and the whole head...

would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig?

That's the one thing that the asshole couldn't do was see.

It needed the eyes.

Nerve connections were blocked...

and infiltrated and atrophied.

So, the brain couldn't give orders anymore.

It was trapped inside the skull...

sealed off.

For a while, you could see...

the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes.

And then finally the brain must have died...

because the eyes went out...

and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.

[Anonymous No.11206597]

John Galt's Speech

[Anonymous No.11206635]

>>11206597
Francisco's speech*

[Anonymous No.11206689]

>>11200875
What happened to the world since he wrote that? I've lived all over the Middle-East and South Asia, and everywhere I went I found good friends, who would take me into their homes and were totally hospitable, even when they didn't need to be. Whereas here in the West I've never really had that experience. I've also noticed people rarely have a 'best friend' like they do in the East, because apparently that's gay

[Anonymous No.11207770]

>I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.

[Anonymous No.11208150]

>>11196149

i think it depends on where you are at life. i remember when i read it in high school I was deeply moved but not quite brought me to tears or bowled me over. But re-reading The Dead now definitely has changed dramatically--there's grief about mortality sure but the deeper grief, the much more subtle grief that Joyce kind of trains the ear to, is grief about failure before mortality. I don't know about you or where you are in life (not to say that it's linear or a forward progress) for me personally I just subtly accumulated more regrets and disappointments about adult life, and The Dead really puts that back in front of you

[Anonymous No.11208151]

These bleak skies I hail

[Anonymous No.11208157]

I've read this page at least a thousand times. All of the Stephen Dedalus chapters are amazing, especially Proteus.

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end."

[Anonymous No.11208174]

>>11197390
brother

this legit perfect for my BA. much love

[Anonymous No.11208214]

The first page of Lolita

[Anonymous No.11208237]

One of the greatest sentences ever written.

No man is an illand, intire of it self; every man is a peece of the continent of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

[Anonymous No.11208251]

>>11206635
Not bad choice tbqh

[Anonymous No.11208277]

>>11195662
"Pimply, stout Brett Merriman cried to the stairway, burping a ball of feather on which a cross and a taser were lost."
Quoted from memory.

[Anonymous No.11208558]

>>11195662
"So, we bite on boards amidst the curries, balls blue nervously over the pesto."
Is the mysterious ending of Gatsby an allusion to the lavish parties from earlier?

[Anonymous No.11209323]

>>11200394
Can you also explain to me why the opening chapter of The Idiot is so great?

[Anonymous No.11211201]

>>11197390
Which translation is this?

[Anonymous No.11212289]

>>11206689
To be fair I don't find that too many adults in the West have 'best friends' either.

[Anonymous No.11212505]

So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly--there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,--there--there--we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love--the ones which love us and themselves as well--incestuous sentences--sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.

William Gass, On Being Blue

[Anonymous No.11212637]

>>11196135

I bet that would have been lovely if the guy reciting had more than five minutes to record it

[Anonymous No.11212675]

>>11195753
The speech he made tot he demiurge right before that was better and underrated.

[Anonymous No.11212732]

To be no more; sad cure; for who would loose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?

[saucy No.11212767]

>Before he died, my father taught me his finger moves. They were movements for getting a woman off. He said he didn't know if they'd be of use to me, seeing as how I was a woman myself, but it was all he had in the way of a dowry. I knew what he meant: he meant inheritance, or legacy, not dowry. There were twelve moves in all,. He did them on my hand like sign language. They were mostly about speed and pressure in different combinations. There were some flourishes that I never would have thought of. I imagined he'd learned them when he was overseas. A sudden reversal in both speed and direction. Still fingers held like silence for a beat, and then long quick strokes that he called "skinning." I kept wanting to write things down, and he would scoff, asking me if I would take out my notes when the time came. You'll remember, he said., and he repeated skinning on my palm with his dry fingers. It felt like a hand massage. He was incredibly confident. I could not imagine using these movements alone, with such confidence. You're going to make some woman very, very happy, he said. But I knew I had never made anyone very, very, happy, and I could only imagine bringing in my dad when the time came to do this. But he would be dead, and I supposed she would be a lesbian and wouldn't want him to touch her. I would have to do the finger moves myself. I would have to decide when she was ready for six and for seven. Could she handle the intensity of the still beat and give in to the rapid pleasures of skinning? I would have to listen to find out. Not just to her breath, my dad said, but to the moisture on the skin in the small of her back. That sweat is your secret emissary. One moment she'll be dry as a cat, and in the next moment—Cape Town is flooding! Don't wait to be sure or you'll miss the boat, hop on and move, move, move. Each morning when I try to motivate toward doing something positive, I think of him saying this, and it is a great comfort. I know that one day I'll meet someone special and I'll have a daughter and I'll teach her what he taught me. Don't wait to be sure. Move, move, move.

[Anonymous No.11212772]

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West; and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

[Anonymous No.11212776]

>>11195753
There exists no better writer.

[Anonymous No.11214040]

>He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity... and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home.

[Anonymous No.11214070]

>They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again.
william faulkner - guy gets on a horse

[Anonymous No.11214278]

>>11212505
>>11214070
Thank you for not being complete faggots and adding the author/work.
>inb4 not knowing by heart the western canon

[Anonymous No.11214282]

>>11208237
Them spellcheckers must have been shoddy in the 17th century.

[Anonymous No.11214289]

>>11208237
Looks like spellcheckers were pretty shoddy back in the 17th century.

[Anonymous No.11214309]

>>11214278
If you don't know where a passage is from then just copy the text into google. It almost always finds you the name of the book.

[Anonymous No.11214324]

>>11197620
Melville was an agnostic and not a Christian, sweetie. Nathaniel Hawthorne on Melville's beliefs:

>Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than the rest of us.

[Anonymous No.11214347]

>>11214324
Melville was possessed of the vital spirit of God, snookums. Try again.

[Anonymous No.11214554]

>>11204584
>>11204589
beautiful

[Anonymous No.11214559]

>>11214289
https://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/

[Anonymous No.11214996]

my favorite from moby dick

>There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

[Anonymous No.11215201]

>>11214324

Melville was a Christian whether he thought he was or not, honeybunnytootiepatootietiddlewinks.

[Anonymous No.11215212]

>>11215201
Sorry darling but we're all Hindus whether we know it or not

[Anonymous No.11215402]

>>11195662
The final part of tristes tropiques

[Anonymous No.11215412]

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.

[Anonymous No.11215476]

If the Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevsky`s Brothers Karamazov counts as a "passage" then that. I would post the entire thing here, but it is far too long.

“For the mystery of human being does not solely rest in the desire to live, but in the problem—for what should one live at all? Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread.”

[Anonymous No.11215734]

>>11197706
That's so stupid. I really can't stand this self-righteous, entitled prick.

[Anonymous No.11215914]

>>11215734
What is tupid about it?

I try to make a point of living life with few wants, simply enjoying the company of the few people around me, be it in work or leisure. And dare I say it, I am quite happy. I see nothing stupid in those words.

[Anonymous No.11216580]

>>11197706
>its simple just give me everything i desire like rest, nature, books, music, space, duty, vocation, children, and a wife, then what more can i desire?
profound

[Anonymous No.11216667]

>>11195816
My favorite quote is actually from the same book and the same subject.

>"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

Whenever I read Stoner I'm reminded of this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdpnN8tI7_Y

They both carry this theme of long-forgotten, bittersweet, but undying and timeless memories. Like no matter what changes about this society, this world, there will always be some light that every person carries in their heart, this essence of pure selflessness and sensitivity that will never die so long as humans live.

[Anonymous No.11216735]

>>11212505
>clay calling to clay like mating birds
>every note a nipple on the breast
The fuck does this even mean? Seems like this guy was just writing whatever sounded 'cool' without bearing into mind whether or not it made sense

[Anonymous No.11217804]

>>11215734
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

[Anonymous No.11217816]

>>11217804
meant for >>11215914

[Anonymous No.11218442]

>>11216735

Both Rilke and Rodin were sculptors who used clay as a primary medium and he's describing the construction of sentences as an art in the way that these great humans (made from the clay of the earth) used clay to create great works of sculpture. The whole entry is about the sheer aesthetic beauty of a well-constructed sentence.

Gass was a stylist and a damn good one and I will not tolerate obtuseness when speaking of the man

[Anonymous No.11218664]

>>11214070
It always baffles me how many distinct voices, distinct characters Faulkner had inside him. Take this passage, for instance. It's beautifully written but you can still tell that it's not authorial Faulkner but Darl and you can tell how severely he's fucked in the head.

[Anonymous No.11220292]

bump

[Anonymous No.11220453]

>I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank.

[Anonymous No.11220483]

>>11216580
sounds easy to you but compared to the complex life most people live nowdays it shines in a new light.
People desire a car, a big house, money and those doesnt really make you happy in the long term.

[Anonymous No.11220553]

Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him; and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death—who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die—and soon," then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.

Middlemarch

[Anonymous No.11222001]

>>11196188
I think hes yikesing because thats definitely not written by a catholic lol

[Anonymous No.11222192]

>>11195983
came here to post this

[Anonymous No.11222319]

Not my favorite, but it stood out to me today and thought I'd like to share it:

- - -

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blueberries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to the swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable wrinkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wildholly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste."

- From Thoreau's "Baker Farm" of Walden

[Anonymous No.11222455]

>>11204584
>>11204589
That was the gayest fucking shit I ever read.

[Anonymous No.11222469]

>>11200875
Hume was such a dolt.

[Anonymous No.11222517]

>>11214070
This is just bad writing. The rider is described as both a '[flowing]...swirl like the lash of a whip', and as a 'leech'. This can't be the same person.

[Anonymous No.11222519]

>>11196043
I read some criticism which said something like,
>Portrait is just about perfect as a novel; Ulysses attempts more and fails at more, but still succeeds at some things beyond Portrait.

Also,
>We can each read Ulysses, and disagree about whether the title is sincere or ironic, or even whether the ending is happy or sad, and each insist that the work is a masterpiece.

[Anonymous No.11222527]

>>11222519
Sorry, this is supposed to go to >>11196020.

[Anonymous No.11222544]

>>11222469
One of the most important thinkers of the enlightenment

[Anonymous No.11222740]

>>11195662
Maybe he had missed some feline looking friend that was meant to whisper in his ear and tell him that he should’ve simply gone in the other direction; That, through the other portal, stood someone before the lord of song with something on their tongue other than “Halleluiah,” their eyes filled with ice and an infinite clime behind them, their countenance blurred, their body clothed in lapis lazuli, their hand holding a glass orb and a blessing posed amongst their other asking God, “Don’t you finally see? You have not looked inside for long enough to find yourself on the other side of the void. And there, there you will find the image of you, supine and quivering, daring to ask the first question,” A shedding tear wetted the figure’s frozen-flesh oculi, “Why?”

[Anonymous No.11222859]

time to live

[Anonymous No.11224087]

>Normally, those people would never wake up from their fantasy worlds. They live meaningless lives. They waste their precious days over nothing. No matter how old they get, they'll continue to say, "My real life hasn't started yet. The real me is still asleep, so that's why my life is such garbage." They continue to tell themselves that. And they age. Then die. And on their deathbeds, they will finally realize: the life they lived was the real thing. People don't live provisional lives, nor do they die provisional deaths. That's a simple fact! The problem... is whether they realize that simple fact.

[Anonymous No.11224136]

>>11195662
>I punish myself for the whole of my life; for the whole of my life I punish

[Anonymous No.11224160]

>>11195662
>I'm slickling his peeny.

[Anonymous No.11224599]

>>11222517
the first description is of him mounting the horse, the second description is of him settled and riding on the horse. there's no contradiction