/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15132626]

What is the most beautiful passage you've read?

[Anonymous No.15132674]

>>15132626
>a sequence of words
>beautiful
kek, a passage isn't beautiful, brianlet. an idea that is -communicated- through a passage can be beautiful. strings of words have no beauty, other than in the way they sound or look, in which case the most beautiful passage is probably something arabic or hindi

[Anonymous No.15132680]

>>15132674
your reddit gold, my good sir!

[Anonymous No.15132685]

>>15132674
>t. Hasnt read joyce

[Anonymous No.15132692]

That one in the bibeel, you know the one

[Anonymous No.15132693]

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

[Anonymous No.15132710]

>>15132693
Great choice, but if we're doing American lit openings with advice from dad, cant beat the sound and the fury

[Anonymous No.15132712]

>>15132685
t. too stupid to understand joyce and thinks da pwitty pwose is gud tehe

[Anonymous No.15132741]

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

[Anonymous No.15132750]

>>15132692
I'm guessing the book of Job? That's where all the good stuff is.

[Anonymous No.15132766]

>>15132712

[Anonymous No.15132769]

>>15132626
If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. 19“If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. 20“Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. 21“But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me. 22“If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. 23“He who hates Me hates My Father also. 24“If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. 25“But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘THEY HATED ME WITHOUT A CAUSE.’

26“When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me, 27and you will testify also, because you have been with Me from the beginning

[Anonymous No.15132788]

14 lipca 1924 roku, gdy przyszli po mnie czynownicy Ministerjum Zimy, wieczorem tego dnia, w wigilję syberjady, dopiero wtedy zacząłem podejrzewać, że nie istnieję.
Pod pierzyną, pod trzema kocami i starym płaszczem gabardynowym, w barchanowych kalesonach i swetrze włóczkowym, w skarpetach naciągniętych na skarpety - tylko stopy wystawały spod pierzyny i koców - po kilkunastu godzinach snu nareszcie rozmrożony, zwinięty prawie w kulę, z głową wciśniętą pod poduchę w grubej obszewce, że i dźwięki docierały już miękkie, ogrzane, oblane w wosku, jak mrówki ugrzęzłe w żywicy, tak one przedzierały się w głąb powoli i z wielkim mozołem, przez sen i przez poduszkę, milimetr za milimetrem, słowo za słowem:

- Gaspadin Wieniedikt Jerosławski.

[Anonymous No.15132794]

Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six month later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absences

[Anonymous No.15132814]

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

[Anonymous No.15132825]

“I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.” - Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

[Anonymous No.15132830]

>>15132794
damn, that's nice

[Anonymous No.15132847]

>>15132830
right? Why isnt this writer discussed here?

[Anonymous No.15132855]

Posting it in the original language because it sounds much better.

Quelquefois, comme Ève naquit d’une côte d’Adam, une femme naissait pendant mon sommeil d’une fausse position de ma cuisse. Formée du plaisir que j’étais sur le point degoûter, je m’imaginais que c’était elle qui me l’offrait. Mon corps qui sentait dans le sien ma propre chaleur voulait s’y rejoindre, je m’éveillais. Le reste des humains m’apparaissait comme bien lointain auprès de cette femme que j’avais quittée, il y avait quelques moments à peine; ma joue était chaude encore de son baiser, mon corps courbaturé par le poids de sa taille. Si, comme il arrivait quelquefois, elle avait les traits d’une femme que j’avais connue dans la vie, j’allais me donner tout entier à ce but: la retrouver, comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s’imaginent qu’on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe. Peu à peu son souvenir s’évanouissait, j’avais oublié la fille de mon rêve.

[Anonymous No.15132879]

>>15132626
sermon on the mount(kjv)

[Anonymous No.15132889]

>>15132693
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world,
I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the
green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long
way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so
close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know
that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast
obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future
that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but
that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out
our arms farther…. And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.

[Anonymous No.15132896]

>Sunset found her...

You know the rest.

[Anonymous No.15132899]

The final paragraph of The Road is unalike any other that preceded:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

[Anonymous No.15132917]

>Jesus wept.

[Anonymous No.15132956]

>Our moral beliefs did not fall from heaven and neither are they credentials we can flash like a badge to establish our moral probity. Consider all the rest of human history, including most of the planet at the present moment. What are we to say about this overwhelming spectacle of cruelty, stupidity, and suffering? What stance is there for us to adopt with respect to history, what judgment can we pass on it? Is it all a big mistake? Christianity attempted to recuperate the suffering of history by projecting a divine plan that assigns it a reason in the here and now and a recompense later, but liberalism is too humane to endorse this explanation. There is no explanation, only the brute fact. But the brute fact we are left with is even harder to stomach than the old explanation. So Left liberalism packages it in a new narrative, a moral narrative according to which all those lives ground up in the machinery of history are assigned an intelligible role as victims of oppression and injustice. There is an implicit teleology in this view; modern Left liberalism is the telos that gives form and meaning to the rest of history. Only very recently is it possible for someone like Schutte [Ofelia Schutte, who in her book Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks castigates Nietzsche for his authoritarianism] to write as she does, with so much confidence that the valuations she assumes will be received as a matter of course by an academic audience, just as much as a Christian homilist writing for an audience of the pious. And only within the protective enclosure of this community of belief can there be any satisfaction in the performance of this speech act, any sense that anything worthwhile has been accomplished by the recitation. When this moral community by means of such recitation reassures itself of its belief, it comes aglow as the repository of the meaning of history, as the locus that one may occupy in order to view history and pass judgment on it without merely despairing or covering one’s eyes and ears. There may not be any plan behind history, nor any way of making up their losses to the dead, but we can draw an invisible line of rectitude through history and in this way take power over it. Against the awesome ‘Thus it was’ of history we set the overawing majesty of ‘Thus it ought to have been.’

>But our liberalism is something that sprang up yesterday and could be gone tomorrow. The day before yesterday the Founding Fathers kept black slaves. What little sliver of light is this we occupy that despite its contingency, the frailty of its existence, enables us to illuminate all the past and perhaps the future as well? For we want to say that even though our community of belief may cease to exist, this would not affect the validity of those beliefs. The line of rectitude would still traverse history.

[Anonymous No.15133007]

>>15132674
imagine being this much of a moron

[Anonymous No.15133022]

>>15132693
Do Americans sincerely think this is good prose? It’s forced and self-conscious.

[Anonymous No.15133026]

>>15132899
It's like Melville but cringe.

[Anonymous No.15133034]

>>15132693

I forgot how windy that book is. It's basically a 200 page squeaky fart. You'd have to be a high school English teacher to think that is great writing.

[Anonymous No.15133067]

>>15132626
Charles stuffed his fedora, trench coat and doc martens in his backpack, right in front of Aliza. After all, it was the hottest day of the year. All three now sat at the same table.

—Aliza, I’d like you to meet Esmerelda, my dad’s whore.
Esmerelda exclaimed in an unruly tone:
—Fuck you and your dad, Charles.
—Well why did you go with me then? Charles asked.
—Last night’s beautiful events got me thinking and I cannot go on living this lie to you! She exclaimed—I was born a man!

Charles became silent. Could this beautiful penis, which had so generously provided him and his father with a flood of semen, really belong to a man?

[Anonymous No.15133090]

>>15132626
That happiness were not such a fickle and tricksome creature! The Pynch’s pat on the back was only a pretext for the soporific needle which he had just rammed into Charlie’s vertebral column. This time, however, he woke up in a place that was familiar... a little too familiar.

—Miss Jueller?!?
—It’s Mistress for you, ladyboy.

In his poor muddle-headed, fluffy young mind, he finally started to doubt his ultimate existence.
—I took too much man, I took too much, too much, he bawled aloud—Miss Jueller, I’m so sorry what happened between me and Ted. Charles was trembling.

—I TOLD YOU TO ADRESS ME PROPERLY YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT, ARE YOU STUPID? HUH? HUH? MISS JUELLER THIS, MISS JUELLER THAT! ARE YOU RETARDED? JUST LOOK AT YOUR FACE! LOOK AT IT, LOOK! YOU LOOK LIKE THAT GUY... what’s his name... THOMAS PYNCHON!

And with that, speak of the fucking devil, Thomas Pynchon walked into the kindergarten.

[Anonymous No.15133106]

>>15132626
oh and this... probably the best out of the 3:

Uncle Ben wasn’t really Charles’ uncle per se, but a very close friend of the family. Charles would have to keep his homosexual tendencies hidden, for Uncle Ben was known to beat up gays, and in his ribald phrasing—”ass fuck the gay out of them until they ain’t queers no more.” Charles secretly loved Ben with all of his heart but this was not a mission of amour but of practicality on delivering these tapes whose contents allured Charles. And so he took a long drag of the fatty and our hero’s quest for tape returning began.

[Anonymous No.15133113]

>>15132626
It is true that Cal had never looked into his father's eye's before, and it is true that many people never look into their father's eyes. Adam's irises were light blue with dark radial lines leading into the vortices of his pupils. And deep down in each pupil Cal saw his own face reflected, as though two Cals looked out at him.

[Anonymous No.15133173]

>>15132626
It's up there:
the thing about hatred... it's the place where people who can't look sorrow in the eye without waverin' run off to.
Even more than a blood rusted sword, vengeance is something you soak and sharpen in blood.
The more you sharpen, the more it rusts, so you sharpen it again.
In the end all that's left is a pile of rust and scraps.
You've got some huge nicks in your heart... damn cracks called fear... running all through it.
You're only a sword without a sheath, filled with scratches and bloodstains.
With a fatal nick, a broken sword.

[Anonymous No.15133397]

Most beautiful passage... this is from a poem, not a book... Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatchèd roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet under ground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.

[Anonymous No.15133433]

>>15132626
You may enjoy this selection from Srimad Devi-Bhagavatam:
(1 of 2)
>In days gone by there reigned a king, named Uparichara; he ruled over the Chedi country and respected the Brâhmins; he was truthful and very religious. Indra, the lord of the Devas, became very pleased by his asceticism and presented him an auspicious celestial car (going in the air) made of pearls, and crystals, helping him in doing what he liked best. Mounting on that divine chariot, that religious king used to go everywhere; he never remained on earth; he used to remain always in the atmosphere and therefore be had his name as “Uparichara Vasu” (moving in the upper regions). He had a very beautiful wife, named Girikâ; and five powerful sons, of indomitable vigour, were born to him.


>The king give separate kingdoms to each of his sons and made them kings. Once on an occasion, Girikâ, the wife of the Uparichara Vasu, after her bath after the menstruation and becoming pure came to the king and informed him of her desire to get a son; but that very day his Pitris (ancestors) requested him also to kill deer, etc., for their Srâddha (solemn obsequies performed in honour of the manes of deceased ancestors). Hearing the Pitris, the king of Chedi became somewhat anxious for his menstruous wife; but thinking his Pitris words more powerful and more worthy to be obeyed, went out on an hunting expedition to kill deer and other animals, with the thought of his wife Girikâ in his breast. Then while he was in the forest, he remembered his Girikâ, who was equal in her beauty and loveliness to Kamalâ, and the emission of semen virile took place. He kept this semen on the leaf of a banyan tree and thought “How the above semen be not futile; my semen cannot remain unfruitful; my wife has just now passed her menstruous condition; I will send this semen to my dear wife.” Thus thinking the time ripe, he closed the semen under the leaves of the banyan tree and charging it with the mantra power (some power) addressed a falcon close by thus :-- “O highly fortunate one! Take this my semen virile and go to my palace. O Beautiful one! Do this my work: take this semen virile and go quick to my palace and hand it over to my wife Girikâ for to-day is her menstruation period.”

[Anonymous No.15133442]

>>15133433
(2 of 2)
>24. Sûta said :-- “O Risis! Thus saying, the king gave that leaf with the virile therein to the falcon, who is capable of going quick in the air, took it and immediately rose high up in the air.
>25-26. Another falcon, seeing this one flying in the air with leaf in his beak, considered it to be some piece of flesh and fell upon him. Immediately a gallant fighting ensued between the two birds with their beaks.
>27. While the fighting was going on, that leaf with semen virile fell down from their beaks on the waters of the Jumnâ river. Then the two faIcons flew away as they liked.
>28-39. O Risis! While the two falcons were fighting with each other, one Apsarâ (celestial nymph) named Adrikâ came to a Brâhmin, who was performing his Sandhyâ Bandanam on the banks of the Jumnâ. That beautiful woman began to bathe in the waters and took a plunge for playing sports and caught hold of the feet of the Brâhmana. The Dvija, engaged in Prânâyâma (deep breathing exercise), saw that the woman had amorous intentions, and cursed her, saying :-- “As you have interrupted me in my meditation, so be a fish.”


>Adrikâ, one of the best Apsarâs, thus cursed, assumed the form of a fish Safari and spent her days in the Jumnâ waters. When the semen virile of Uparichara Vasu fell from the beak of the falcon, that fish Adrikâ came quickly and ate that and became pregnant. When ten months passed, a fisherman came there and caught in a net that fish Adrikâ. When the fish's belly was torn asunder, two human beings instantly came out the the womb. One was a lovely boy and the other a beautiful girl. The fisherman was greatly astonished to see this. He went and informed the king of that place who was Uparichara Vasu that the boy and the girl were born of the womb of a fish. The king also was greatly surprised and accepted the boy who seemed auspicious. This Vasu's son was highly energetic and powerful, truthful and religious like his father and became famous by the name of the king Matsyarâj. Uparichara Vasu gave away the girl to the fisherman. This girl was named Kâli and she became famous by the name of Matsyodarî. The smell of the fish came out of her body and she was named also Matsyagandhâ. Thus the auspicious Vasu's daughter remained and grew in that fisherman's house.

[Anonymous No.15133446]

>>15133442
>mfw fighting another falcon over a cum-leaf

[Anonymous No.15133495]

Geschrieben steht: „Im Anfang war das Wort!"
Hier stock’ ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen,
Ich muss es anders übersetzen,
Wenn ich vom Geiste recht erleuchtet bin.
Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war der Sinn.
Bedenke wohl die erste Zeile,
Dass deine Feder sich nicht übereile!
Ist es der Sinn, der alles wirkt und schafft?
Es sollte stehn: Im Anfang war die Kraft!
Doch, auch indem ich dieses niederschreibe,
Schon warnt mich was, dass ich dabei nicht bleibe.
Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh’ ich Rat
Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat

[Anonymous No.15133519]

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. 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 up- per 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. This is my substi- tute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, al- most all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

[Anonymous No.15133520]

>To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes - needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.
~Roberto Mangabeira Unger

>He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger

>Imagination over dogma, vulnerability over serenity, aspiration over obligation, comedy over tragedy, hope over experience, prophecy over memory, surprise over repetition, the personal over the impersonal, time over eternity, life over everything. ”
—Roberto Mangabeira Unger

[Anonymous No.15133547]

>>15133007
I actually can't to be honest. The fact that such soulless people exist is frightening.

[Anonymous No.15133565]

>>15132788
>>15132855
>>15133495
good pick

[Anonymous No.15133630]

>>15132674
the absolute state of /lit/

[Anonymous No.15133638]

>>15132674
stoneman that thinks he's smart, but is just missing something

[Anonymous No.15133681]

>>15133034
Each to his own, but The Great Gatsby is almost universally viewed as an exemplary modernist novel within academia.

[Anonymous No.15133741]

Honestly you could post anything by Melville.
Moby Dick is godtier.
So is Shakespeare's Julius Caeser

[Anonymous No.15133821]

>and when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

[Anonymous No.15133825]

>>15132825

[Anonymous No.15133859]

“As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.“

[Anonymous No.15133878]

… and in the southern deserts of Sudan the heat rises in airless waves, thousands upon thousands of men, women, children, roam throughout the vast bushland, desperately seeking food. Ravaged and starving, leaving a trail of dead, emaciated bodies, they eat weeds and leaves and … lily pads, stumbling from village to village, dying slowly, inexorably; a gray morning in the miserable desert, grit flies through the air, a child with a face like a black moon lies in the sand, scratching at his throat, cones of dust rising, flying across land like whirling tops, no one can see the sun, the child is covered with sand, almost dead, eyes unblinking, grateful (stop and imagine for an instant a world where someone is grateful for something) none of the haggard pay attention as they file by, dazed and in pain (no—there is one who pays attention, who notices the boy’s agony and smiles, as if holding a secret), the boy opens and closes his cracked, chapped mouth soundlessly, there is a school bus in the distance somewhere and somewhere else, above that, in space, a spirit rises, a door opens, it asks “Why?”—a home for the dead, an infinity, it hangs in a void, time limps by, love and sadness rush through the boy …

[Anonymous No.15133885]

>>15132750
Job 38 to be specific

[Anonymous No.15133890]

>>15132847
becouse no biens

[Anonymous No.15133923]

>I closed my eyes.

>There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM.

>I opened my eyes—and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. Borasisi, the sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel.

>The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.

[Anonymous No.15133947]

>>15132626
“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been
there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I
had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of
been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about
to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face
twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re
one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him
on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her
three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off
his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking
down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs
crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenselesslooking. “Take her off and thow her where you shown the others,” he said, picking up
the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.
“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a
yodel.
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody
there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

[Anonymous No.15133950]

>>15132674
Anon... easy on the bait