/lit/ - Literature

is that shakespeare?

the passage from one flew over the cuckoo's nest where santa claus appears at the hospital on christmas eve then gets institutionalised always gets me

>>1952643
blood meridian

everything was beautiful and nothing hurt

what if its just us

- simon
- lord of the flies

the moment when Isabel Archer figures out that her husband is cheating on her

Stephen Dedalus explaining his theory about Hamlet's Ghost

the last sentence of The Crying of Lot 49

the last third of nineteen eighty four

>>1952659
>Stephen Dedalus explaining his theory about Hamlet's Ghost

what was it?

The temple is holy because it is not for sale

-Canto XCVII, Ezra Pound

>>1952830
he wrong, though

To the Lighthouse:
'Lily felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her Mrs Ramsey felt that something was lacking. All of them bending themselves to listen thought, “Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed,” for each thought, “The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas I feel nothing.”'

'Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay’s knee.'

>>1952838
Yes.

there is no god and we are his prophets

>I do not know yet that in the instant of sleep the eyelid closing prisons within the eye’s self her face demure, pensive; tragic, sad, and young; waiting, colored with all the vague and formless magic of young desire. That already there is something for love to feed upon: that sleeping I know now why I struck refraining that negro girl three years ago and that she must know it too and be proud, with waiting and pride
how poignant and sad and nigger beatings

run, spot, run.

my favorite part of The Plague Dogs

the part where Snitter the brain-damaged dog gets trapped in a shed and he thinks that he is sitting inside his own head, the windows being his eyes and the crack under the door being his muzzle, and all the cobwebs and things inside he thinks are the scattered remains of his disordered mind. he sees a big cleft down the center of the floor and thinks it is obviously the gash that runs all down his forehead, and he sees bundles of splinters and he thinks that these must obviously be the things that caused the deadly "explosion" that is, the gunshot that killed his master, which Snitter mistakenly believes was a deadly explosion that came from his own body somehow
----

"My goodness, though, what a mess the place is in! I wish those flies hadn't got in. Maggots and flies--who wants a lot of flies buzzing round inside his head? Well, now I'm here I'd better make a start on my eyes. How funny it'll be to clean them from inside! I hope it doesn't hurt."

He jumped up on a shelf running along the further wall, just below the level of his cobwebbed eyes. There followed a twinge of pain in his head as some light, unseen object fell from beneath his paws and shattered on the ground below. He wondered what part of him it might have been. Still, he could feel nothing immediately wrong. He waited a few moments to recover himself, then put his forepaws on the narrow, dirty sill and looked out through his right eye.

>>1952838
man

When Harry and Ron and Hermione get all confused and shit with the time thing because they aren't supposed to see themselves but then they do but it ends up being good for them because he didn't realize that in the past he saw himself in the future

Feathers or lead?

As they walked, Tehol spoke. '… the assumption is the foundation stone of Letherii society, perhaps
all societies the world over. The notion of inequity, my friends. For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences.

'I know what you're thinking, to which I have no choice but to challenge you both. Like this. Imagine walking down this street, doling out coins by the thousands. Until everyone here is in possession of vast wealth. A solution? No, you say, because among these suddenly rich folk there will be perhaps a majority who will prove wasteful, profligate and foolish, and before long they will be poor once again. Besides, if wealth were distributed in such a fashion, the coins themselves would lose all value - they would cease being useful. And without such utility, the entire social structure we love so dearly would collapse.

>>1953588

'Ah, but to that I say, so what? There are other ways of measuring self-worth. To which you both heatedly reply: with no value applicable to labour, all sense of worth vanishes! And in answer to that I simply smile and shake my head. Labour and its product become the negotiable commodities. But wait, you object, then value sneaks in after all! Because a man who makes bricks cannot be equated with, say, a man who paints portraits. Material is inherently value-laden, on the basis of our need to assert comparison - but ah, was I not challenging the very assumption that one must proceed with such intricate structures of value?

'And so you ask, what's your point, Tehol? To which I reply with a shrug. Did I say my discourse was a valuable means of using this time? I did not. No, you assumed it was. Thus proving my point!'

'I'm sorry, master,' Bugg said, 'but what was that point again?'

'I forget. But we've arrived. Behold, gentlemen, the poor.'

Malazan book 5, Midnight Tides. I fucking love Tehol & Bugg.

"Maybe I'd never see him again... maybe he'd gone for good... swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about... Ah, it's an awful thing... and being young doesn't help any... when you notice for the first time... the way you lose people as you go along ... the buddies you'll never see again... never again... when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams... that it's all over... finished... that you too will get lost someday... a long way off but inevitably... in the awful torrent of things and people... of the days and shapes... that pass... that never stop..."

"This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody."

All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can't be counted.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

"All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute."

"Depressing thought" K. said. "It makes the lie fundamental to world order."

Das gut book.

"Your sentiments are those of a God"
"India likes Gods"
"And Englishmen like posing as Gods"

He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all —

>>1953662

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls

The depressed person therefore
urged her terminally ill friend to go on, to not
hold back, to let her have it: What terms might
be used to describe and assess such a solipsistic,
self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum
and sponge as she now appeared to herself to
be? How was she to decide and describe-even
to herself, facing herself-what all she had
learned said about her?

I have a couple from American Psycho that just really struck me.

“….where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failures, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”

Here's another from American Psycho, and I have one more.

“….and in the southern deserts of Sudan the heat rises in airless waves, thousands upon thousands of men, women, children, roam throughout the vast bush land, desperately seeking food. Ravaged and staving, 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 mooring in the miserable desert, a 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, and 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…”

And this one, I can't explain why. Just this one.

“Faintly it hits me that she too is lost in a world of shit, completely drowning in it,”

This is the way it is with the Zone: if you come back with swag–it’s a miracle; if you come back alive–it’s a success; if the patrol bullets miss you–it’s a stroke of luck. And as for anything else –that’s fate.”