/lit/ - Literature

From The Wild Ass's Skin

>Of Aquilina in Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin:

>Sitting on a comfortable sofa, the two friends first of all saw approaching them a tall, well-proportioned girl of superb carriage, with rather irregular features but a striking and impetuous face, which awoke interest by the marked contrasts that characterized it. Her black hair with its wanton curls looked as if it had already been tousled in amourous sport, and fell lightly over her wide and gracefully attractive shoulders. Those long, dark tresses half concealed a queenly neck on which the light gleamed here and there, bringing into the relief the delicacy and beauty of its curves. Against her white, matt skin the warm tones of her coloring stood out brightly. Her eyes, under long lashes, darted forth bold flames - sparks to enkindle love; her red, moist mouth, her parted lips invited kisses. She was of sturdy build but amourously lissom; her bosom and arms were amply developed, like those of Caracci's buxom figures; yet she gave an impression of litheness and suppleness, and her appearance of vigour suggested the agility of a panther, just as the cleanly-cut elegance of her limbs gave promise of tigerish voluptuousness.

>>No doubt laughter and wantoning came naturally to this young woman, but there was something frightening in her eyes and smile. Like a sibyl possessed by a demon, she was more likely to astonish than to please. Every variety of expression crowded with lightning rapidity over her mobile features. A bored libertine might have found her stimulating, but a young man would have recoiled in terror. She was like a more than life-size statue fallen from the portico of a greek temple: sublime at a distance, but rough-hewn when seen close up. Nevertheless, her beauty was startling enough to arouse the impotent, her voice might well calm deaf ears, a glance from her might well bring dry bones to life. And so Emile compared her - vaguely - to a tragedy by Shakespeare, to some wonderful arabesque in which joy itself is strident while love is unspeakably savage and faery grace and fiery bliss follow hard on bloody and tumultuous rages; to a monster who bites and fondles, who laughs like a demon or weeps like an angel, who is able in one single embrace to improvise every feminine seduction save the melancholy sighs and charming modesty of a virgin and then, one instant later, flies into a fury, lacerates her own breast, shatters her own passion and her lover with it: in short, destroys herself as does a revolutionary mob.

From The Knight's Tale

And Palamon in answer made retort,
‘Cousin, believe me, your opinion springs
From ignorance and vain imaginings.
Imprisonment was not what made me cry.
I have been hurt this moment through the eye,
Into my heart. It will be death to me.
The fairness of the lady that I see
Roaming the garden yonder to and fro
Is all the cause, and I cried out my woe.
Woman or Goddess, which? I cannot say.
I guess she may be Venus – well she may!’
He fell upon his knees before the sill
And prayed: ‘O Venus, if it be thy will
To be transfigured in this garden thus
Before two wretched prisoners like us,
O help us to escape, O make us free!
Yet, if my fate already is shaped for me
By some eternal word, and I must pine
And die in prison, have pity on our line
And kindred, humbled under tyranny!’

>>21749461
the one in For Whom The Bell Tolls by Hemingway

The bards sang of victorious war,
And the high-bosom beloved of the hero.
Raised Ullin, spokesman to the king,
A tuneful voice echoing Cona.
He praised the daughter of Lochlin of woods,
And the king of great Bens of frowning height.
The daughter of Lochlin heard the music ;
She came forth from her retired abode,
And in her loveliness drew near them,
Like a new moon from clouds on sea.
Beauty enrobed her as light ;
Her steps were as the music of songs.
The modest maid beheld the king ;
Slowly rose the sigh of her breast ;
Her blue eye in secret turned
To the king of great hills of hoary cairns.

>>21749462
I need to read this

Declare to Fingal the king,
The noblest of a thousand chiefs.
That I give him the maiden of sweet voice ;
Loveliest maid that ever heaved a bosom smooth.
White is her rounded arm
As foam on the ridge of ocean ;
Mild is the soul of the branch of brown hair.
Let the monarch cross the wave with speed,
Let the unyielding hero come
To the maiden of retiring steps ! '
"Came Snivan of hoary locks.
Fingal set forth with his band ;
His soul, enraptured, flew before the chief
To the wavy-haired maid of the north.

>>21749840
>>21749884
What are these from?

>>21750338
The Poems of Ossian published by James Macpherson translated by Archibald Clerk

>>21749840
>>21749884
>>21750338
Fake Ossain shit, ignore.

>>21749840
>>21749884
>ITT post the best, most beautiful descriptions of women in books.
>posts this drivel
You Ossian faggots are insufferable.

>>21749840
this crap can be reduced to
"I thought she was beautiful"

fuck this is shitty writing

>>21750400
fun. I've had these thoughts. What else does Shopenheimer talk about?

>>21750463
Read the OP
>ITT post the best, most beautiful descriptions of women in books.
They fully conform to it.
Make sure you say this to every poster that posts excerpts from Le Morte De Arthur and Classical Authors like Horace or Ovid since they are equally "fake"

>>21750511
So could the passages from Balzac or Chaucer, your point?

>>21749850
It's a wonderful novel. And a good introduction into Balzac if you're into that sort of thing.

>>21750548
This you can say that about anything it's just complaining about the existence of books

>>21749461
Minimalism works. You shouldn't describe a woman in 10000 sentences. You should describe the feelings that a man feels as he watches her, and the senses that stimulate the man's feeling as he does so.

End of.

"She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen."

But you can continue if you want, for example:
>"As she walked by, he could smell the sweat leaking in-between her armpits. Nauseating as it was, it filled his heart with desire and lust, and he could feel his manhood tingling. At that moment, enfatuated with love, he imagined her sitting on his face, farting as a gravid cow, smothering him, and consuming him whole through her buttocks. He could smell it. Feel it. Taste it. All as if it were real. He was drooling at the though, staring at her with great intensity. Though he'd never admit it to anyone, he creamed right then and there."

>She lifted her white and rounded arms—never had I seen such arms before—and slowly, very slowly, withdrew some fastening beneath her hair. Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form, now only robed in a garb of clinging white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace that was more than human. On her little feet were sandals, fastened with studs of gold. Then came ankles more perfect than ever sculptor dreamed of. About the waist her white kirtle was fastened by a double-headed snake of solid gold, above which her gracious form swelled up in lines as pure as they were lovely, till the kirtle ended on the snowy argent of her breast, whereon her arms were folded. I gazed above them at her face, and—I do not exaggerate—shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot! The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what I saw. I might talk of the great changing eyes of deepest, softest black, of the tinted face, of the broad and noble brow, on which the hair grew low, and delicate, straight features. But, beautiful, surpassingly beautiful as they all were, her loveliness did not lie in them. It lay rather, if it can be said to have had any fixed abiding place, in a visible majesty, in an imperial grace, in a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be—and yet, the sublimity was a dark one—the glory was not all of heaven—though none the less was it glorious. Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion. Not even the lovely smile that crept about the dimples of her mouth could hide this shadow of sin and sorrow. It shone even in the light of the glorious eyes, it was present in the air of majesty, and it seemed to say: “Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand—evil have I done, and from age to age evil I shall do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.”

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

>>21749461
Wife of bath is the only accurate description of women ever written.

>Sigismund's bulldog was called Pym. ... This partnership continued very uneventfully for several years, to Sigismund's perfect satisfaction. Then a heavy cantrip, of the most feudal ingredients, was cast upon Sigismund. He became deeply enamoured of a deep-chested lady. He pursued her tirelessly with his rather trite addresses. She had the slightest stagger, reminiscent of Pym. She was massive and mute. And when Sigismund mechanically slapped her on the back one day, she had a hollow reverberation such as Pym's swollen body would emit. Her eyes flickered ever so little. Sigismund the next moment was overcome with confusion at what he had done: especially as her pedigree was like Pym's, and he had the deepest admiration for race. A minute or two later she coughed. And he could not for the life of him decide whether the cough was admonitory—possibly the death-knell of his suit—or whether it was the result of his premature caress.

>The next day, grasping the stems of a bushel of new flowers inside a bladder of pink paper, he called. A note accompanied them:
>Dear Miss Libyon-Bosselwood,—There are three flowers in this bouquet which express, by their contrite odour, the sentiments of dismay which I experience in remembering the hapless slap which I delivered upon your gorgeous back yesterday afternoon. Can you ever forgive me for this good-for-nothing action?—Your despondent admirer.
>Sigismund.

>But when they next met she did not refer to the note. As she rose to her thunderous stature to go over to the vase where the bushel of flowers he had brought was standing, and turned on him her enormous and outraged back, Sigismund started. For there, through a diaphanous négligé, he saw a blood-red hand upon her skin. His hand! And in a moment he realized that she had painted it to betray her sentiments, which otherwise would have remained, perhaps for ever, hidden. So he sprang up and grasped her hand, saying:

>'Deborah!'

>She fell into his arms to signify that she would willingly become his bride. In a precarious crouch he propped her for a moment, then they both subsided on to the floor, she with her eyes closed, rendered doubly heavy by all the emotion with which she was charged. Pym, true to type, 'the bulldog' at once, noticing this contretemps, and imagining that his master was being maltreated by this person whom he had disliked from the first, flew to the rescue. He fixed his teeth in her eighteenth-century bottom. She was removed, bleeding, in a titanic faint. Sigismund fled once more in dismay.

>The next day he called unaccompanied by Pym. He was admitted to Deborah's chamber. She lay on her stomach. Her swollen bottom rose in the middle of the bed. But a flat disc of face lay sideways on the pillow, a reproachful eye slumbering where her ear would usually be.

>He flung himself down on the elastic nap of the carpet and rolled about in an ecstasy of dismay. She just lisped hoarsely: 'Sigismund!' and all was well between them.

>>21750529
>Make sure you say this to every poster that posts excerpts from Le Morte De Arthur and Classical Authors like Horace or Ovid since they are equally "fake"
No they aren't; they are not pretending they are original copies of ancient mythology written by a fraud who lied. And more importantly they didn't write shit poetry / prose, unlike James Macpherson.
>>21750548
>>21750590
Schizo samefag, shut up.

she just turned 20.... ruined. the wall claims another victim.

>>21750815
You haven't read it have you? You're posting this to dunk on women, but the Wife of Bath is fabulously wealthy and beautiful.

bump

>>21750400
Also from Balzac:

>Women are accustomed, thanks to some strange tendency of their nature, to notice only the flaws in a man of talent and only the good qualities a fool possesses, since these exist as a perpetual flattery for their own defects,
whereas a genius does not afford them enough enjoyment to compensate for his imperfections. Talent is an intermittent fever, and no woman is eager to share only the discomfort it brings;
they all want to find in their lovers justification for satisfying their vanity. What they love in us is still themselves. Is not a man who is poor, proud, artistic, creative - is not such a man armed with an injurious egoism? He lives at the center of a whirlwind of mental activity which embraces everything, even his mistress, who is forced to follow its twistings.

>>21750588
I have been putting off Balzac too lon

>A handsome red-haired girl wearing a short dress of blue linen was sitting astride the wall, panting, considerably disarranged by her climbing, and as yet unaware of Mr. Polly....
>She certainly looked quite adorable on the wall. She had a fine neck and pointed chin that was particularly admirable from below, and pretty eyes and fine eyebrows are never so pretty as when they look down upon one. But no calculation of that sort, thank Heaven, was
going on beneath her ruddy shock of hair.
Simple but lovely

8 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

My sweet little whorish Nora,

I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue come bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over me with a whore’s glow in your slumbrous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometime too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your hot drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.

JIM

>Her perfectly natural voice was grateful to his ear, and soothing. He looked at her all over with an open admiration that she noticed and, without concealment, liked. She was very untidy, the grey stockings on her vigorous legs were torn, her short skirt was spattered with mud. Her nut-brown hair, glossy and plentiful, flew loose about neck and shoulders. In place of the usual belt she had tied a coloured handkerchief round her waist. She wore no hat. What she had been doing to get in such a state, while her parents entertained a “distinguished” party, he did not know, but it was not difficult to guess. Climbing trees or riding bareback and astride was probably the truth. Yet her dishevelled state became her well, and the welcome in her face delighted him. [...]The afterglow lit up her face; it fell on her loose hair and tumbled blouse, turning them amber red. She looked not only soft and comely, but extraordinarily beautiful. The strange expression haunted the deep eyes again, the lips were a little parted, the young breast heaving slightly, joy and excitement in her whole presentment. And as he watched her he knew that all he had just felt was due to her close presence, to her atmosphere, her perfume, her physical warmth and vigour.

In which a daughter describes her mom
>The Empress Irene, my mother, was at that time only a young girl, not yet fifteen years old [...] She stood upright like some young sapling, erect and evergreen, all her limbs and the other parts of her body absolutely symmetrical and in harmony one with another. With her lovely appearance and charming voice she never ceased to fascinate all who saw and heard her. Her face shone with the soft light of the moon; it was not the completely round face of an Assyrian woman, nor long, like the face of a Scyth, but just slightly oval in shape. There were rose blossoms on her cheeks, visible a long way off. Her light-blue eyes were both gay and stern: their charm and beauty attracted, but the fear they caused so dazzled the bystander that he could neither look nor turn away. Whether there really was an Athena in olden times, the Athena celebrated by poets and writers, I do not know, but I often hear the myth repeated and satirized. However, if someone in those times had said of this empress that she was Athena made manifest to the human race, or that she had descended suddenly from the sky in some heavenly glory and unapproachable splendour, his description would not have been so very inappropriate. What was rather surprising – and in this she differed from all other women – was the way she humbled swaggerers, but when they were subdued and fearful restored their courage by a single glance. For the most part her lips were closed and when thus silent she resembled a veritable statue of Beauty, a breathing monument of Harmony. Generally she accompanied her words with graceful gestures, her hands bare to the wrists, and you would say it (her hand) was ivory turned by some craftsman into the form of fingers and hand. The pupils of her eyes, with the brilliant blue of deep waves, recalled a calm, still sea, while the white surrounding them shone by contrast, so that the whole eye acquired a peculiar lustre and a charm which was inexpressible.

>>21750594
Pitfag anons always make the most capital passages

kitty, natasha and sonya, written by Tolstoy

>>21751894
>its real

>>21751022
Yep. Seething.

>Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up, she was shitting brown water. The more she drank the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew.

>>21750400
Based

bump

>>21754618
Cracking up this bumper here who absolutely *needs* to read more descriptions of women ASAP.

>>21754618
Cracking up at this guy here who absolutely *needs* to read more descriptions of women ASAP.