/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10785940]

>When the shadow of the sash appeared on the currents it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt 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.

Has a book passage ever made you say "holy shit" out loud?

[Anonymous No.10785946]

>>10785940
Quentin's whole section was one of the most depressing things I've ever read. Every time the father spoke was just painful.

[Anonymous No.10785950]

Shit I fucked the passage up. Here it is.

[Anonymous No.10785951]

>>10785940

"Good heavens," was my thought when I first read that passage. "Good heavens, I do believe this new fellow has even less of a grasp on reality than Benjy. Well played, sir. I honestly didn't think that was possible."

[Anonymous No.10785959]

But that's nothing, Bateman. Get a load of this.

Itself circumambient and enclosed by its effluvium of hell, its aura of unregeneration, it mused (mused, thought, seemed to possess sentience, as if, though dispossessed of the peace - who was impervious anyhow to fatigue - which she declined to give it, it was still irrevocably outside the scope of her hurt or harm) with that quality peaceful and now harmless and not even very attentive - the ogre-shape which, as Miss Coldfield's voice went on, resolved out of itself before Quentin's eyes the two half-ogre children, the three of them forming a shadowy background for the fourth one.

Now *that's* a Faulkner sentence.

[Anonymous No.10785965]

>>10785959
i hate Faulkner so fucking much

[Anonymous No.10785975]

>>10785965

He's magnificent. I mock him, but he's great. And in time, you too will come to love him, Winston.

[Anonymous No.10785984]

>>10785950
Yeah, I don't know why the shortened version in OP gets posted around so much. The full passage is makes it much greater.

[Anonymous No.10785992]

>>10785959
corncobby indeed

[Anonymous No.10786012]

Posting a couple of my favorites

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

[Anonymous No.10786016]

>>10786012
From Gormenghast

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

[Anonymous No.10786022]

>>10786016
From Illuminations

By submitting to these laws he conquered the hopeless sadness within him and from the honeycombs of memory he built a house for the swarm of his thoughts.

[Anonymous No.10786034]

>>10786022
From D'Annunzio's Meriggio

E la mia forza supina
si stampa nell'arena,
diffondesi nel mare;
e il fiume è la mia vena,
il monte è la mia fronte,
la selva è la mia pube,
la nube è il mio sudore.
E io sono nel fiore
della stiancia, nella scaglia
della pina, nella bacca,
del ginepro: io son nel fuco,
nella paglia marina,
in ogni cosa esigua,
in ogni cosa immane,
nella sabbia contigua,
nelle vette lontane.
Ardo, riluco.
E non ho più nome.
E l'alpi e l'isole e i golfi
e i capi e i fari e i boschi
e le foci ch'io nomai
non han più l'usato nome
che suona in labbra umane.
Non ho più nome nè sorte
tra gli uomini; ma il mio nome
è Meriggio. In tutto io vivo
tacito come la Morte.

E la mia vita è divina.

[Anonymous No.10786058]

>>10786034
And last but not least, Dante

When I parted from Circe, who held me more than a year near Gaeta before Aeneas so named it, not fondness for a son, nor duty to an aged father, nor the love I owed Penelope which should have gladdened her, could conquer within me the ardor I had to gain experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men; and I put forth on the open deep with but one ship and with that little company which had not deserted me. The one shore and the other I saw as far as Spain, as far as Morocco, and Sardinia and the other islands which that sea bathes round. I and my companions were old and slow when we came to the narrow outlet where Hercules set up his landmarks so that men should not pass beyond. On my right hand I left Seville, on the other had already left Ceuta. “O brothers,” I said, “who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of the senses that remains to us choose not to deny experience, in the sun’s track, of the unpeopled world. Take thought of the seed from which you spring. You were not born to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”

[Anonymous No.10786068]

And that must end us, that must be our cure,
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?

[Anonymous No.10786772]

Bump

[Anonymous No.10787092]

>>10785951

Caddy smelled like trees.

[Anonymous No.10787132]

>>10785940
"Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."

[Anonymous No.10787362]

>>10787092

Indeed she did, anon. Indeed she did. Benjy doesn't understand much, but he has a firm grasp on that one fact and he's sticking with it.

He also has sound views on women wearing perfume. When it comes to the important things in life, he knows what's what.