/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13133998]

Post prose moments so beautiful you think like "damn i wanna write like that!!"

>We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become. – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

>and they rode on and the bloody sunrise crept in over the flat plains and The Judge killed and murdered and raped another indian and spat on the ground
- Mccarthy, Blood Meridian

>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. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[Anonymous No.13134058]

>>13133998
In the west the moon was growing pale, and was just on the point of plunging into the black clouds which were hanging over the distant summits like the shreds of a torn curtain. We went out of the hut. Contrary to my fellow-traveller’s prediction, the weather had cleared up, and there was a promise of a calm morning. The dancing choirs of the stars were interwoven in wondrous patterns on the distant horizon, and, one after another, they flickered out as the wan resplendence of the east suffused the dark, lilac vault of heaven, gradually illumining the steep mountain slopes, covered with the virgin snows. To right and left loomed grim and mysterious chasms, and masses of mist, eddying and coiling like snakes, were creeping thither along the furrows of the neighbouring cliffs, as though sentient and fearful of the approach of day.

[Anonymous No.13134082]

>No one is adequate to comprehending the misery of my lot! Fate obliges me to be constantly in movement: I am not permitted to pass more than a fortnight in the same place. I have no Friend in the world, and from the restlessness of my destiny I never can acquire one. Fain would I lay down my miserable life, for I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the Ocean; The Waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore: I rush into fire; The flames recoil at my approach: I oppose myself to the fury of Banditti; Their swords become blunted, and break against my breast: The hungry Tiger shudders at my approach, and the Alligator flies from a Monster more horrible than itself. God has set his seal upon me, and all his Creatures respect this fatal mark!

[Anonymous No.13134198]

One evening in Osroës' tent, during a feast given in my honor, I observed among the women and long-eyelashed pages a naked, emaciated man who sat utterly motionless. His eyes were wide open, but he seemed to see nothing of that confusion of acrobats and dancers, or those dishes laden with viands. I addressed him through my interpreter but he deigned no reply, for this was indeed a sage. His disciples, however, were more loquacious; these pious beggars came from India, and their master belonged to the powerful caste of Brahmans. I gathered that his meditations led him to believe that the whole universe is only a tissue of illusion and error; for him self-denial, renunciation, death were the sole means of escape from this changing flood of forms whereon, on the contrary, our Heraclitus had willingly been borne along. Beyond the world of the senses he hoped to rejoin the sphere of the purely divine, that unmoving firmament of which Plato, too, had dreamed.

I got some inkling, therefore, in spite of the bungling of my interpreters, of conceptions not unlike those of certain of our philosophers, but expressed by this Indian with more absolute finality. He had reached the state where nothing was left, except his body, to separate him from intangible deity, without substance or form, and with which he would unite; he had resolved to burn himself alive that next morning. Osroes invited me to the solemnity. A pyre of fragrant woods was prepared; the man leaped into it and disappeared without one cry. His disciples gave no sign of sorrow; for them it was not a funeral ceremony.

[Anonymous No.13134204]

>>13134198

I pondered these things far into the night which followed. There I lay on a carpet of finest wool on the floor of a tent hung with gleaming brocades. A page massaged my feet. From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and Opramoas’ snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse’s hoof; from farther away, in the women’s quarters, the melancholy murmur of a song. All of that had left the Brahman unmoved. In his veritable passion of refusal he had given himself to the flames as a lover to a bed. He had cast off everything and everyone, and finally himself, like so many garments which served to conceal from him that unique presence, the invisible void which was his all.

I felt myself to be different, and ready for wider choice. Austerity, renunciation, negation were not wholly new to me; I had been drawn to them young (as is almost always the case), at the age of twenty. I was even younger when a friend in Rome took me to see the aged Epictetus in his hovel in the Suburra, shortly before Domitian ordered his exile. As in his slave days, when a brutal master failed to extract from him even one cry, though the beating broke his leg, so now grown old and frail he was patiently bearing the slow torments of gravel; yet he seemed to me to enjoy a liberty which was almost divine. His crutches, his pallet, the earthenware lamp and wooden spoon in its vessel of clay were objects of admiration to me, the simple tools of a pure life.

But Epictetus gave up too many things, and I had been quick to observe that nothing was more dangerously easy for me than mere renunciation. This Indian, more logically, was rejecting life itself. There was much to learn from such pure-hearted fanatics, but on the condition of turning the lesson from the meaning originally intended. These sages were trying to rediscover their god above and beyond the ocean of forms, and to reduce him to that quality of the unique, intangible, and incorporeal which he had foregone in the very act of becoming universe. I perceived differently my relations with the divine. I could see myself as seconding the deity in his effort to give form and order to a world, to develop and multiply its convolutions, extensions, and complexities. I was one of the segments of the wheel, an aspect of that unique force caught up in the multiplicity of things; I was eagle and bull, man and swan, phallus and brain all together, a Proteus who is also a Jupiter.

[Anonymous No.13134216]

>>13133998
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

[Anonymous No.13134250]

>>13134216
This is really such a based quote

[Anonymous No.13134276]

The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales

[Anonymous No.13134281]

>I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

-DFW, Infinite Jest

[Anonymous No.13134288]

>>13134281
wtf I love DFW now

[Anonymous No.13134304]

>>13134281
Based. Guess I’m reading ij now

[Anonymous No.13134327]

>>13133998
Lolita is based

[Anonymous No.13134404]

>>13134288
>>13134304
Fucking newfags..

[Anonymous No.13134409]

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard 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 he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Beat this you enormous faggots, BRAP man is still king

[Anonymous No.13134422]

>"The biocontrol apparatus is prototype of one-way telepathic control. The subject could be rendered susceptible to the transmitter by drugs or other processing without installing any apparatus. Ultimately the Senders will use telepathic transmitting exclusively.... Ever dig the Mayan Codices? I figure it like this : the priests - about one percent of population - made one way telepathic broadcasts instructing the workers what to feel and when.... A telepathic sender has to send all the time. He can never receive, because if he receives that means someone else has feelings of his own could louse up his continuity. The Sender has to send all the time but he can't ever recharge himself by contact. Sooner or later he's got no feelings to send. You can't have feelings alone. Not alone like the Sender is alone - and you dig there can only be one Sender at one place-time.... Finally the screen goes dead... the Sender has turned into a huge centipede... So the workers come in on the beam and burn the centipede and elect a new Sender by consensus of the general will... The Mayans were limited by isolation... Now one Sender could control the planet... You see control can never be a means to a practical end... It can never be a means to anything but more control...

[Anonymous No.13134439]

>>13134409
Holy fuck i don't really like Joyce (though i haven't read him years) but this passage is just majestic. I'm honestly really surprised at how beautiful the repetition of "falling, softly, faintly" etc achieves a kind of hypnotic effect, and not just cringe alliteration. Maybe the BRAP dude is truly a good writer and i'm a pleb huh. I'll give him another chance some time.

[Anonymous No.13134447]

>>13133998
>>13134409
>night by silentsailing night while infantina Isobel (who will be blushing all day to be, when she growed up one Sunday, Saint Holy and Saint Ivory, when she took the veil, the beautiful presentation nun, so barely twenty, in her pure coif, sister Isobel, and next Sunday, Mistlemas, when she looked a peach, the beautiful Samaritan, still as beautiful and still in her teens, nurse Saintette Isabelle, with stiffstarched cuffs but on Holiday, Christmas, Easter mornings when she wore a wreath, the wonderful widow of eighteen springs, Madame Isa Veuve La Belle, so sad but lucksome in her boyblue's long black with orange blossoming weeper's veil) for she was the only girl they loved, as she is the queenly pearl you prize, because of the way the night that first we met she is bound to be, methinks, and not in vain, the darling of my heart, sleeping in her april cot, within her singachamer, with her greengageflavoured candywhistle duetted to the crazyquilt, Isobel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood's eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitethorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon, for soon again 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me! deeply, now evencalm lay sleeping;

Old brap man runs circles around your younger version, and every mediocre passage in this thread

[Anonymous No.13134452]

>>13134439
he is an unbelievably talented writer but that doesn't mean you have to enjoy all the memery he concocted

[Anonymous No.13134490]

For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay against the backward wall and blackness of its prison cave, so that the eyes alone shine of their own angry glory, but the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human 'soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent of all advantaging within hope of human dream, that which most marvelous and most precious to our knowledge and most extremely advanced upon futurity of all flowerings within the scope of creation is of all these the least destructible, the least corruptible, the most defenseless, the most easily and multitudinously wounded, frustrated, prisoned, and nailed into a cheating of itself: so situated in the universe that those three hours upon the cross are but a noble and too trivial an emblem how in each individual among most of the two billion now alive and in each successive instant of the existence of each existence not only human being but in him the tallest and most sanguine hope of godhead is in a billionate choiring and drone of pain of generations upon generations unceasingly crucified and is bringing forth crucifixions into their necessities and is each in the most casual of his life so measurelessly discredited, harmed, insulted, poisoned, cheated, as not all the wrath, compassion, intelligence, power of rectification in all the reach of the future shall in the least expiate or make one ounce more light: how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,' as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I 'know' you?

[Anonymous No.13134507]

>ctrl f
>no "Sunset found her squatting"
You disappoint me, the lot of ya.

[Anonymous No.13134544]

For the edge of the sea is like the edge of a sword; it is sharp, military, and decisive; it really looks like a bolt or bar, and not like a mere expansion. It hangs in heaven, grey, or green, or blue, changing in colour, but changeless in form, behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savage softness of the forests, like the scales of God held even. It hangs, a perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice which abides behind all compromises and all legitimate variety; the one straight line; the limit of the intellect; the dark and ultimate dogma of the world.

-Chesterton

[Anonymous No.13135500]

anything by this guy

[Anonymous No.13135572]

>>13134447
what the fuck this means?

[Anonymous No.13135599]

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

[Anonymous No.13135744]

>>13135572
>Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his river-end name, and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L'Escaut, in the silence, of the sy-
comores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of
his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown.

[Anonymous No.13135747]

>>13134544
Jesus Christ, I wish Chesterton had written half as much for it all to be this quality

[Anonymous No.13135754]

All of you faggots posting quotes without the author get the wall

[Anonymous No.13135764]

>Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.
Zorba the Greek

[Anonymous No.13135765]

They came in the night, when everyone was asleep. The work took but a few minutes. Most never woke up. If there had been floors instead of dirt, their exit would have been slippery instead of sticky. It would be years before the knowledge of what they had done that night would come back to trouble their own sleep.

[Anonymous No.13135782]

Posting my favourite Pynchon excerpts.

"It's a warm evening, Just around the time sunset colours are developing over Jersey and food-delivery bike traffic in the neighborhood approaches its peak and city trees are filled with bird dialogue that reaches a crescendo as the streetlights come on, contrails of evening departures hanging brightly in the sky." -- Bleeding Edge

"hey drove through the night, and in the first light they got to the turnoff Puck had shown Doc on the map, and followed a state road to a county road, left the blacktop then for a ranch road of packed dirt, past battered and dangling gates and across dry washes on strumming cattle guards, past yucca and squat little cactuses, desert wildflowers at the roadside, rock outcrops in the distance, dark moving patches out in the alkaline brightness that could have been burros or coyotes or mule deer, or maybe aliens from long-ago landings, for Doc could feel evidence everywhere of ancient visitation." -- Inherent Vice (Blood Meridian feeling)

"Assigning to ev'ry Looking-Glass a Coefficient of Mercy,-- term it μ,-- none, among those into which he has ever gaz'd, seeking anything but what he knows will be there, has come within screaming distance of even, say, 0.5, given the Lensman's Squint, the Stoop, and most of all, in its Fluctuation day by day, the Size of a certain Frontal Hemisphere, ever a source of Preoccupation, over whose Horizon he can sometimes not observe his Penis." -- M&D

[Anonymous No.13135786]

>>13135765
>They came in the night, when everyone was asleep. The work took but a few minutes. Most never woke up. If there had been floors instead of dirt, their exit would have been slippery instead of sticky. It would be years before the knowledge of what they had done that night would come back to trouble their own sleep.
Its stark simplicity and deceptive banality are paradoxically chilling...which is EXACTLY the effect the author should be aiming for in this work. Perfect prose is situational. A crude, ugly story should be told crudely and uglily.

[Anonymous No.13135819]

>>13135782
Fuck I’m gonna have to read Pynchon now

[Anonymous No.13135839]

>>13135765
Oh god, why would they cum all over the floor? That’s dark.

[Anonymous No.13135852]

>>13135839
One of the things that makes that passage a genuine work of art and not some piece of pulp guignole is the ambiguity: Is the blood on the ground or cum...or something else, something that is better left undescribed and even unimagined. Shudder.

THAT, my friend, is the mark of a true master.

[Anonymous No.13135864]

>>13135839
>>13135852
kek

[Anonymous No.13135879]

>>13134404
I think they’re being ironic bro

[Anonymous No.13135895]

>Jesus wept

[Anonymous No.13135939]

Rabbit comes to the curb but instead of going to his right and around the block he steps down, with as big a feeling as if this little sidestreet is a wide river, and crosses. He wants to travel to the next patch of snow. Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

-Rabbit, Run, John Updike

[Anonymous No.13135959]

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.

-Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

This was the passage that really got me into literature. This was the first time I got the shivers, the good shivers, while reading something.

[Anonymous No.13135964]

>>13133998
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land

Practically the entirerty of Moby Dick

[Anonymous No.13135970]

If this doesn't qualify as literature, well, damn it, it should:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

-Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

[Anonymous No.13135982]

>>13135970
I love Lincoln, even though he made some huge mistakes as president. He was such a genius when it came to writing

[Anonymous No.13136000]

>>13135982
Curious what you think those mistakes where.....

[Anonymous No.13136004]

>>13136000
>>13135982
you guys might read Lincoln the Man by Edgar Lee Masters
https://archive.org/details/MastersEdgarLeeLincolnTheMan

very interesting account of the period and the person

[Anonymous No.13136015]

>>13136000
Infringing heavily upon state rights was definitely a huge mistake, among other things. The founding fathers never intended for the government to become so powerful

[Anonymous No.13136025]

>>13134281
Magnificent. DFW is truly one of the greats.

[Anonymous No.13136032]

But post the book where you found the excerpt or at least the author, retards.

[Anonymous No.13136041]

Most people are afflicted by an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it’s necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in a wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral: it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing.
All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying,’ which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, ‘I feel like tears.’ And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! That small child aptly defined his spiral.
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming – like worms when a rock is lifted – under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13136042]

>>13134404
it is you who outed yourself as a newfag by attempting to foist the newfag label and framework upon minor posts of questionable sincerity, thus revealing with your condemnation that you yourself are acting sincerely in the hope of being recognized as not-new, but one of the in-group--which you are definitely not, as evidenced by your swiftness to censure

[Anonymous No.13136102]

>>13134409

The Dead is truly one of the most beautiful closing crescendos of prose in the English language. I don't think much of the rest of the story, however. A Painful Case is still my favorite, and the ending is just as beautifully written and somber.

[Anonymous No.13136418]

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien—IF, indeed, it stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground—nay more, that it is at its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts.

[Anonymous No.13136453]

>>13135782
>"Assigning to ev'ry Looking-Glass a Coefficient of Mercy,-- term it μ,-- none, among those into which he has ever gaz'd, seeking anything but what he knows will be there, has come within screaming distance of even, say, 0.5, given the Lensman's Squint, the Stoop, and most of all, in its Fluctuation day by day, the Size of a certain Frontal Hemisphere, ever a source of Preoccupation, over whose Horizon he can sometimes not observe his Penis."
what does this even fucking mean?

How is this good writing? My Professor would give this a 3/10.

[Anonymous No.13136457]

>>13134281
the fuck is childish nonsense...is this real?

[Anonymous No.13136462]

>>13136453
I don't know what it means but I appreciate the 18th century cadence and orthography as well as the technical metaphor. Also proof that English professors are shitty hacks.

[Anonymous No.13136523]

>>13133998
Irimiás scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.

[Anonymous No.13136526]

I've come to resent the opening of Lolita.

Anyhow, the Quarter-Deck remains one of my favourite chapters in any book I've read.

"Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me."

[Anonymous No.13136678]

>>13134281
Unironically one of the best quotes in literature. Based DFW

[Anonymous No.13136688]

>>13136004
Thanks, anon. Will check it out.

[Anonymous No.13136690]

>>13136041
This is interesting. I've never heard of Pessoa before, but I'll check him out. Thanks, anon.

[Anonymous No.13136746]

"Dolores, with two rackets under her arm, in Wimbeldon. Dolores endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores and her gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert."
A good one from Lolita too.

[Anonymous No.13136751]

>>13136462
Just tell me what it means. I think it means - the character was getting uglier and fatter everyday.

[Anonymous No.13136766]

>>13136746
Yes, Nabokov could write some brilliant prose. Why was he so obsessed with perversion, though? Almost every protagonist in his novels was some kind of pervert. Pedophilia (Humbert in Lolita), Homosexuality (Kinbote in Pale Fire), Incest (in Ada). Seems kinda forced, doesn't it? As if he were trying to thumb his nose at the prim and proper "realism" of Soviet literature.

[Anonymous No.13136781]

[Anonymous No.13136852]

>>13136751
There's more context to it, which I can't remember, I do remember that it makes less sense in context though.

[Anonymous No.13136853]

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets

[Anonymous No.13136867]

>>13134439

Unfortunately there are not many passages like this in his work. To my mind he wasted a lot of time and effort on things like Finnegans Wake when after Ulysses he could have turned his attention again to this poetic realism of his early days.

But he was nowhere as gifted as a prose poet as Melville and Shakespeare (yes, a lot of things in Shakespeare are written in prose, not verse).

[Anonymous No.13136871]

>>13134281
Holy...I want more!

[Anonymous No.13136873]

The Grapes of Wrath.
All of it.

[Anonymous No.13136876]

>When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel. Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up-reared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake. For an instant before the jerk comes onto his arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-umber, until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again. Then they are rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs, with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse's wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.

>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 midair 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.

[Anonymous No.13136885]

>>13134281
Unironically good character work, ironically good work. The faults of this passage are the faults of the character Dave's writing as.

[Anonymous No.13136931]

>>13136885
and the faults are?

[Anonymous No.13136975]

>>13136885
it's from a John Green book

[Anonymous No.13136998]

>>13136931
in our stars

[Anonymous No.13137002]

>>13136931
on the stars, dumbo

[Anonymous No.13137021]

>>13136931
The cringey sentimentality, the awkward, clunky blend of cliches and pretension, the "muh one long sentence with no reason to not be multiple short sentences because muh overflowing emotions"...it all just screams "teenager". It's shit writing, but, regardless of who wrote it, it's blatantly engineered to be relatable to teenagers (and immature adults).

[Anonymous No.13137102]

>>13136853
it's strange that, never having read this passage or even this book, i knew exactly who it was by the first sentence, and the rest of the passage only vindicated me

[Anonymous No.13137108]

>>13136975
>>13136998
randumbs couldn't even get this right

[Anonymous No.13137290]

>>13137021
You trying to insult me?

[Anonymous No.13137406]

>>13137102
You have to read it. The entire book is pure prose porn. Story is pretty good too. The Judge is a God tier villain.

[Anonymous No.13137427]

>>13134281

[Anonymous No.13137679]

>>13133998

>O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

[Anonymous No.13137746]

>>13134281
Low test

[Anonymous No.13137747]

>>13134281
virgin tier prose

[Anonymous No.13137760]

one from Hesiod

"A man owns no better treasure than a prudent tongue"

[Anonymous No.13137775]

>>13137760
lame. I would take insight over that any day.

[Anonymous No.13137780]

>>13137775
he´s right tho

[Anonymous No.13137804]

>>13137780
maybe for you, big guy

[Anonymous No.13137965]

>>13137804
aye

[Anonymous No.13137984]

>>13136004
Just googled it. Looks fascinating, will definitely add it to my to-read list. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.13138148]

>>13134204
This btfo all the Christian's and stoics. I really changed my life perspective after reading this book. Thank you for reminding me of that time.
Also do you think you can write like this without having read extensevly the Romans and the Greeks? The precision of the prose makes me think of Roman Edicts but the quality and poetry of the metaphors make me think about the Greeks and their life affirming religion of the good old days.