/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18208641]

Post a better paragraph than this one.

[Anonymous No.18208675]

Pretty vivid imagery. Unsettling in a very human but satanic way.

[Anonymous No.18208739]

>>18208641
Cormac is a master of the craft

[Anonymous No.18208886]

>>18208641
Two paragraphs, but never mind:

---

In the morning before it was quite light he walked out of the compound and down to the river. He walked out over the plank bridge on its stone piers and stood looking down at the clear cold waters of the Casas Grandes running out of the mountains to the south. He turned and looked downstream. A hundred feet away in water to her thighs stood the primadonna naked. Her hair was down and it was wet and clinging to her back and it reached to the water. He stood frozen. She turned and swung her hair before her and bent and lowered it into the river. Her breasts swung above the water. He took off his hat and stood with his heart laboring under his shirt. She raised up and gathered her hair and twisted out the water. Her skin so white. The dark hair under her belly almost an indelicacy.

She bent once more and trailed her hair in the water with a swaying motion sideways and then stood and swung it about her in a great hoop of spray and stood with her head back and her eyes closed. The sun rising over the gray ranges to the east lit the upper air. She held one hand up. She moved her body, she swept both hands before her. She bent and caught her falling hair in her arms and held it and she passed one hand over the surface of the water as if to bless it and he watched and as he watched he saw that the world which had always been before him everywhere had been veiled from his sight. She turned and he thought she might sing to the sun. She opened her eyes and saw him there on the bridge and she turned her back and walked slowly up out of the river and was lost to his view among the pale standing trunks of the cottonwoods and the sun rose and the river ran as before but nothing was the same nor did he think it ever would be.

― The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy

[Anonymous No.18208892]

>>18208641
>dancing and fiddling at once
Dancing to his own tune.

[Anonymous No.18208901]

>>18208886
Holy shit Cormac is so quickly becoming my favorite novelist!!!!

[Anonymous No.18208909]

>>18208886
This one is better.

"The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

[Anonymous No.18208917]

You first.

[Anonymous No.18208921]

From the Learned Disguise

[Anonymous No.18208924]

>>18208909
>>18208886
I would unironically read these for the memes

[Anonymous No.18208933]

[Anonymous No.18208945]

>>18208921
>gook pseud has to use the emotions set up by another writer to convey what he's feeling
what a cunt

[Anonymous No.18208949]

>>18208901
He's pretty good. He can be awesome in voices other than his own, too:

---

Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.

— Suttree

[Anonymous No.18208951]

>>18208933
Faulker is the only one who can hold a candle to McCarthy!!

[Anonymous No.18208970]

>>18208951
He is his literary father. You can see his influence in him in that paragraph. Personally, i like this one better:
https://mymodernmet.com/longest-run-on-sentence-william-faulkner/

[Anonymous No.18208976]

>>18208641

[Anonymous No.18209006]

He has quite a lot of great ending passages.

"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"

"The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come."

[Anonymous No.18209023]

>>18208641
I prefer another from BM

"The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't."

This paragraph has stuck hard in my mind ever since the first time I read it

[Anonymous No.18209064]

>>18208945
references to another work aren't ok?

[Anonymous No.18209094]

Unironically reads like pottery

[Anonymous No.18209114]

>>18209064
the faggot can write his own feelings. it's a crutch

[Anonymous No.18209127]

>>18209114
What would it look like without the crutch?

[Anonymous No.18209159]

>>18209127
look at how dostoevsky set up raskolikov's character, idk. he didn't just say "oh, he feel like that one dude in this other book." build some pathos, damn. why should this be so hard to ask from a writer?

[Anonymous No.18209193]

>>18209159
I don't like the paragraph either but there's nothing wrong in principle with doing it. The point is that C&P as a novel has a psychological richness that goes beyond what Waldun can express in one sentence, so the choice is having this overworked fucking sentence being a lesser expression, or just referencing a famous character instead & carrying the baggage. I guess you could "build pathos" in ways complementary with this, since it seems sudden & awkward in any case

[Anonymous No.18209276]

>>18209193
i don't think this paragraph should exist at all. it's pathetically lazy and boring to, in one paragraph, tell the reader what your character is feeling. i think it ought to have been conveyed across the book or several paragraphs

>the choice is having this overworked fucking sentence being a lesser expression, or just referencing a famous character instead & carrying the baggage
it seems although you think this sentence has to exist, and that it has been done correctly. as i have said above, i don't think it should be here at all. the fact that he is dumping so much material here is a mistake; it's not the way he decided to deal with the material that's the problem. lets say it really was the case that he had to convey that much information in one paragraph or a sentence, then it would be fine to make a reference rather than a long-winded mistake. but this could've been avoided. that's my issue with it

[Anonymous No.18209373]

Blood Meridian, Chapter 11

Not the best paragraph but one that stood out to me all the same. It's during the story in which the Judge describes the saddle maker and the traveler.

"...There was a young bride waiting for that traveler with whose bones we are acquainted and she bore a child in her womb that was the traveler's son. Now this son whose father's existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way."

I've had a couple friends whose parents died when they were very young, or were essentially dead due to their estrangement, and this passage hits the nail on the head. Some found a mother or father figure later in life and were able to find a transition out of this arrested development, but some are still stuck forever with a part of their soul utterly devastated and desolate. The pain of the wound in one form or another informs and guides most of their life.

[Anonymous No.18209390]

>>18208641
> "NIGGERS could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be NIGGERS anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE NIGGERS" he thought. Sweet Dreams are Made of These reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $9 wine circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of minorities after dark. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

[Anonymous No.18210695]

>>18208909
That’s probably my favorite of his, fucking hell that whole wolf story was sad.

[Anonymous No.18210740]

"I wiped the blade against my jeans and walked into the bar. It was mid-afternoon, very hot and still. The bar was deserted. I ordered a whiskey. The barman looked at the blood and asked:

‘God?’

‘Yeah.’

‘S’pose it’s time someone finished that hypocritical little punk, always bragging about his old man’s power…’

He smiled crookedly, insinuatingly, a slight nausea shuddered through me. I replied weakly:

‘It was kind of sick, he didn’t fight back or anything, just kept trying to touch me and shit, like one of those dogs that try to fuck your leg. Something in me snapped, the whingeing had ground me down too low. I really hated that sanctimonious little creep.’

‘So you snuffed him?’

‘Yeah, I’ve killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I got frenzied, it was an ecstasy, I never knew I could hate so much.’

I felt very calm, slightly light-headed. The whisky tasted good, vaporizing in my throat. We were silent for a few moments. The barman looked at me levelly, the edge of his eyes twitching slightly with anxiety:

There’ll be trouble though, don’tcha think?’

‘I don’t give a shit, the threats are all used up, I just don’t give a shit.’

‘You know what they say about his old man? Ruthless bastard they say. Cruel…’

‘I just hope I’ve hurt him, if he even exists.’

‘Woulden wanna cross him merself,’ he muttered.

I wanted to say ‘yeah, well that’s where we differ’, but the energy for it wasn’t there. The fan rotated languidly, casting spidery shadows across the room. We sat in silence a little longer. The barman broke first:

‘So God’s dead?’

‘If that’s who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just hope it’s true this time.’

The barman worked at one of his teeth with his tongue, uneasily:

‘It’s kindova big crime though, isn’t it? You know how it is, when one of the cops goes down and everything’s dropped ’til they find the guy who did it. I mean, you’re not just breaking a law, your breaking LAW.’

I scraped my finger along my jeans, and suspended it over the bar, so that a thick clot of blood fell down into my whisky, and dissolved. I smiled:

‘Maybe it’s a big crime,’ I mused vaguely ‘but maybe it’s nothing at all…’ ‘…and we have killed him’ writes Nietzsche, but—destituted of community—I crave a little time with him on my own.

In perfect communion I lick the dagger foamed with God’s blood."

[Anonymous No.18211695]

>>18210740
https://youtu.be/QT13kk8HDDo

[Anonymous No.18211704]

I would but my diary is confidential and will be released to the public upon my death

[Anonymous No.18211720]

>>18210740
I sometimes wish I were stupid enough to consider this good or deep.

[Anonymous No.18211725]

>>18211720

[Anonymous No.18211741]

>This monotonousness and abstract universality are maintained to be the Absolute. This formalism insists that to be dissatisfied therewith argues an incapacity to grasp the standpoint of the Absolute, and keep a firm hold on it. If it was once the case that the bare possibility of thinking of something in some other fashion was sufficient to refute a given idea, and the naked possibility, the bare general thought, possessed and passed for the entire substantive value of actual knowledge; similarly we find here all the value ascribed to the general idea in this bare form without concrete realisation; and we see here, too, the style and method of speculative contemplation identified with dissipating and, resolving what is determinate and distinct, or rather with hurling it down, without more ado and without any justification, into the abyss of vacuity. To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one. To pit this single assertion, that “in the Absolute all is one”, against the organised whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development – to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black – that is the very naïveté of emptiness of knowledge. The formalism which has been deprecated and despised by recent philosophy, and which has arisen once more in philosophy itself, will not disappear from science, even though its inadequacy is known and felt, till the knowledge of absolute reality has become quite clear as to what its own true nature consists in. Having in mind that the general idea of what is to be done, if it precedes the attempt to carry it out, facilitates the comprehension of this process, it is worth while to indicate here some rough idea of it, with the hope at the same time that this will give us the opportunity to set aside certain forms whose habitual presence is a hindrance in the way of speculative knowledge

[Anonymous No.18211772]

>>18211741
Another gem:

>If we consider the appearance of a claim like this in its more general setting, and look at the level which the self-conscious mind at present occupies, we shall find that self-consciousness has got beyond the substantial fullness of life, which it used to carry on in the element of thought – beyond the state of immediacy of belief, beyond the satisfaction and security arising from the assurance which consciousness possessed of being reconciled with ultimate reality and with its all-pervading presence, within as well as without. Self-conscious mind has not merely passed beyond that to the opposite extreme of insubstantial reflection of self into self, but beyond this too. It has not merely lost its essential and concrete life, it is also conscious of this loss and of the transitory finitude characteristic of its content. Turning away from the husks it has to feed on, and confessing that it lies in wickedness and sin, it reviles itself for so doing, and now desires from philosophy not so much to bring it to a knowledge of what it is, as to obtain once again through philosophy the restoration of that sense of solidity and substantiality of existence it has lost. Philosophy is thus expected not so much to meet this want by opening up the compact solidity of substantial existence, and bringing this to the light and level of self-consciousness is not so much to bring chaotic conscious life back to the orderly ways of thought, and the simplicity of the notion, as to run together what thought has divided asunder suppress the notion with its distinctions, and restore the feeling of existence. What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, love – these are the bait required to awaken the desire to bite: not the notion, but ecstasy, not the march of cold necessity in the subject-matter, but ferment and enthusiasm – these are to be the ways by which the wealth of the concrete substance is to be stored and increasingly extended.

[Anonymous No.18211846]

Asalom absalom's got dozens that can probably match it.

[Anonymous No.18211862]

Any paragraph from Call of the Crocodile

[Anonymous No.18211955]

>>18208976
Source?

[Anonymous No.18211981]

>>18208641
I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?
>tips fedora

[Anonymous No.18212118]

from the Tunnel by Gass

[Anonymous No.18212135]

[Anonymous No.18212161]

>>18208970
funny how the masters of run-on sentences had the same editor. i wonder if he encouraged it?

[Anonymous No.18212169]

>>18212161
mccarthy just copied the shit out of faulkner so Erskine was like lemme help u with that.

[Anonymous No.18212176]

>>18211862
Is..Is that...A COLOR I'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE?! AAAAAAAHHHH NIGGERMAN WHY IS NO ONE BUYING MY BOOOOOOOOK?!?!

[Anonymous No.18212193]

here is the real best passage from Blood Meridian
>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.18212556]

>>18212161
I remember reading that McCarthy had to convince him to not heavily edit his first novel which was pretty Faulknerian. Also funny that he only got popular after he dropped Erskine.

[Anonymous No.18212636]

>>18210695
Billy watching the wolves hunt on the snow in the moonlight is also very beautiful:

>They were already out on the plain and when he crossed the gravel fan where the creek ran south into the valley he could see where they'd crossed before him. He went forward on knees and elbows with his hands pulled back into his sleeves to keep them out of the snow and when he reached the last of the small dark juniper trees where the broad valley ran under the Animas Peaks he crouched quietly to steady his breath and then raised himself slowly and looked out.

>They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire.

[Anonymous No.18213854]

>>18208641
For sale. Baby. Worn once.

[Anonymous No.18214055]

Fuck off, I will not post any literature in this illiterate puke thread.

[Anonymous No.18214245]

>>18211955
Hydriotaphia

[Anonymous No.18214252]

Weird how I hated the whole book and forced myself to read it until I got to the end when it became really fascinating

[Anonymous No.18214352]

>>18208641
>“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.”

[Anonymous No.18214423]

I actually don't enjoy the quotes posted in this thread. I'm not sure why, but they just don't sound good to me.

[Anonymous No.18214481]

>>18214423
Post one that you like then

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18214489]

Here have an entire story.

All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering
uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of
Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind
waiting.

And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone
spoke of the swallows and the South.

"I think I shall go South myself next year," said a hen.

And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the year
wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the poultry discussed
the departure of the hen.

And very early one morning, the wind being from the North, the
swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in their wings; and a
strength came upon them and a strange old knowledge and a more
than human faith, and flying high they left the smoke of our cities and
small remembered eaves, and saw at last the huge and homeless sea,
and steering by grey sea-currents went southward with the wind. And
going South they went by glittering fog-banks and saw old islands lifting
their heads above them; they saw the slow quests of the wandering
ships, and divers seeking pearls, and lands at war, till there came in
view the mountains that they sought and the sight of the peaks they
knew; and they descended into an austral valley, and saw Summer
sometimes sleeping and sometimes singing song.

"I think the wind is about right," said the hen; and she spread her
wings and ran out of the poultry-yard. And she ran fluttering out on
to the road and some way down it until she came to a garden.

At evening she came back panting.

And in the poultry-yard she told the poultry how she had gone South
as far as the high road, and saw the great world's traffic going by,
and came to lands where the potato grew, and saw the stubble upon
which men live, and at the end of the road had found a garden, and
there were roses in it--beautiful roses!--and the gardener himself was
there with his braces on.

"How extremely interesting," the poultry said, "and what a really
beautiful description!"

And the Winter wore away, and the bitter months went by, and the
Spring of the year appeared, and the swallows came again.

"We have been to the South," they said, "and the valleys beyond
the sea."

But the poultry would not agree that there was a sea in the South:
"You should hear our hen," they said.

- Lord Dunsany

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18214495]

Or if you want just a paragraph, here’s a paragraph.

The witch approached it and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets. She sang of old Summer noons in the time of harebells: she sang on that high dark heath a song that seemed so full of mornings and evenings preserved with all their dews by her magical craft from days that had else been lost, that Alveric wondered of each small wandering wing, that her fire had lured from the dusk, if this were the ghost of some day lost to man, called up by the force of her song from times that were fairer. And all the while the unearthly metal grew harder. The white liquid stiffened and turned red. The glow of the red dwindled. And as it cooled it narrowed: little particles came together, little crevices closed: and as they closed they seized the air about them, and with the air they caught the witch's rune, and gripped it and held it forever. And so it was it became a magical sword. And little magic there is in English woods, from the time of anemones to the falling of leaves, that was not in the sword. And little magic there is in southern downs, that only sheep roam over and quiet shepherds, that the sword had not too. And there was scent of thyme in it and sight of lilac, and the chorus of birds that sings before dawn in April, and the deep proud splendour of rhododendrons, and the litheness and laughter of streams, and miles and miles of may. And by the time the sword was black it was all enchanted with magic.


― The King of elfland’s daughter, Lord Dunsany

[Anonymous No.18214499]

>>18214495
I only made it till the two of them were married. It bored me to tears; is there any other good Dunsany?

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18214509]

>>18214499
Dunsany’s strength is his short stories and not his Longer works, check out either the Gods of pegana, Gods and time, 51 short tales or the book of wonder. Dunsany’s ornate prose style works best when he’s working high religious-fantasy and in small portions. I would shill reading a random story from the book of wonder and a random one from 51 tales to see if you like the flavor, but reading gods of Pegana from start to finish.

[Anonymous No.18214520]

>>18214509
Okay. Thanks Frater

[Anonymous No.18214526]

“Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou were within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou were with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all. Thou didst call and cry to my and break open my deafness: and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness: Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do not pant for Thee: I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee: Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.”

― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18215001]

Bumping this thread with more kino.

Raptly as one who would divine the perilous eyes of Sleep, and the dreams and mysteries which lurk therein, I sought to fathom the gulf-enclosing orb of the crystal: Void for a time, and hollow with light it was, and transpicuous like the orient sky that is made clear for the colours of the dawn. But soon the light was centered to a star, and the crystal itself, as if pregnant with the Infinite, became a tenebrous and profound abysm, thro which a teeming myriad of shadows, vague as incipient dreams, or luminous with a glimpse of vision not prefigurable, fled in an ever-changing phantasmagoric succession about the star: From out those vortical and swirling glooms, where only the central star was constant, I saw the pallor of innominable faces emerge-faces that broke like bubbles; and forms that were strange as conceptions of an alien sun, with the eidolons of things which were imageless before, swam for a little in that phantasmic wave. But all the multifold mysteries which were manifest therein, I knew for the hidden thoughts and occluse, reluctant dreams of mine under-soul — thoughts and dreams now shadow-shown in the gulf-revealing orb of the hollow crystal

- clark Ashton smith

[Anonymous No.18215156]

literally just a rehash of Molly's soliloquy

[Anonymous No.18215189]

>>18214423
yea this pompous epic bacon mccarthy shit is pretty lame ngl

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18215697]

>>18215189
>>18214423
How’s the two I posted?

[Anonymous No.18215786]

>>18208641
I really love Cormac McCarthy's writing style, I wonder how he developed it

[Anonymous No.18215808]

>>18210740
holy fuck and to think I actually respected Nick somewhat, what an edgy loser

[Anonymous No.18215825]

>>18215189
Post your pick then

[Anonymous No.18215858]

When Fate heard footsteps approaching he thought they were the footsteps of a giant. Guadalupe Roncal must have thought something similar, because she seemed about to faint, but instead of fainting, she clung to the prison official’s hand and then his lapel. Rather than pull away, he put his arm around her shoulders. Fate felt Rosa’s body next to him. He heard voices. As if the inmates were egging someone on. He heard laughter and calls to order, and then the black clouds from the east passed over the prison and the air seemed to darken. The footsteps came closer. He heard laughter and pleas. Suddenly a voice began to sing a song. It sounded like a woodcutter chopping down trees. The voice wasn’t singing in English. At first Fate couldn’t figure out what the language was, until Rosa, beside him, said it was German. The voice grew louder. It occurred to Fate that he might still be dreaming. The trees fell one by one. I’m a giant whose lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me. Rosa translated the suspect’s string of curses for him. A polyglot woodcutter, thought Fate, who speaks English as well as he speaks Spanish and who sings in German. I’m a giant lost in the middle of a charred forest. And yet only I know where I’m going, only I know my destiny. And then the footsteps and the laughter could be heard once more, and the goading and words of encouragement of the inmates and the guards escorting the giant. And then an enormous and very blond man came into the visitor’s room, ducked his head, as if he were afraid of knocking it on the ceiling, and smiled as if he had just done something naughty, singing the German song about the lost woodcutter and fixing them all with an intelligent and mocking gaze. Then the guard accompanying him asked Guadalupe Roncal if she would prefer if he were handcuffed to the chair and Guadalupe Roncal shook her head and the guard gave the tall man a little pat on the shoulder and left and the official who was standing with Fate and the women went out too, though not before saying something into Guadalupe Roncal’s ear, and they were left alone.

[Anonymous No.18215897]

>>18212118
Gass is the greatest prose stylists in terms of peaks. He writes a lot of insincere garbage though as well

[Anonymous No.18215915]

>>18214352
I know it's one of the most popular to the point of being memed examples but it really is beautiful.

[Anonymous No.18215925]

>>18208641
Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

[Anonymous No.18215983]

Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb’s long spade–still remaining there after the whale’s decapitation–and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there look hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in there. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations.

Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou has been where bell or diver never went; has slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down.

Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed–while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! Thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine.”

[Anonymous No.18216030]

McCarthy's style appals the most to the American mind, as it is, just like each American man: a bit rugged, honest, straightforward, and devoid of any depth or beauty.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18216138]

The ceremony by Arthur machen

From her childhood, from those early and misty days which began to seem unreal, she recollected the grey stone in the wood.
It was something between the pillar and the pyramid in shape, and its grey solemnity amidst the leaves and the grass shone and shone from those early years, always with some hint of wonder. She remembered how, when she was quite a little girl, she had strayed one day, on a hot afternoon, from her nurse’s side, and only a little way in the wood the grey stone rose from the grass, and she cried out and ran back in panic terror.
‘What a silly little girl,’ the nurse had said. ‘It’s only the . . . stone.’ She had quite forgotten the name that the servant had given, and she was always ashamed to ask as she grew older.
But always that hot day, that burning afternoon of her childhood when she had first looked consciously on the grey image in the wood, remained not a memory but a sensation. The wide wood swelling like the sea, the tossing of the bright boughs in the sunshine, the sweet smell of the grass and flowers, the beating of the summer wind upon her cheek, the gloom of the underglade rich, indistinct, gorgeous, significant as old tapestry; she could feel it and see it all, and the scent of it was in her nostrils. And in the midst of the picture, where the strange plants grew gross in shadow, was the old grey shape of the stone.
But there were in her mind broken remnants of another and far earlier impression. It was all uncertain, the shadow of a shadow, so vague that it might well have been a dream that had mingled with the confused waking thoughts of a little child. She did not know that she remembered, she rather remembered the memory. But again it was a summer day, and a woman, perhaps the same nurse, held her in her arms, and went through the wood. The woman carried bright flowers in one hand; the dream had in it a glow of bright red, and the perfume of cottage roses. Then she saw herself put down for a moment on the grass, and the red colour stained the grim stone, and there was nothing else— except that one night she woke up and heard the nurse sobbing.
She often used to think of the strangeness of very early life; one came, it seemed, from a dark cloud, there was a glow of light, but for a moment, and afterwards the night. It was as if one gazed at a velvet curtain, heavy, mysterious, impenetrable blackness, and then, for the twinkling of an eye, one spied through a pin-hole a storied town that flamed, with fire about its walls and pinnacles. And then again the folding darkness, so that sight became illusion, almost in the seeing. So to her was that earliest, doubtful vision of the grey stone, of the red colour spilled upon it, with the incongruous episode of the nursemaid, who wept at night.
But the later memory was clear; she could feel, even now, the inconsequent terror that sent her away shrieking, running to the nurse’s skirts.

Cont

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18216147]

>>18216138
Afterwards, through the days of girlhood, the stone had taken its place amongst the vast array of unintelligible things which haunt every child’s imagination. It was part of life, to be accepted and not questioned; her elders spoke of many things which she could not understand, she opened books and was dimly amazed, and in the Bible there were many phrases which seemed strange. Indeed, she was often puzzled by her parents’ conduct, by their looks at one another, by their half-words, and amongst all these problems which she hardly recognized as problems, was the grey ancient figure rising from dark grass.
Some semi-conscious impulse made her haunt the wood where shadow enshrined the stone. One thing was noticeable; that all through the summer months the passers-by dropped flowers there. Withered blossoms were always on the ground, amongst the grass, and on the stone fresh blooms constantly appeared. From the daffodil to the Michaelmas daisy* there was marked the calendar of the cottage gardens, and in the winter she had seen sprays of juniper and box, mistletoe and holly. Once she had been drawn through the bushes by a red glow, as if there had been a fire in the wood, and when she came to the place, all the stone shone and all the ground about it was bright with roses.
In her eighteenth year she went one day into the wood, carrying with her a book that she was reading. She hid herself in a nook of hazel, and her soul was full of poetry, when there was a rustling, the rapping of parted boughs returning to their place. Her concealment was but a little way from the stone, and she peered through the net of boughs, and saw a girl timidly approaching. She knew her quite well; it was Annie Dolben, the daughter of a labourer, lately a promising pupil at Sunday school. Annie was a nice-mannered girl, never failing in her curtsy, wonderful for her knowledge of the Jewish Kings. Her face had taken an expression that whispered, that hinted strange things; there was a light and a glow behind the veil of flesh. And in her hand she bore lilies. The lady hidden in hazels watched Annie come close to the grey image; for a moment her whole body palpitated with expectation, almost the sense of what was to happen dawned upon her. She watched Annie crown the stone with flowers, she watched the amazing ceremony that followed.
And yet, in spite of all her blushing shame, she herself bore blossoms to the wood a few months later. She laid white hothouse lilies upon the stone, and orchids of dying purple, and crimson exotic flowers. Having kissed the grey image with devout passion, she performed there all the antique immemorial rite.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18216199]

Outside, the moan of the tortured thousands shuddered up to the stars which crusted the sweating Vendhyan night, and the conchs bellowed like oxen in pain.
In the gardens of the palace the torches glinted on polished helmets and curved swords and gold-chased corselets. All the noble-born fighting-men of Ayodhya were gathered in the great palace or about it, and at each broad-arched gate and door fifty archers stood on guard, with bows in their hands. But Death stalked through the royal palace and none could stay his ghostly tread.

On the dais under the golden dome the king cried out again, racked by awful paroxysms. Again his voice came faintly and far away, and again the Devi bent to him, trembling with a fear that was darker than the terror of death.

- Robert e Howard

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18216321]

From the nethermost profound of slumber, from a gulf beyond the sun and stars that illume the Lethean shoals and the vague lands of somnolent visions, I floated on a black unrippling tide to the dark threshold of a dream. And in this dream I stood at the end of a long hall that was ceiled and floored and walled with black ebony, and was lit with a light that fell not from the sun or moon nor from any lamp. The hall was without doors or windows, and at the further extreme an oval mirror was framed in the wall. And standing there, I remembered nothing of all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth and of everything thereafter, were alike forgotten. And forgotten too was the name I had found among men, and the other names whereby the daughters of dream had known me; and memory was no older than my coming to that hall. But I wondered not, nor was I troubled thereby, and naught was strange to me: for the tide that had borne me to this threshold was the tide of Lethe.

Anon, though I knew not why, my feet were drawn adown the hall, and I approached the oval mirror. And in the mirror I beheld the haggard face that was mine, and the red mark on the cheek where one I loved had struck me in her anger, and the mark on the throat where her lips had kissed me in amorous devotion. And, seeing this, I remembered all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth and of everything thereafter, alike returned to me. And thus I recalled the name I had assumed beneath the terrene sun, and the names I had borne beneath the suns of sleep and of reverie. And I marvelled much, and was enormously troubled, and all things were most strange to me, and all things were as of yore

- Clark Ashton smith

[Anonymous No.18216459]

>>18208641
The most based thread on /lit/ right now

[Anonymous No.18216474]

>>18212118
damn, might have to read the gassman now

[Anonymous No.18216552]

>>18216147
very cool

[Anonymous No.18216570]

>>18216321
I didn't realize there was this much artsy fantasy. I only knew of tolkien or miyazaki. thanks for the recs

[Anonymous No.18216724]

The Fingalian army from Scotland spies on the King of Scandinavia and his son.

Full, and slow, the moon rose over the waves: In grey armour came the chief of the brave-
DuMacRoin from woody Croma- Master hunter of Tawny boars.
The man's delight was the dark brown skiff Bounding high on the ocean of ships,
When Crom-hormod awakened the woods.
In the land of fraud and foes, No fear was in Dur's soul.
"Son of Cu-hal, shall I stretch my step Through the night? Over the shield of sounds,
Shall I look on our foemen all In silence, under the shade of night, Round
Lochlin's ruthless, churlish king, And Strong Swaran, fierce foe to strangers,
Together pouring forth their rhymes To Odin's stone of specters cold?
And not in vain are their slow words To Lodin of the mighty Galls. But if, O Chief, Mac-Roin'
shall not return, His womanly wife walks all alone, At the meeting of rough mountain streams,
Which downward fall from Crua-lin. On either side are peak and cairn, Green woods,
high pointed rock, and ocean's roar. The eye of my son is on birds of the waves,
In youth he, thoughtless, wanders mid the knolls....

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18216746]

>>18216570
A lot of the guys in the weird fiction crowd have high quality ornate prose and a ton of the pre-Tolkien fantasy is basically just continuing folk tales usually with heavy influence from the King James Bible, along with various mythology. Imo fantastical pieces lend themselves to beautiful prose much easier than more Mundane stories.

[Anonymous No.18216767]

>>18216030
>devoid of any beauty

worst take I've ever seen on this board

[Anonymous No.18216773]

>>18216724
btw this is from Cath-Loduinn Line 55 on.

[Anonymous No.18216947]

Can anyone here post a list of all the books mentioned in this thread?

[Anonymous No.18217593]

>>18208641
They managed to piss everybody off. Everybody, simultaneously. And like a frenzied, uninterrupted, intense scatological boiling tornado with faggot nigger magnets for hemorrhoids, it just continued to gather monster retard strength. Day after day, week after week, month after month, it just did not want to quit. When the gargoyle spics, stink beetles, fancy chimps, ghetto-dwellers, secular mudslimes, sharia derka derkas, bible-trash, liberal kikes, kapo-kikes, straightly queer protestants, nigger-jews, tomahawk niggers, atheist basement virgins, handicapped lesbians, neckbearded dykes, ching-chong ladyboys, gook half-breeds, transsexual retirees, stoner garbage gnomes and Constitutionalist sex offenders started marching together, I knew it wouldn’t be very long before the curtain went up.

[Anonymous No.18217818]

>>18216746
sounds cool. I really love nature so aesthetically fantasy has a ton of potential

[Fish in a barrel No.18217850]

>>18208641

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18217888]

>>18217818
Dunsany really wins here. Here’s a random example.

“But he, repeating the oath that he had sworn, set out, looking often backwards until the slope became to step and his face was set to the rock. It was in the morning that he started, and he climbed all the day with little rest, where every foot-hole was smooth with many feet. Before he reached the top the sun disappeared from him, and darker and darker grew the Inner Lands. Then he pushed on so as to see before dark whatever thing Poltarnees had to show. The dusk was deep over the Inner Lands, and the lights of cities twinkled through the sea-mist when he came to Poltarnees’s sum- mit, and the sun before him was not yet gone from the sky.
And there below him was the old wrinkled Sea, smiling and murmuring song. And he nursed little ships with gleaming sails, and in his hands were old regretted wrecks, and mast all studded over with golden nails that he had rent in anger out of beautiful galleons. And the glory of the sun was among the surges as they brought driftwood out of isles of spice, tossing their golden heads. And the grey currents crept away to the south like companion-
less serpents that love something afar with a restless, deadly love. And the whole plain of water glittering with late sunlight, and the surges and the currents and the white sails of ships were all togeth- er like the face of a strange new god that has looked at a man for the first time in the eyes at the moment of his death; and Athelvok, looking on the wonderful Sea, knew why it was that the dead never return, for there is something that the dead feel and know, and the living would never understand even though the dead should come and speak to them about it. And there was the Sea smiling at him, glad with the glory of the sun. And there was a haven there for homing ships, and a sunlit city stood upon its marge, and people walked about the streets of it clad in the unimagined merchandise of far sea-bordering lands.
An easy slope of loose rock went from the top of Poltarnees to the shore of the Sea.

For a long while Athelvok stood there regretfully, knowing that there had come something into his soul that no one in the Inner Lands could understand, where the thoughts of their minds had gone no farther than the three little kingdoms. Then, looking long upon the wandering ships, and the marvelous merchandise from alien lands, and the unknown colour that wreathed the brows of the Sea, he turned his face to the darkness and the Inner Lands.
At that moment the Sea sang a dirge at sunset for all the harm that he had done in anger and all the ruin wrought on adventurous ships; and there were tears in the voice of the tyrannous Sea,”

[Anonymous No.18218027]

>>18216030
The dude would embarrass your favourite writer if it comes to elegant prose. A lot of the passages posted itt have no ruggedness to them unless you are a filthy ESL.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18218044]

The litany of seven kisses by clark Ashton smith (prose poem)

I

I kiss thy hands—thy hands, whose fingers are delicate and pale as the petals of the white lotus.

II

I kiss thy hair, which has the lustre of black jewels, and is darker than Lethe, flowering by midnight through the moonless slumber of poppy-scented lands.

III

I kiss thy brow, which resembles the rising moon in a valley of cedars.

IV

I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster.

V

I kiss thine eyelids, and liken them to the purple-veined flowers that close beneath the oppression of a tropic evening, in a land where the sunsets are bright as the flames of burning amber.

VI

I kiss thy throat, whose ardent pallor is the pallor of marble warmed by the autumn sun.

VII

I kiss thy mouth, which has the savour and perfume of fruits agleam with spray from a magic fountain, in the secret Paradise that we alone shall find; a Paradise whence they that come shall nevermore depart, for the waters thereof are Lethe, and the fruit is the fruit of the tree of Life.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18218055]

>>18218027
How do you feel about the stuff I’ve posted?

[Anonymous No.18218079]

Goddamit this tripfag ticks me off. I want to break his fucking neck

[Anonymous No.18218531]

>>18208641

[Anonymous No.18218596]

>>18218055
I like Dunsany but the Lovecraft gang annoys me to no end. Nothing wrong with the passages you posted but the stories that I have read by Smith have had some of the most badly ornate prose.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18218999]

>>18218596
Badly in what sense? I think his ornate prose is nice when it fits the context of his stories, like in The Coming of the White Worm.

But desu, I like purple overwritten stuff, so maybe that’s a problem.

[Anonymous No.18219280]

>>18216767
>>18218027
'Muricans seething
Develop some fucking taste

[Anonymous No.18219405]

>>18219280
ESL cope

[Anonymous No.18219412]

>>18218999
He is channelling the older antiquarian style almost 1 to 1. Dunsany does it too but his way of writing has enough idiosyncrasies to sound like his own. Smith's prose is more affected and I don't like it, though I claim no authority on him and his books.

[Anonymous No.18219431]

This single sentence makes McCarthy's entire output redundant and irrelevant.

He didn't remember whether it was that winter and then spring and then summer that overtook and passed them on the road, or whether they overtook and passed in slow succession the seasons as they descended, or whether it was the descent itself that did it, and they not progressing parallel in time but descending perpendicularly through temperature and climate—a (you couldn't call it a period because as he remembered it or as he told Grandfather he did, it didn't have either a definite beginning or a definite ending. Maybe attenuation is better)—an attenuation from a kind of furious inertness and patient immobility, while they sat in the cart outside the doors of doggeries and taverns and waited for the father to drink himself insensible, to a sort of dreamy and destinationless locomotion after they had got the old man out of whatever shed or outhouse or barn or ditch and loaded him into the cart again, and during which they did not seem to progress at all but just to hang suspended while the earth itself altered, flattened and broadened out of the mountain cove where they had all been born, mounting, rising about them like a tide in which the strange harsh rough faces about the doggery doors into which the old man was just entering or was just being carried or thrown out (and this one time by a huge bull of a nigger, the first black man, slave, they had ever seen, who emerged with the old man over his shoulder like a sack of meal and his—the nigger's—mouth loud with laughing and full of teeth like tombstones) swam up and vanished and were replaced; the earth, the world, rising about them and flowing past as if the cart moved on a treadmill.

[Anonymous No.18219435]

test

[Anonymous No.18219453]

Heh, I was going to reply with a paragraph from Blood Meridian before I even opened the OP

[Anonymous No.18219491]

>>18219453
One of the ones I had in mind

[Anonymous No.18219526]

>>18214423
I picked up early on in high school that a lot of people are drawn to outward aesthetics whereas I was wholly consumed by inner contemplation. It was most readily apparent in the poetry of my peers. We were all shit poets of precisely the right age--16-20 is the perfect age for writing terrible poetry. We met once a week and maybe one or two of us had a genuine interest in it but it was more of a casual social event than a serious workshop.

Of course each of us in turn would become inspired and one week produce something of above average effort. As you would expect, we were at our worst when we were striving for greatness. I, of course, was no exception and arguably the worst of the whole lot. Nevertheless a sample size of 300+ adolescent poems over the course of a year helped me identify a curious focus on aesthetics that my own pieces lacked.

One friend in particular wrote almost exclusively a series of flashing images with no linkage or connection. The touch of grass, waterfalls, temperature descriptions: all very dreamlike descriptions of a painting. The silliest thing is that he would argue for their coherence. That somehow his chaotic filmstrip of still life still frames would animate into perfectly conveying a singular emotion or passion if only the operator could guess the rate at which the film should be fed into the mind 's projector. Suffice to say, I never felt a damn thing from any of his pieces. Among the aesthetically absorbed he was king, but to me he was the primary source of my revelation.

I'm older now, but my taste has not changed much. I bounce off of lyrical and visual obsessed prose like oil and water. I'm obsessed with time and change like my aesthetic driven peers were obsessed with image and impact. I exclusively enjoy works with a heavy philosophical focus. The depth of analysis does not matter. I read to resonate with a facsimile of truth, the magnitude or complexity of the truth explored has little importance.

[Anonymous No.18219579]

>>18219431
This shits on anything Faulkner ever wrote.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

[Anonymous No.18219604]

>>18208641
Jakub hid under the bed and the Jacobin militia raped his mother. All the could remember was his mothers last words to him, “Your father will be home in Thermador.” It's the end of Floreal now, it seems that it maybe forever until he’s back.

[Anonymous No.18219618]

>>18218531
source?

[Anonymous No.18219648]

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, a certain initial
girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lo-
lita 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 mis-
informed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

[Anonymous No.18219883]

>>18208921
This, is seriously, bad writing. Jesus, christ.

[Anonymous No.18219897]

>>18209159
>look at how dostoevsky set up
You just did the same thing he did. You hate him because he reminds you of you.

[Anonymous No.18219920]

>>18211846
Patrician.

"I have come to the conclusion that God is not only a sport and a gentleman, He is also a Kentuckian."

[Anonymous No.18219960]

>>18219618
You'll literally never guess.

[Anonymous No.18219994]

We came by a 930 Turbo Porsche near the Talladega exit. He was going about ninety when we passed him, and he gave us a little bit of a run, passed us at about 110, and then we passed him again. He was as game as anybody we came across and was hanging right on our tail at 120. Ah, but then — then we just walked away from him. Five seconds and he was nothing but a bathtub-shaped dot in the mirrors. I suppose he could have kept up, but driving one of those ass-engined Nazi slot cars must be a task at around 225 percent of the speed limit. But not for us. I’ve got more vibration here on my electric typewriter than we had blasting into Birmingham that beautiful morning in that beautiful tour across this wonderful country from the towers of Manhattan to the bluffs of Topanga Canyon so fast we filled the appointment logs of optometrists’ offices in thirty cities just from people getting their eyes checked for seeing streaks because they watched us go by.

— P.J.O'Rourke, 'Ferrari Refutes the Decline of the West' (from 'Republican Party Reptile')

[Anonymous No.18219995]

>>18219491
Has he ever written a single bad run on sentence? Wish he kept them instead of opting for minimalism.

[Anonymous No.18220415]

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else. They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up. See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns. Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.

[Anonymous No.18220426]

>>18215697
you are such a woman.

[Anonymous No.18220434]

King Karna-Vootra sitting on his throne commanding all things said: "I very clearly saw last night the queenly Vava-Nyria. Though partly she was hidden by great clouds that swept continually by her, rolling over and over, yet her face was unhidden and shone, being full of moonlight.

"I said to her:

"'Walk with me by the great pools in many-gardened, beautiful Istrakhan where the lilies float that give delectable dreams; or, drawing aside the curtain of hanging orchids, pass with me thence from the pools by a secret path through the else impassable jungle that fills the only way between the mountains that shut in Istrakhan. They shut it in and look on it with joy at morning and at evening when the pools are strange with light, till in their gladness sometimes there melts the deadly snow that kills upon lonely heights the mountaineer. They have valleys among them older than the wrinkles in the moon.

"'Come with me thence or linger with me there and either we shall come to romantic lands which the men of the caravans only speak of in song; or else we shall listlessly walk in a land so lovely that even the butterflies that float about it when they see their images flash in the sacred pools are terrified by their beauty, and each night we shall hear the myriad nightingales all in one chorus sing the stars to death. Do this and I will send heralds far from here with tidings of thy beauty; and they shall run and come to Séndara and men shall know it there who herd brown sheep; and from Séndara the rumour shall spread on, down either bank of the holy river of Zoth, till the people that make wattles in the plains shall hear of it and sing; but the heralds shall go northward along the hills until they come to Sooma. And in that golden city they shall tell the kings, that sit in their lofty alabaster house, of thy strange and sudden smiles. And often in distant markets shall thy story be told by merchants out from Sooma as they sit telling careless tales to lure men to their wares.

"'And the heralds passing thence shall come even to Ingra, to Ingra where they dance. And there they shall tell of thee, so that thy name long hence shall be sung in that joyous city. And there they shall borrow camels and pass over the sands and go by desert ways to distant Nirid to tell of thee to the lonely men in the mountain monasteries.

"'Come with me even now for it is Spring.'"

"And as I said this she faintly yet perceptibly shook her head. And it was only then I remembered my youth was gone, and she dead forty years."

[Anonymous No.18220538]

>>18215983
Great taste

[Anonymous No.18220726]

I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house—from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me,—a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-door, and went in.

[Anonymous No.18220728]

Freedom — that consuming goal above doubt or criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter winters! Freedom, that land where rogues, at every corner, cozen with lies and promises the plucky sheep who judged it time to sack the shepherd! Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will do so upon the instant, for who would wish to be cast into the fiery furnace of his neighbours’ contempt? I will come to you as a male spider to the female, as the explorer to the upper reaches of the great river upon which he knows he will die before ever he reaches the estuary. How should I dare refuse your beckoning, queen whose discarded lovers vanish by night, princess whose unsuccessful suitors die at sunset? Would to God we had never encountered you, goddess of thrombosis, insomnia, asthma, duodenal and migraine! For we are free — free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we long to be and, once there, to conclude that it is not, after all, the right place. For a great price obtained I this freedom, to wish to God I had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when I sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. The tyrant wasn’t such a bad old bugger, and even in his arbitrary rages never killed as many as died in yesterday’s glorious battle for liberty. Will you return to him, then? Ah no, sweet Freedom, I will slave for you until I have forgotten the love that once consumed my being, until I am old and bitter and can no longer see the wood for the starved, dirty trees. Then I will curse you and die; and will you then concede that I may be accounted your loyal follower and a true creature of this Earth? And, Freedom, was I free?

[Anonymous No.18220739]

The old man stopped and turned. Andy stopped. The deep-brown eyes looked at Andy and the thin corded lips moved. What happened then Andy was never able either to explain or to forget. For the eyes spread out until there was no Chinaman. And then it was one eye—one huge brown eye as big as a church door. Andy looked through the shiny transparent brown door and through it he saw a lonely countryside, flat for miles but ending against a row of fantastic mountains shaped like cows’ and dogs’ heads and tents and mushrooms. There was low coarse grass on the plain and here and there a little mound. And a small animal like a woodchuck sat on each mound. And the loneliness—the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape made Andy whimper because there wasn’t anybody at all in the world and he was left. Andy shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see it any more and when he opened them, he was in Cannery Row and the old Chinaman was just flap-flapping between Western Biological and the Hediondo Cannery. Andy was the only boy who ever did that and he never did it again.

[Anonymous No.18220740]

>>18220726
Where is that from? It sounds incredibly obtuse. In fact I'm confident in saying that whoever wrote this is an incredible fucking idiot.

[Anonymous No.18220756]

An actual good thread on /lit/?

[Anonymous No.18220880]

>>18208976
>>18212118
My favorites so far.

[Anonymous No.18220894]

>>18212118
That's a hell of a sentence and it doesn't even feel bad to read, pretty great.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18221395]

Half leaning on me, she led me from the precincts of Bretton Hall. We walked in silence over the waste that crowns the valley of the Whitelands and, being near the verge of the rocks, saw the great pinewood sloping downwards, lighted near us by the moon, but soon lost in density. Along the mysterious line where the light changed into gloom, intricate shadows of withered summer bracken struck and receded in a mimic battle. Before us lay the Priests’ Cliff. The moon was veiled by a grove of elms, whose ever-swaying branches alternately increased and lessened her brightness. This was a place of notoriety—a veritable Golgotha—a haunt fit only for demons. Murder and theft had been punished here; and to this day fireside stories are told of evil women dancing round that Druids’ circle, carrying hearts plucked from gibbeted bodies.

“Rose,” I whispered, ‘why have you brought me here?’
She made no reply, but pressed her head more closely to my shoulder. Scarce had my lips closed ere a sound like the hiss of a half-strangled snake vibrated amongst the trees. It grew louder and louder. A monstrous shadow hovered above.
Rose from my bosom murmured. ‘Love is strong as Death! Love is strong as Death!’
I locked her in my arms, so tightly that she grew breathless. ‘Hold me,’ she panted. ‘You are strong.’
A cold hand touched our foreheads so that, benumbed, we sank together to the ground, to fall instantly into a dreamless slumber.
When I awoke the clear grey light of the early morning had spread over the country. Beyond the Hell Garden the sun was just bursting through the clouds, and had already spread a long golden haze along the horizon. The babbling of the streamlet that runs down to Halkton was so distinct that it seemed almost at my side. How sweetly the wild thyme smelt! Filled with the tender recollections of the night, without turning, I called Rose Pascal from her sleep.
‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, waken! waken! waken! See how glad the world looks—see the omens of a happy future.’
No answer came. I sat up, and looking round me saw that I was alone. A square stone lay near. When the sun was high I crept to read the inscription carved thereon:—‘Here, at four cross-paths, lieth, with a stake through the bosom, the body of Rose Pascal, who in her sixteenth year wilfully cast away the life God gave.

- murray Gilchrist

[Anonymous No.18221437]

GR

[Anonymous No.18222038]

>>18219431
You just like it because he uses the word "nigger"

[Anonymous No.18222124]

>>18208886
this guy really doesn't like using commas does he? and this happened and then she looked and his heart raced under his shirt and she did this and he did that and it was good and then another thing

[Anonymous No.18222306]

>>18222124
Yeah the ands can be annoying at first but you learn to appreciate them.

[Anonymous No.18222341]

>>18222124
He is hardly the first one to not do it. See any stream of consciousness literature

[Anonymous No.18222372]

>>18222038
Not the only reason but yes. It's a much better usage of the nigger word than anything in Blood Meridian. McCarthy thinks the more times he writes nigger the more literary his work becomes. It's funny sometimes but not good writing.

[Anonymous No.18222495]

>>18222372
Can't tell if this is bait

[Anonymous No.18222694]

>>18222372
>>18222038
This is the most literary use of the word.

[Anonymous No.18222861]

>>18219960
>meandering complaints about social problems in vienna
give me a hint: how many testicles is he commonly suspected of having had