/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20827339]

What are some passages from books you've read that stuck with you?

[Anonymous No.20827362]

"In women, mental virginity is lost much earlier than biological virginity. The first one is more important" - From Lichtenberg's Waste Books

[Anonymous No.20827390]

"99% of the world's problems would be solved if females walked through life with their bodycount on their foreheads" - Sir Andrew Tate

[Anonymous No.20827415]

"Don't ye love sperm?" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick

[Anonymous No.20827429]

"this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down...and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul."
-Melville on Hawthorne

[Anonymous No.20827439]

>also harry potter, there are too many to list

This guy has mastered the art of the subtle troll.

[Anonymous No.20827502]

>Also, I am intrigued by the quote from the Gunslinger, I have never heard of it or the quote but the same quote has been given many times in these comments.*

*[Modern scholars believe something may be missing from these lines, and that the meaning may be corrupted.]

[Anonymous No.20827523]

>>20827339
It speaks to me more than any other word ever have before.

[Anonymous No.20827527]

"My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves." -Sartre in Nausea

[Anonymous No.20827564]

>>20827339
Some of favorite uncle Evola quotes

"today we find ourselves at the end
of a cycle. Already for centuries, at first
insensibly, then with the momentum of a
landslide, multiple processes have destroyed
every normal and legitimate human order in
the West and falsified every higher conception
of living, acting, knowing, and fighting. And
the momentum of this fall, its velocity, its
giddiness, has been called ‘progress’. And we
have raised hymns to ‘progress’ and deluded
ourselves that this civilisation — a civilisation
of matter and machines — was civilisation par
excellence, the one for which the entire history
of the world was preordained: until the final
consequences of this entire process has been
such as to cause some people at least to wake
up" - Orientations.

[Anonymous No.20827566]

"the fault lies not with the mob, who demands nonsense, but with those who don't know how to produce anything else"

[Anonymous No.20827572]

>>20827564
"But to avoid straying too far from my argument, the point is that the
most acute forms of the modern existential crisis are appearing today at
the margin of a civilization of prosperity, as witness the currents in the
new generation that have been described. One sees there rebellion, disgust, and anger manifesting not in a wretched and oppressed subproletariat but often in young people who lack nothing, even in millionaires’
children. And among other things it is a significant fact, statistically
proven, that suicide is much rarer in poor countries than in rich ones,
showing that the problematic life is felt more in the latter than in the
former. Blank despair can occur right up to the finishing-post of socioeconomic messianism, as'in the musical comedy about a utopian island
where they have everything, “fun, women, and whiskey,” but also the
ever-recurrent sense of the emptiness of existence, the sense that something is still missing.
There exists, therefore, no correlation, except possibly a negative
one, between the meaning of life and conditions of economic wellbeing. There is a famous example, not recent but from the traditional
world, of the Buddha Shakyamuni. He who on a metaphysical plane
radically denounced the emptiness of existence and the deceptions of
the “god of life,” pointing out the way of spiritual awakening, was not
a victim of oppression and hunger, not a representative of social strata
like the plebeians of the Roman empire, to whom the revolutionary
sermons of Christianity were first addressed; no, he was of the race
of princes, in all the splendor of his power and all the fullness of his
youth. The true significance of the socioeconomic myth, in any of its
forms, is as a means of internal anesthetization or prophylaxis, aimed
at evading the problem of an existence robbed of any meaning and at
consolidating in every way the fundamental insignificance of modern
man’s life...

[Anonymous No.20827578]

>>20827572
We may therefore speak either of an opiate that is much more
real than that which, according to the Marxists, was fed to a humanity as yet unillumined and unevolved, mystified by religious beliefs, or,
from another point of view, of the organized method of an active nihilism. The prospects in a goodly part of today’s world are more or less
those that Zarathustra attributed to the “last man”: “The time is near
of the most despicable of men, who can no longer despise himself,” the
last man “of the tenacious and pullulating race.” “We have invented
happiness, say the last men with a wink,” having “abandoned the lands
where life is hard.”...

[Anonymous No.20827584]

>>20827578
In this context, there is another more recent phenomenon that is
heavy with significance: that of the so-called global protest movement.
It took its rise in part from the order of ideas already mentioned. In
the wake of theories such as Marcuse’s, it came to the conclusion that
there is a basic similarity, in terms of technological consumer society,
between the system of advanced communist countries and that of the
capitalist world, because in the former, the original impulse of the proletarian revolution is much diminished. This impulse has now been
realized, inasmuch as the working class has entered the consumer system, being assured of a lifestyle that is no longer proletarian but bourgeois: the very thing whose absence was the incentive for revolution.
But alongside this convergence there has become visible the conditioning power of one and the same “system,” manifesting as the tendency
to destroy all the higher values of life and personality. At the level more
or less corresponding to the “last man” foreseen by Nietzsche, the individual in contemporary consumer society reckons that it would be too
expensive, indeed absurd, to do without the comfort and well-being
that this evolved society offers him, merely for the sake of an abstract
freedom. Thus he accepts with a good grace all the leveling conditionings of the system. This realization has caused a bypassing of revolutionary Marxism, now deprived of its original motive force, in favor of
a “global protest” against the system. This movement, however, also
lacks any higher principle: it is irrational, anarchic, and instinctive in
character. For want of anything else, it calls on the abject minorities of
outsiders, on the excluded and rejected, sometimes even on the Third
World (in which case Marxist fantasies reappear) and on the blacks, as
being the only revolutionary potential. But it stands under the sign of
nothingness: it is a hysterical “revolution of the void and the ‘underground,’” of “maddened wasps trapped in a glass jar, who throw themselves frenetically against the walls.” In all of this it confirms in another
way the general nihilistic character of the epoch, and indeed on a much
larger scale, for the current protest is no longer that of the individuals
and small groups mentioned earlier, whose intellectual level was indubitably higher" - Ride the Tiger

[Anonymous No.20827586]

proust being god tier:

“For existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world emerges from the twilight of dream and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them except in our dreams”

[Anonymous No.20827602]

>>20827584
Least Evola opinion.

[Anonymous No.20827606]

>>20827584
Least based Evola opinion

[Anonymous No.20827625]

>>20827606
Who the fuck is Evola?

[Anonymous No.20827626]

>>20827625
This guy

[Anonymous No.20827629]

>>20827625
he created the evola virus

[Anonymous No.20827632]

>>20827339
master's rant about the university from stoner

[Anonymous No.20827641]

>>20827339
>What is the Way?
>the normal mind is the Way.

>is the flag moving?
>or is the wind moving?
>neither, your mind is moving

[Anonymous No.20827733]

bump

[Anonymous No.20827736]

>>20827572
>>20827578
>>20827584
Boring loser

[Anonymous No.20828123]

>>20827632
post it

[Anonymous No.20828132]

>>20827439
No my good man, he's a redditor. Surprised he didn't mention Douglas Adams, Pratchett, and Gaiman.

[Anonymous No.20828145]

>>20827523
Nietzsche tried so hard to be profound in that book lol

[Anonymous No.20828149]

>>20827339
"Men who are cowards will never sleep with beautiful women."

[Anonymous No.20828158]

>>20828149
thats at the least highly debatable and almost certainly not true.

[Anonymous No.20828215]

>>20828123
>>20827632

[Anonymous No.20830393]

>>20827339
The more she drank

[Anonymous No.20830451]

>>20827339
"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents."
East of Eden, John Steinbeck. Introducing the character of Cathy. Chilling.

[Anonymous No.20830501]

>>20827339
This.

Also: "if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." When I first read this as a teenager, I had to put the book down for a moment.

[Anonymous No.20830531]

>>20828215
wow nice
stoner is now on my to read list
thanks

[Anonymous No.20830554]

>>20827339
Felix placed the surface of his face screen against Bolov’s.
“You know what to do?” he asked in a cold, distant, tone.
Bolov cursed him deliberately, soundlessly and Felix knew that he would do it. He nodded, almost to himself. He judged the distance to the hole, tensed his muscles. Bolov’s voice stopped him cold.
“You, Felix,” said Bolov calmly, hopelessly, “are a filthy human being.” Felix saw the lips working, saw the tongue accentuate each syllable, and felt a weight upon him growing and growing.
But the Engine only nodded in agreement. And then it rolled over, holding Bolov with both hands, and flung him into the hive.

[Anonymous No.20830556]

>>20827606
>existentialist apartments
I hate it when my apartment smokes weed and reads Camus and realizes existence precedes essence and decides it's going to make its own choices from now on and then decides it's actually a luxury apartment and my rent goes up and I have to find a new apartment but the only apartments in town are perennialists housing migrant families.

[Anonymous No.20830591]

>>20830501
please goback to rebbit

[Anonymous No.20830599]

>"There are outrages and there are outrages, and some are more outrageous than others.
>Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.
>The death of Socrates had no effect upon the history of Athens. If anything, the reputation of the city has been improved by it.
>The death of no person is as important to the future as the literature about it.
>You will learn nothing from history that can be applied, so don’t kid yourself into thinking you can.
>“History is bunk,” said Henry Ford.
>But Socrates was dead.
>Plato does not report that he wept that day.
>He would have been only twelve at the time of his Symposium and therefore was not present to hear those affecting encomiums of Alcibiades to Socrates which he so eloquently represents.
>Death by hemlock is not as peaceful and painless as he portrays: there is retching, slurring of speech, convulsions, and uncontrollable vomiting.
>The Rembrandt painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer may not be by Rembrandt but by a pupil so divinely gifted in learning the lessons of his master that he never was able to accomplish anything more and whose name, as a consequence, has been lost in obscurity. The bust of Homer that Aristotle is shown contemplating is not of Homer. The man is not Aristotle."
—Joseph Heller, Picture This (1988)

[Anonymous No.20830626]

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

[Anonymous No.20830631]

>>20827339

[Anonymous No.20830665]

Here, have some of the finest writing on the 20th century from Pynchon

[Anonymous No.20831010]

>He never read a book but often thought about God; it was unavoidable, a matter of simplicity and awe. The starry sky, the soughing of the forest, the solitude, the big snow, the majesty of the earth and what was above the earth filled him with a deep devoutness many times a day.
I need to read more Hamsun.

[Anonymous No.20831019]

>>20828149
What's that guy from Vagabond callled? Matahachi right? He is a coward and he fucked lot of beautiful bitches

[Anonymous No.20831026]

Is Portrait of Dorian Gray that midwit-core?

[Anonymous No.20831078]

>>20827632
>>20828215
I felt like I wasted my time reading that. Did you think that was smart? Dropped from my reading list

[Anonymous No.20831265]

>>20831078
not everyone likes things just because they think they're smart

[Anonymous No.20831271]

>>20831026
I like Wilde a lot but he wasn't very profound.

[Anonymous No.20831330]

>>20827339

[Anonymous No.20831583]

>>20831026
>>20831271
Wilde is a true artist, straddling the low and the high. Normies will look at his work and find quotable Twitter tier wit and showcase Wildean passages that sound subversive or insightful at first but fall flat once you recognise that it is actually just fairly surface level dinner party showboating and observational humour in book form. I found while reading Dorian that Wilde's prose and drama is underrated and his wit overrated. Probably comfortably midwit in the end but of a certain niche that you can appreciate because he didn't aim for profound and miss, he aimed squarely for midwit and shamelessly decorated it with beauty and humour and actually quite daring politics.

[Anonymous No.20831594]

>>20827625
He wrote "Eye of the Tiger". Good song.

[Anonymous No.20832297]

>>20827339
I'm not really sure if I'm a Christian any more but these lines from St. John Climacus still really stick with me:
As in everything else, we propose to philosophize against ourselves.
[speaking of faith, hope, and love] The first can make and create all things; the divine mercy surrounds the second and makes it immune to disappointment; the third does not fall, does not stop in its course, and allows no respite to him who is wounded by its blessed madness.
Purity Makes its disciple a theologian, who of himself grasps the dogmas of the holy Trinity.
Love is the progress of eternity.

[Anonymous No.20832318]

>>20827502
>The man in black fled across the ocean. And the gunslinger followed

[Anonymous No.20832901]

>>20827586
Beautiful

[Anonymous No.20832930]

>>20827339
“The direction of this new force, liberated by the love, vanity, and inspiration of a sharp little shop assistant, was through the spirit of the times to a personal power that were content to wish as large as possible, without any limitation or detailed idea. This spirit, since it was the Age of Reason, was love of Mystery. For it cannot be disguised that the prime effect of knowledge of the universe in which we are shipwrecked is a feeling of despair and disgust, often developing into an energetic desire to escape reality altogether. The age of Voltaire is also the age of fairy tales; the vast Cabinet de Fèes, some volumes of which Marie Antoinette took into her cell to console her, it is said, stood alongside the Encyclopèdie ... This impression of disgust, and this impulse to escape were naturally very strong in the eighteenth century, which had come to a singularly lucid view of the truth of the laws that govern our existence, the nature of mankind, its passions and instincts, its societies, customs, and possibilities, its scope and cosmical setting and the probable length and breadth of its destinies. This escape, since from Truth, can only be into Illusion, the sublime comfort and refuge of that pragmatic fiction we have already praised. There is the usual human poverty of all its possible varieties ... there are all the drugs, from subtle, all conquering opium to cheating, cozening cocaine. There is religion, of course, and music, and gambling; these are the major euphorias. But the queerest and oldest is the sidepath of Magic... At its deepest, this Magic is concerned with the creative powers of the will; at lowest it is but a barbarous rationalism, the first of all our attempts to force the heavens to be reasonable.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

[Anonymous No.20833305]

>>20827586
Wow this restored my belief that profundity in fiction isn’t futile pontification

[Anonymous No.20833340]

>>20827339
"Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten. For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come, and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be nothing, for ever."

[Anonymous No.20834675]

>>20831330
book name?

[Anonymous No.20835292]

>Well, Scholar, having now taught you to paint your rod, and we having still a mile to Tottenham High-Cross, I will, as we walk towards it in the cool shade of this sweet honeysuckle hedge, mention to you some of the thoughts and joys that have possessed my soul since we two met together. And that our present happiness may appear to be the greater, and we the more thankful for it, I will beg you to consider with me how many do, even at this very time, lie under the torment of the stone, the gout, and tooth-ache; and this we are free from. And every misery that I miss is a new mercy; and therefore let us be thankful. There have been, since we met, others that have met disasters or broken limbs; some have been blasted, others thunder-strucken: and we have been freed from these, and all those many other miseries that threaten human nature; let us therefore rejoice and be thankful. Nay, which is a far greater mercy, we are free from the insupportable burthen of an accusing tormenting conscience; a misery that none can bear: and therefore let us praise Him for His preventing grace, and say, Every misery that I miss is a new mercy. Nay, let me tell you, there be many that have forty times our estates, that would give the greatest part of it to be healthful and cheerful like us, who, with the expense of a little money, have eat and drunk, and laughed, and angled, and sung, and slept securely; and rose next day and cast away care, and sung, and laughed, and angled again; which are blessings rich men cannot purchase with all their money. Let me tell you, Scholar, I have a rich neighbour that is always so busy that he has no leisure to laugh; the whole business of his life is to get money, and more money, that he may still get more and more money; he is still drudging on, and says, that Solomon says "The diligent hand maketh rich"; and it is true indeed: but he considers not that it is not in the power of riches to make a man happy; for it was wisely said, by a man of great observation, "that there be as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them ". And yet God deliver us from pinching poverty; and grant, that having a competency, we may be content and thankful. Let not us repine, or so much as think the gifts of God unequally dealt, if we see another abound with riches; when, as God knows, the cares that are the keys that keep those riches hang often so heavily at the rich man's girdle, that they clog him with weary days and restless nights, even when others sleep quietly. We see but the outside of the rich man's happiness: few consider him to be like the silk-worm, that, when she seems to play, is, at the very same time, spinning her own bowels, and consuming herself; and this many rich men do, loading themselves with corroding cares, to keep what they have, probably, unconscionably got. Let us, therefore, be thankful for health and a competence; and above all, for a quiet conscience.

[Anonymous No.20835592]

He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill 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.

[Anonymous No.20835758]

>>20834675
Moscow-Pietushki, Moscow to the end of the line, in some translations.

[Anonymous No.20835832]

>>20830531
stoner is a fav, enjoy:))

[Anonymous No.20835855]

>Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

[Anonymous No.20836128]

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
-Henry David Thoreau

There's also a very short chapter in Les Miserables about a man drowning which is one of the finest things I have ever read: http://mrbodell24601.weebly.com/uploads/3/9/1/4/39144303/les_mis_chapter_8.pdf

[Anonymous No.20836159]

>>20836128
as something of the obverse (as opposed to the inverse) to Thoreau, I present Richard Watson, in a letter to Edward Gibbon:
>And in truth, in all countries where Paganism has been the established religion, though a philosopher may now and then have stepped beyond the paltry prescript of civil jurisprudence, in his pursuit of virtue; yet the bulk of mankind have ever been contented with that scanty pittance of morality, which enabled them to escape the lash of civil punishment: I call it a scanty pittance; because a man may be intemperate, iniquitous, impious, a thousand ways profligate and a villain, and yet elude the cognizance, and avoid the punishment of civil laws.

[Anonymous No.20836559]

Always adored this from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fills me with some feeling I can't really explain, euphoric and hopeful and kinda sad and nostalgic all at the same time:

>There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

>And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

>So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

[Anonymous No.20836624]

>>20836559
That last one is perfect.
I love that postmortem of paradise type of stuff.

[Anonymous No.20836650]

>>20828215
I recently read Bronte's The Professor and it reminded me of Stoner; a victorian kind of Stoner written by a woman in an attempt to draw out a realistic but in the end female-sounding male character. One of the last chapters has an interesting rant on England by one of the characters in it and I'd like to think it is in fact the best chapter in the book.

[Anonymous No.20837368]

I remember the speech but I never remember where it's from. Hopefully, if I save a screenshot as an image with all the words I normally search for, I will be able to keep it in my mind now.

[Anonymous No.20837428]

>>20827339
>Should the [you-know-who], with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago.
-- The Kampfy Chair

[Anonymous No.20838249]

>>20827606
lmao, imagine being this triggered
the absolute jackass

[Anonymous No.20838268]

>>20830631
Quote is false btw
But I won't post my ex pic to prove my point

[Anonymous No.20838522]

>>20830665
it's crazy that anyone could say IJ isn't aping this style. GR is obviously better, but sometimes the DFW ripping it off are so clear

[Anonymous No.20838565]

I have no idea why, but the below always stuck with me. I first read it at 13.

“But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life lacking all of that.
Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not.”

[Anonymous No.20838873]

>>20838565
Whatever it is that's watching, it's not human, unlike little dark eyed Donna. It doesn't ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbH4JOqmB28

[Anonymous No.20838908]

>>20827390
Lmao where/when did he said this

[Anonymous No.20838977]

“reddit / twitter screen Cap? Yes they should be banned from 4chan” Paradise Lost,

[Anonymous No.20839039]

>>20827339
You've finally understood! Kirillov cried out rapturously. So it can be understood, if even someone like you understands! You understand now that the whole salvation for everyone is to prove this thought to them all. Who will prove it? I! I don't understand how, up to now, an atheist could know there is no God and not kill himself at once. To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the same time that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king, and you will not kill yourself but live in the chiefest glory. But one, the one who is first, must necessarily kill himself, otherwise who will begin and prove it? It is I who will necessarily kill myself in order to begin and prove it. I am still God against my will, and I am unhappy, because it is mydutyto proclaim self-will. Everyone is unhappy, because everyone is afraid to proclaim self-will. That is why man has been so unhappy and poor up to now, because he was afraid to proclaim the chief point of self-will and was self-willed only on the margins, like a schoolboy. I am terribly unhappy, because I am terrible afraid. Fear is man's curse...But I will proclaim self-will, it is my duty to believe that I do not believe. I will begin, and end, and open the door. And save. Only this one thing will save all men and in the next generation transform them physically. for in the present physical aspect, so far as I have thought, it is in no way possible for man to be without the former God. For three years I have been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I have found it: the attribute of my divinity is--Self-will! That is all, by which I can show in the main point my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom. For it is very fearsome. I kill myself to show my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.

This was so good and turned me into someone who reads regularly

[Anonymous No.20839045]

>>20838908
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6WKjcsxQto