/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21931002]

What are some of the best opening phrases of all time?

[Anonymous No.21931010]

Once upon a time

[Anonymous No.21931023]

>>21931002
It's Call me Ishmael. That's the goat. No contest. Has been and will be a meme for far longer than Kazcynski's autistic screech about the evils of indoor plumbing.

[Anonymous No.21931026]

A screaming came across the sky, but everything following is shit.

[Anonymous No.21931066]

>>21931002
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

[Anonymous No.21931148]

>>21931023
riverrun

[Anonymous No.21931168]

>>21931002
See the child.

Followed by the GOAT opening page.

[Anonymous No.21931184]

>>21931002
We live in a period.

[Anonymous No.21931336]

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

[Anonymous No.21931350]

>>21931023
>Call me Ishmael
What is the best speculation on who he really was and what he was running from?

[Anonymous No.21931397]

"Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

[Anonymous No.21931484]

>>21931002
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs out of his hair.

[Anonymous No.21931534]

Happy Families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

[Anonymous No.21931538]

>>21931002
>This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

[Anonymous No.21931545]

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins"

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I like these, and also >>21931023 >>21931336

[Anonymous No.21931918]

>>21931002
I was walking down the stairs of the Imperial Palace of Constantinople, as one so often does, when from the corner of my eye I saw Christ Pantokrator, "burn the city," he commanded, "and throw the people upon spikes," and as he commanded so would I obey.

[Anonymous No.21932046]

>>21931002
>Money . . . ?

[Anonymous No.21932050]

ᴥ

[Anonymous No.21932064]

El día que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5.30 de la mañana para esperar el buque en que llegaba el obispo

[Anonymous No.21932513]

>>21931002
Only one enemy remained; two if you counted God.

[Anonymous No.21932530]

>>21931002
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.

[Anonymous No.21932650]

>>21931534
No man is an island entire of itself

[Anonymous No.21932678]

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Simple as

[Anonymous No.21932748]

>>21932678
citation needed

mr simple as, you vapid bimbo cunt

[Anonymous No.21932755]

>>21931397
kys

[Anonymous No.21932799]

>>21931002
Someone must have been spreading lies about Joseph K…

[Anonymous No.21932919]

>>21931397
It’s infuriating how unparalleled it is

[Anonymous No.21933279]

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. It's wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.

[Anonymous No.21933417]

>>21931002
>It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity

[Anonymous No.21934250]

"I don't know... why don't you ask God... Oh yeah he doesn't exist"

[Anonymous No.21934265]

>>21931918
What's this?

[Anonymous No.21934275]

I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

[Anonymous No.21934277]

>>21931002
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

[Anonymous No.21934278]

>>21934275
wanted to post this. at this point i know it by heart

[Anonymous No.21934295]

>>21931002
>For a period of several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski experienced intense sexual fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition. He arranged to meet with a psychiatrist, but changed his mind in the waiting room and did not disclose his reason for making the appointment. Afterwards, enraged, he considered killing the psychiatrist and other people whom he hated. Kaczynski described this episode as a "major turning point" in his life: "I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope."

[Anonymous No.21934341]

>>21931002
>“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Hell, the first chapter alone makes the reader want to read the whole book.
>“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that nearly reached down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed) – Gandalf came by. All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots. “Good Morning!” said Bilbo. And he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat."
It's a masterful use of language and also subtle intrigue. It doesn't tell you outright who Gandalf or Bilbo are, where are they, or what a hobbit is, yet the writing assumes you know all this and you want to keep reading to find out. It's mysterious and comfy all at once.

[Anonymous No.21934355]

>>21931002

[Anonymous No.21934363]

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that
is suicide."

[Anonymous No.21934395]

>>21934363
From which book is this?
From what I can search, it is Camus?
By the way, what should I read from Camus as someone who has already read some philosophical books

[Anonymous No.21934433]

>>21931350
>>21931023
While "Call me Ishmael." is a fantastic first sentence, it's one of the few instances where I actually prefer a translation. In the most common German translation it is "Nenn mich meinethalben Ishmael."
"Meinethalben" roughly translates to "as far as I'm concerned" or "if you care". I don't know why it is translated that way, as "meinethalben" really isn't needed at all here. It could just be translated as "Nenn mich Ishmael." But I like the layer of arbitrarity it adds without actually tinkering with the (apparent) intention of the original.

[Anonymous No.21934448]

>>21934295
Got MK Ultra'd pretty hard at Harvard

[Anonymous No.21934461]

>>21931002
the opening passage to the sound and the fury

[Anonymous No.21934617]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

[Anonymous No.21934670]

>>21931002
>the best opening phrases of all time

Christopher had his first menstruation when he was about fourteen; he was an 'early bloomer' as his Mother had said with some degree of pride, and the very next day he was taken to Doctor Shoemaker to be tried for tampons and to be fitted with special underpants.

[Anonymous No.21934889]

>>21934395
The Myth of Sisyphus

Haven't read that much of him but from what I know Sisyphus and The Stranger delve the most into absurdism, which is the main theme of his philosophy.

[Anonymous No.21934914]

The Stranger and Notes from Underground both have pretty great cold opens.
Homer's opening call to the Muses, of course.

[Anonymous No.21934933]

He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

[Anonymous No.21934949]

A screaming comes across the sky.

[Anonymous No.21935067]

>>21931002
Call me stately, plump Buck Mulligan screaming across the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

[Anonymous No.21935125]

>>21931002
>Today it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace.

[Anonymous No.21935131]

>>21934433
Well in the original it's not meant to be nuanced. It's supposed to be plainspoken.

[Anonymous No.21935134]

>>21935131
it seems to me the implication is that his name is not, in fact, Ishmael

[Anonymous No.21935143]

>>21935134
I dunno what to tell you. Why would he lie?

[Anonymous No.21935145]

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

[Anonymous No.21935153]

>>21935143
he felt that the name was fitting. aren't all of the Biblical names in the book carefully selected for their relevance to the characters?

[Anonymous No.21935159]

>>21935153
Not really, plenty are called dumb sailors names like flask and stubb

[Anonymous No.21935167]

>>21931002
LOOK AT THE PICTURE
SEE THE SKULL
(Francis E. Dec, only hope for a future)

[Anonymous No.21935168]

>>21935159
i specified the Biblical names for a reason you illiterate babybrain
yeah i obviously don't think "queequeg" means anything

[Anonymous No.21935180]

>>21935167
WOOK AT THE PICTUWE!!! See the skuww, the pawt of bone wemoved, the "mastew-wace" Fwankenstein wadio contwows, the Bwain-thoughts Bwoadcasting Wadio, the Eyesight Tewevision, the Fwankenstein Eawphone Wadio, the Thweshowd Bwainwash Wadio, the watest new skuww wefowming to contain AWW Fwankenstein Contwows, even in THIN skuwws of WHITE PEDIGWEE MAWES! Visibwe Fwankenstein contwows! The synthetic newve-wadio diwectionaw antennae woop! Make copies fow youwsewf! Thewe is NO ESCAPE fwom this wowst gangstew powice state, using AWW of the deadwy gangstew Fwankenstein contwows!

[Anonymous No.21935190]

”Who’s there?”

[Anonymous No.21935192]

>>21935168
Calm down Schneedlewütz, the use of biblical names is not very widespread in moby dick and nor does it especially fit anyone in particular. Even Ahab is a stretch. it being American and written during the great awakening everyone has dumb Yankee names like Enoch and Abel. One of the goals of the book is to capture sailors superstition, and including these contemporaneous religious signals is fair game.

But maybe Ishmael is being facetious why the fuck not.

[Anonymous No.21935205]

>>21935190
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

[Anonymous No.21935661]

>>21931002
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man.

[Anonymous No.21935671]

i live in a cia prison

[Anonymous No.21935737]

>Humanity... All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women.

[Anonymous No.21935981]

>>21935661
you left out the crucial part
>I think that my liver hurts.
he's just like me fr fr

[Anonymous No.21936393]

>>21931397
this one sucks

[Anonymous No.21936432]

>>21931397
Can you name anything more disgusting than arbitrary or selectively stylized translation?

[Anonymous No.21936587]

>>21931918

What's this from

[Anonymous No.21937112]

Do you guys think I'll be put on some list for buying pic related? Want to cop

[Anonymous No.21937161]

>>21937112
No, but I recommend Technological Slavery instead.

[Anonymous No.21937190]

>Oo-oo-oo-woo-woo-woo-hoo-oo! Look at me, look, I'm dying. The wind under
the archway howls at my departing, and I howl with it. I'm done for, done for. That
villain in a cook's hat — the chef at the canteen of Normative Nourishment for the
employees of the Central Council of the People's Economy — splashed boiling
water at me and scalded my left side. Swine that he is, and him a proletarian. Oh,
my God, how it hurts. That boiling water's seared me to the bone. And now I howl
and howl, but what's the use of howling...

[Anonymous No.21937196]

>>21931002
>It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits, it fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the it.

[Anonymous No.21937199]

>It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.

[Anonymous No.21937201]

>One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

[Anonymous No.21937227]

>>21931002
Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember…

[Anonymous No.21937231]

>When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains.

[Anonymous No.21937239]

>ॐ अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृत्विज॑म्। होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम्॥१॥

[Anonymous No.21937366]

Im Schatten des Hauses, in der Sonne des Flußufers bei den Booten, im Schatten des Salwaldes, im Schatten des Feigenbaumes wuchs Siddhartha auf, der schöne Sohn des Brahmanen, der junge Falke, zusammen mit Govinda, seinem Freunde, dem Brahmanensohn.

[Anonymous No.21937433]

>>21932530

[Anonymous No.21937434]

>>21934933
Fucking love this one.

[Anonymous No.21937441]

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

[Anonymous No.21937582]

"It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiania:
Christiania, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there."

[Anonymous No.21937587]

Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town.

[Anonymous No.21937651]

Prilli i Thyer

[Anonymous No.21937774]

>>21931002
I don't get the appeal of Kaczynski or why even he cared about things he cared.
If he doesn't want to see society progress a long technological lines then he doesn't need to worry, there is still no anti aging technology, much less one that you are forced to take so he will just get old and die.
His ideology is of dead end stagnation.

[Anonymous No.21937911]

>>21937774
If you believe that progress at any cost is always preferable to "stagnation" as you call it, you won't be able to sympathize with his points.

Think about it more as conservation in the face of rapid and unnatural change.

Ultimately his attempts at revolution were misguided and he failed, as most "change the world" type of ambitions do, but he was no fool.

[Anonymous No.21937919]

>>21937774
If you believe that progress at any cost is always preferable to "stagnation" as you call it, you won't be able to sympathize with his points.

Think about it more as conservation in the face of rapid and unnatural change.

Ultimately his attempts at revolution were misguided and he failed, as most "change the world" type ambitions do, but he is no fool.

[Anonymous No.21937920]

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed (The dark tower by Stephen King).

[Anonymous No.21937926]

>>21937919
I wouldn't say that I believe in "progress" at any cost, that's too absolute, but if it were up to me I would divert more resources into things like energy production, ecology and anti aging, things to make humanity and its existence more robust.
But that doesn't mean I would want to kill people over that, because that would kind of defeated the point in the first place.

[Anonymous No.21938365]

>>21931026
Came here to say this brother. It really is a great opening and kind of a shit book.

[Anonymous No.21938431]

>>21937774
He explicitly argued against that type of defeatist "you'll die anyway so who cares lol". His view was that humanity and most life on Earth would be wiped out or at least totally enslaved by technology. Later, in prison, he developed his ideas and come down more on the side of tech wiping out all life. The current AI race is the exact kind of thing he discussed: massively powerful, unstable, and dangerous tech being developed because it offers a short-term competitive advantage for the systems using it. Any company or nation that refuses to use AI will be dominated by those that do. But the potential downsides to AI are catastrophic. Tech won't be controlled or modulated which is why he concluded that action to destroy it was the only possible solution. I don't know if he's right but he can't just be dismissed out of hand if you read his better-argued works like Anti-Tech Revolution.

[Anonymous No.21938444]

>>21935168
You are totally right, anon. that other guy is way off the fucking mark. He is so far off it has to be bait, actually. Ishmael is very very clearly using a pseudonym purposefully to conjure biblical allusions, and that is the entire reason the line is famous.

[Anonymous No.21938445]

>>21935192
You are a fucking idiot

[Anonymous No.21938476]

For a long time, I went to bed early.

[Anonymous No.21938561]

>>21934461
For me, it's the opening of Quentin's chapter.

[Anonymous No.21938566]

>>21934275
Nice

[Anonymous No.21938613]

>>21931168
this

[Anonymous No.21938846]

>>21937920
That's my father's favorite opening line.

[Anonymous No.21939340]

>its time I focused on my problem. Who does not have a problem?--everybody has one.

[Anonymous No.21939352]

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene.

[Anonymous No.21939358]

>>21931026
My exact thoughts.

[Anonymous No.21939367]

>>21934275
based Garnett poster

[Anonymous No.21939370]

>>21931023
Yeah, Ted is pretty pathetic... A failed tranny and dog rapist, good verbal skills of course so that he could plagiarise the fuck our of Zerzan and Hoffer without making it too obvious. But the classic mentally ill person who thinks that things could be made better if only he could make the whole world as broken as he is.

[Anonymous No.21939475]

An empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.

[Anonymous No.21939481]

>>21931002
I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.

[Anonymous No.21939489]

Holy fucking shit, that's a hook if i ever saw one. What is it from?
>inb4 "mine"

[Anonymous No.21939498]

>>21931918
>>21934265
>>21931918
I think i found it, a shame.

[Anonymous No.21940196]

>>21931002
HI MY NAME IS EBONY DARK'NESS DEMENTIA RAVEN WAY AND I HAVE LONG EBONY BLACK HAIR (THAT'S HOW I GOT MY NAME) WITH PURPLE STREAKS AND RED TIPS THAT REACHES MY MID-BACK AND ICY BLUE EYES LIKE LIMPID TEARS AND A LOT OF PEOPLE TELL ME I LOOK LIKE AMY LEE (AN: IF U DON'T KNOW WHO SHE IS GET DA HELL OUT OF HERE!). I'M NOT RELATED TO GERARD WAY BUT I WISH I WAS BECAUSE HE'S A MAJOR FUCKING HOTTIE. I'M A VAMPIRE BUT MY TEETH ARE STRAIGHT AND WHITE. I HAVE PALE WHITE SKIN. I'M ALSO A WITCH, AND I GO TO A MAGIC SCHOOL CALLED HOGWARTS IN ENGLAND WHERE I'M IN THE SEVENTH YEAR (I'M SEVENTEEN). I'M A GOTH (IN CASE YOU COULDN'T TELL) AND I WEAR MOSTLY BLACK. I LOVE HOT TOPIC AND I BUY ALL MY CLOTHES FROM THERE. FOR EXAMPLE TODAY I WAS WEARING A BLACK CORSET WITH MATCHING LACE AROUND IT AND A BLACK LEATHER MINISKIRT, PINK FISHNETS AND BLACK COMBAT BOOTS. I WAS WEARING BLACK LIPSTICK, WHITE FOUNDATION, BLACK EYELINER AND RED EYE SHADOW. I WAS WALKING OUTSIDE HOGWARTS. IT WAS SNOWING AND RAINING SO THERE WAS NO SUN, WHICH I WAS VERY HAPPY ABOUT. A LOT OF PREPS STARED AT ME. I PUT UP MY MIDDLE FINGER AT THEM.

[Anonymous No.21940237]

>>21935737
Is this elliot rodger?

[Anonymous No.21940270]

>>21940196
Game over, white boy

[Anonymous No.21940666]

>>21931002
Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

[Anonymous No.21940767]

NIGGERS could be here

[Anonymous No.21940792]

>>21940767
Lol I can't

[Anonymous No.21940951]

It was love at first sight.

[Anonymous No.21941012]

>>21934275
He's literally me

[Anonymous No.21941741]

>>21931023
That's not the first opening phrase of the book. There's an entire thing about types of whales before that.

[Anonymous No.21941761]

>It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1, the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo.

[Anonymous No.21941783]

>>21937112
Don't buy that. Buy Technological Slavery from Fitch & Madison.

[Anonymous No.21941806]

>>21939370
I just find his arguments profoundly unconvincing. It all hinges on a layman's psychology that claims that so-called "surrogate" activities are, by definition, not as fulfilling as the real power-process, which he arbitrarily circumscribes to be just about ensuring survival.
I don't buy that at all. I enjoy surrogate activities immensely, and the fact that he is championed on a board about literature appreciation, the superfluous surrogate activity par excellence, is just profoundly ironic.
But in a way, his manner of reasoning betrays that he has not fully appreciated the problem of technology either. I agree with both Heidegger and Adorno that the problem of technology is not a problem with technological gadgets and inventions as such, but rather a problem with the mode of thought that engenders both their invention and simultaneously considers it beyond questioning that their development is good and desirable.
It's the prevalence and ubiquity of means-end reasoning that put us here in the first place, and the cure is to engender appreciation of ends-in-themselves - which are, PRECISELY, the surrogate activities that Kaczynski derides.
Philosophically speaking, it is a completely failed book. Politically as well, as in the most cruelly ironic twist of fate, he has mostly inspired a cadre of permanently online aesthetes who like using technology as a surrogate activity to project a self-image of being very radical mavericks.

[Anonymous No.21941809]

>There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.

[Anonymous No.21941840]

>>21940237
unmistakably

[Anonymous No.21941889]

>>21934914
I prefer Virgil's nod to it

[Anonymous No.21942111]

>SING, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,

[Anonymous No.21942123]

I am absolutely fucking obsessed with this one
>Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,-- the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.
I wish I could have written this

[Anonymous No.21942132]

>>21931023
It's true, but the entire opening paragraph deserves praise:
>Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

[Anonymous No.21942174]

Great was the year and terrible the year of Our Lord 1918, of the revolution the second.

[Anonymous No.21942180]

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimson-weed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother’s hand on your check. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A Sunflower, four more one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

[Anonymous No.21942611]

>>21942111
checked and homer-pilled but what translation is that

[Anonymous No.21943324]

>>21940767
>MILK 2.99
Wtf do Americans really have milk-powered engines?

[Anonymous No.21943676]

Gnotics, agnostics, and masters of duplicity; keepers of chastity, experts of inebriation, and connoisseurs of sodomy all have rumoured and declared, narrated and revealed that, 7079 years after the origin of the universe, 1681 years after Jesus the Saviour and 1092 years after the Hegira, there was a city by the name of the Constantinople, notorious for its racket.

Much better in Turkish tho

[Anonymous No.21943688]

The only one that I can remmember this the one from Franz Kafkas novell were the protagonist is transformed into a bug.

[Anonymous No.21943851]

>>21931002
"It was the Sneed of times. It was the Feed of times."

[Anonymous No.21943886]

>>21935192
>Even Ahab is a stretch
You did not read the book

[Anonymous No.21944568]

>>21931002
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

[Anonymous No.21944620]

>>21942132
Is the rest of the book written like this?

[Anonymous No.21944622]

>>21944568
Based and "Eldritch Horrors Brooding in Tombs of Cyclopean Architecture" pilled

[Anonymous No.21944970]

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord,

[Anonymous No.21944979]

>>21943688
>>21937201

[Anonymous No.21944987]

>>21934341
Currentley reading this. It's amazing Tolkiens ability to make something so appealing to all ages without talking down or up to the audience. Its such authentically likeable text and well made that it makes sense everyone reads it no matter the age.

[Anonymous No.21945016]

>>21941806
The issue is that you don't actually go outside and interact with the average person so you have no frame of reference of their desires.

[Anonymous No.21945091]

All this happened, more or less.

[Anonymous No.21945109]

>>21939352
if we're counting shakespeare then richard III's opening is pretty goated

[Anonymous No.21945127]

>>21944970
id never heard of gilead but this is very good

[Anonymous No.21945158]

>>21931002
"One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten"

[Anonymous No.21945320]

>>21931023
>Call me Ishmael
can somebody explain why this is good

[Anonymous No.21945492]

>>21944620
Not entirely, no. The style reappears often enough, but one of the many strengths of Moby Dick is that it varies it style, sometimes to the better, sometimes to the worse (autistic whaling trivia).

[Anonymous No.21945498]

>>21945016
I do though, so what is your point?

[Anonymous No.21945515]

>>21945158
kek some people really do post that entire paragraph unironically as an example of a good opening

[Anonymous No.21945535]

>>21945515
I just finished the third book, it's characters are totally composed of unredeemable assholes and I'm not reading another four books to have them "but they save the day anyways and now everything is better". And people unironically project themselves on them

[Anonymous No.21945746]

Rosenbergs, electrocuted

[Anonymous No.21945889]

[Anonymous No.21946812]

>>21942123
i dont even understand it

[Anonymous No.21947299]

>Dobby relished his groinsaw's roar as he withdrew the flesh-choked blade from the astronaut's ruined skull.

[Anonymous No.21947519]

"My name is Jake. That's my first name, obviously. I can't tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere. Everywhere. And if they knew my full name, they could find me and my friends, and then . . . well, let's just say I don't want them to find me."
>>21941806
>I just find his arguments profoundly unconvincing. It all hinges on a layman's psychology that claims that so-called "surrogate" activities are, by definition, not as fulfilling as the real power-process, which he arbitrarily circumscribes to be just about ensuring survival.
>I don't buy that at all. I enjoy surrogate activities immensely
currently reading the book and I agree with this. But something makes me come back to the idea of surrogate activities again and again. Some activities cause this insurmountable dread to creep closer and some have the opposite effect, all while being satisfying all the same. gaming almost universally belongs in that first category for me, maybe because I'm subconsciously recognising it to be a waste of time? Meanwhile game development sparks a similar level of enjoyment but probably because it also involves a minimal level of a creative process. But maybe because there's a tangible connection between the gained expertise and the possibility to use it at my job it feels better? maybe it is the difference between creating vs. consuming that causes this difference but as of late this has had a growing impact on me with manic/depressive-ish mood swings, and I'd like to understand it better.