/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.559748]

ITT: Post a book you like with your favorite line(s) from said book. You can post more than one.

Pic related:

“. . . the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

[Anonymous No.559767]

Is Gustav Flaubert the title and Madam Bovary the author, or is it the other way around?

[Anonymous No.559784]

>>559767
Who would name a book Gustav Flaubert?

[Anonymous No.559789]

>>559767

Assuming you aren't trolling - Flaubert is the author. It's generally considered to be one of the greatest novels ever written.

[Anonymous No.559822]

>>559789

Hm, contentious. The writing is, undoubtedly, sublime but the narrative is unspectacular.

[Anonymous No.559834]

>>559822

The fact that it's generally considered one of the best is not contentious.

Whether it actually is or not . . . on that you are entitled to your opinion.

[Anonymous No.559859]

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue.
Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with someone and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.
I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

[Anonymous No.559860]

So, no one on here now has ever read a book and found something memorable in it?

[Anonymous No.559868]

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

[Anonymous No.559883]

>>559859

Awesome line, honestly - captures the sexual uneasiness/frustration of youth. Probably especially for a girl.

Curious though - did you post that purely because you like it, or because you think it's appropriate to 4chan?
Or both?

[Anonymous No.559889]

>>559859
The only thing I was good at was winning scholarships and that era was coming to an end.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without race tracks of a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

[Anonymous No.559891]

>>559834

It's entirely contentious, as that opinion isn't merely my own. A great many literary scholars would disagree with your appraisal, and while a great many more may agree with it the former school is sufficiently large as to render the description 'generally considered' hyperbolic and incorrect.

[Anonymous No.559901]

>>559889

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

[Anonymous No.559904]

>>559883
All the above and the extra credit answer: I'm a virgin.

"He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant,a nd then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

[Anonymous No.559907]

>>559891

Okay, it's entirely contentious.

>>559889
>>559868
>>559859

These are awesome guys. Hope to see more.

[Anonymous No.559927]

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

[Anonymous No.559942]

>>559901
Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

And so we have more than just Plath, Fahrenheit 451.

"Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass..."

[Anonymous No.559953]

"Oh, Christ. I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed." - Eddie Dean

[Anonymous No.559954]

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

[Anonymous No.559961]

>>559942
>>559901
>>559889
>>559859

Wow, I've never read Plath.

Thanks to you guys I now plan on it.

[Anonymous No.559965]

The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them... But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the sings and arrows. It's too easy."

[Anonymous No.559983]

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog's ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. they had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once called him "a quiet man," a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted int he house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him--that he could not feel.

[Anonymous No.559989]

>>559961

The Bell Jar is a masterpiece.

Her poetry is excellent too.

[Anonymous No.559990]

I gave her the chance to reform. I tried to save her. And what? She did not fulfill the easiest of requirements – the observance of propriety. . . It is possible to save a person who does not wish to perish. But if the whole nature is so corrupt, so perverted, that perdition itself looks like salvation, then what can be done?

[Anonymous No.560012]

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

[Anonymous No.560014]

[W]ords dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. . . . [M]otherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.

"Jewel!" Dewey Dell cries; "Jewel!" It seems to me that I now hear the accumulation of her voice through the last five minutes, and I hear her scuffling and struggling as pa and Mack hold her, screaming "Jewel! Jewel!" But he is no longer looking at us. We see his shoulders strain as upends the coffin and slides it single-handed from the saw-horses. It looms unbelievably tall, hiding him: I would not have believed that Addie Bundren would have needed that much room to lie comfortable in; for another instant it stands upright while the sparks rain on it in scattering bursts as though they engendered other sparks from the contact. Then it topples forward, gaining momentum, revealing Jewel and the sparks raining on him too in engendering gusts, so that he appears to be enclosed in a thin nimbus of fire. Without stopping it overends and rears again, pauses, then crashes slowly forward and through the curtain. This time jewel is riding upon it, clinging to it, until it crashes down and flings him forward and clear and Mack leaps forward into a thin smell of scorching meat and slaps at the widening crimson holes that bloom like flowers in his undershirt.

[Anonymous No.560032]

Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order – dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlon and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws – I translate: Inhuman laws – which we will never completely perceive. Tlon may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Contact with Tlon and the ways of Tlon have disintegrated this world. Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

[Anonymous No.560033]

>>559868
If it could just be a hell beyond that; the clean flame, the two of us more than dead. Then you will have me and only me.

dont cry poor Quentin
but I couldnt stop she held my head against her damp hard breast i could her her heart going firm and slow now not hammering and the water gurgling among the willows in the dark and waves of honeysuckle coming up the air my arm and shoulder were twisted under me

Honeysuckle was the saddest odor of all, I think

Quentin's section is fucking magnificent.

If I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother

[Anonymous No.560049]

>>560032

It's possible, but not interesting," Lonnrot answered. "You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.

[Anonymous No.560057]

>>559989
I'll second that. Lady Lazarus is an all-time personal favorite; I wanted to cry when I read it.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

I about yelled at the pages that she wasn't trash.

Bloom
(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!

Rudy
(Gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling, He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.

[Anonymous No.560073]

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

[Anonymous No.560082]

I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
"Araby"

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
"Araby"

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
"Araby"

He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched upon him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.
"A Little Cloud"

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.
"A Little Cloud"

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
"The Dead"
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 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.
"The Dead"

[Anonymous No.560085]

"What do you think of Paneloux's sermon, Doctor?"

The question was asked in a quite ordinary tone, and Rieux answered in the same tone.

"I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. But, as you know, Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem."

"However, you think, like Paneloux, that the plague has its good side; it opens men's eyes and forces them to take thought?"

The doctor tossed his head impatiently.

"So does every ill that flesh is heir to. What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague."

[Anonymous No.560089]

Harry consists of a thousand selves, not two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

[Anonymous No.560096]

>>559983
This late experience of the world had brew in them all, all men and women, a well of tears; tears and sorrows, courage and endurance, and a perfectly upright and stoical upbringing.

[Anonymous No.560100]

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it.The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

[Anonymous No.560139]

"And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie's head. The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again. Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly forward to the sand, and he lay without quivering."

[Anonymous No.560158]

>>560139
Still makes me sniffle.

[Anonymous No.560162]

He saw her in her hotel room somewhere now in the halfsecond remaining with the
bombs a yard, a foot, an inch from her building. He saw her leaning toward the great
shimmering walls of colour and motion where the family talked and talked and talked
to her, where the family prattled and chatted and said her name and smiled at her
and said nothing of the bomb that was an inch, now a half-inch, now a quarter-inch
from the top of the hotel. Leaning into the wall as if all of the hunger of looking would
find the secret of her sleepless unease there. Mildred, leaning anxiously, nervously,
as if to plunge, drop, fall into that swarming immensity of colour to drown in its bright
happiness.
The first bomb struck.
"Mildred! "
Perhaps, who would ever know? Perhaps the great broadcasting stations with their
beams of colour and light and talk and chatter went first into oblivion.
Montag, falling flat, going down, saw or felt, or imagined he saw or felt the walls go
dark in Millie's face, heard her screaming, because in the millionth part of time left,
she saw her own face reflected there, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it was
such a wildly empty face, all by itself in the room, touching nothing, starved and
eating of itself, that at last she recognized it as her own and looked quickly up at the
ceiling as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her
with a million pounds of brick, metal, plaster, and wood, to meet other people in the
hives below, all on their quick way down to the cellar where the explosion rid itself of
them in its own unreasonable way.

[Anonymous No.560164]

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”
“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.”
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

. . . I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

[Anonymous No.560177]

Not posting a picture of the book because you need to turn in your books if you don't know this is from.

>It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.

I didn't like the book at all when I was sixteen (probably because the teacher was horrible), but, Christ, I loved the ending.

[Anonymous No.560186]

Paul gazed into the television camera lenses and imagined the millions now watching, now listening, and he wondered if he'd made sense to any of them. He tried to think of some vivid image that would bring his point home to them all. An image came to mind; he rejected it as indelicate, could find no other, and so blurted it out nayway.

"The most beautiful peonies I ever saw," said Paul, "were grown in almost pure cat exrement. I--"

Bagpipes and drums howled from the street below.

"What's going on out there?" demanded the judge.

"Parade, sir," said a guard, leaning out of the window.

[Anonymous No.560190]

Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

[Anonymous No.560194]

"Except about the door, all he has said is true," cried Mitya, in a loud voice. "For combing the lice off me, I thank him; for forgiving my blows, I thank him. The old man has been honest all his life and as faithful to my father as seven hundred poodles."

"Prisoner, be careful in your language," the President admonished him.

"I am not a poodle," Grigory muttered.

"All right, it's I am a poodle myself," cried Mitya.

[Anonymous No.560249]

As for minute joys: as I was saying: do you realize the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose? I always have, ever since I was a child–there are so many subtle variations of sensation. A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger an catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at, crumbled between fingers, and flicked to the floor in minute crusts. Or a heavier, more determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous, roll them round and jelly-like between thumb and forefinger, and spread them on the under surface of a desk or chair where they will harden into organic crusts. How many desks and chairs have I thus secretively befouled since childhood? Or sometimes there will be blood mingled with the mucous in dry brown scabs, or bright sudden wet red on the finger taht scraped too rudely the nasal membranes. God, what a sexual satisfaction! It is absorbing to look with new sudden eyes on the old worn habits: to see a sudden luxurious and pestilential “snot green sea”, and shiver with the shock of recognition.

[Anonymous No.560253]

I'm on the verge of tears by the time we arrive at Pastels since I'm positive we won't get seated but the table is good, and relief that is almost tidal in scope washes over me in an awesome wave

[Anonymous No.560257]

>>560249
The other two are from an entry on December 27, 1958, where Plath talks about how she wanted her mother to love her.

I felt I couldn't write because she would appropriate it. Is that all? I felt if I didn't write then nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, then love my writing and love me for my writing.

MY WRITING IS MY WRITING IS MY WRITING. Whatever elements there were in it of getting her approval I must no longer use it for that. I must not expect her love for it. [Omission.] I must change, not she. Why is telling her of a success so unsatisfying: because one success is never enough: when you love, you have an indefinite lease of it. When you approve, you only approve single acts. Thus approval has a short dateline. The question is: so much for that, good, but now, what is the next thing?

[Anonymous No.560262]

>>560249
holy fuck this is amazing.


Where do I start with sylvia plath /lit/?

[Anonymous No.560265]

>>560262

Her poetry. All of it.

[Anonymous No.560274]

>>560262

The Bell Jar
then Ariel
then The Colossus
then whatever you want

[Anonymous No.560280]

>>560262
I'd read her journals first. The Bell Jar is basically her life in the summer of 1953 with some throwbacks to other points of her life (her father died when she was eight). She was also a confessional poet, so knowing about her life helps you understand her poetry.

[Anonymous No.560287]

(1984)
At the sight of the words "I Love You" the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.

[Anonymous No.560294]

I love the first lines in "Nausea". They always remind me not to write crap I don't need to.

"The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly--let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change.

For instance, here is a cardboard box holding my bottle of ink. I should try to tell how I saw it before and now how I1 Well, it's a parallelopiped rectangle, it opens--that's stupid, there's nothing I can say about it. This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something."

[Anonymous No.560298]

Unk shook his head vaguely. He could think of no apt condensation of his adventures for the obviously ritual mood. Something great was plainly expected of him. He was not up to greatness. He exhaled noisily, letting the congregation know that he was sorry to fail them with his colorlessness.

"I was a victim of a series of accidents," he said. He shrugged, "As are we all," he said.

The cheering and dancing began again.

[Anonymous No.560301]

>>560294
a good counterpoint to Nausea is The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard describes why the spirit attempts to devour itself and Sartre analyzes the attempt.

[Anonymous No.560309]

>>560262

Guy that's provided almost all the Plath excerpts here.

http://www.amazon.com/Unabridged-Journals-Sylvia-Plath-ebook/dp/B0012DZ34W/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=
digital-text&qid=1271384524&sr=8-2

This here is, apparently, the definitive version of her journals. The version posted in >>560249 seems much shorter in comparison. According to Amazon, the unabridged version is about twice as long. I plan on buying the abridged version sometime; I'll probably spend graduation money on it.

Still disappointing that Ted Hughes destroyed the journals from the last few weeks of his life, though I can understand why he did it--he didn't want his children to see what she was like before she finally killed herself.

[ForcedMeme !IsAMEmE6C2 No.560310]

Great thread, people.

[Anonymous No.560317]

>>560309
of her life*

herpus derpus

[Anonymous No.560396]

>>560310
Good job, /lit/

[Anonymous No.560441]

The dark man had gone back to sleep.
How does the rabbit feel when the shadow of the hawk falls on him like a dark crucifix... and then goes on without stopping or even slowing? How does the mouse feel when the cat who has been crouched patiently outside his hole for the entire day is picked up by its master and tossed unceremoniously out the front door? How does the deer feel when it steps quietly past the mighty hunter who is snoozing away the effects of his three lunchtime beers? Perhaps they feel nothing, or perhaps they feel what Tom Cullen felt as he rode out of that black and dangerous sphere of influence: a great and nearly electrifying sunburst of relief, a feeling of new birth. Most of all a feeling of safety scarcely earned, that such great good luck must surely be a sign from heaven.

[Anonymous No.560471]

>>560309
>>560280
>>560274
>>560265
Would it be taboo among you /lit/-fiends to request a link to a download of the free sort? I had trouble finding anything outside of audiobooks and was curious as to how you guys find your books (is this something I'd find at a commercial bookstore? The library?). I'll admit to being a complete and utter newfag when it comes to this so be gentle

[Anonymous No.560504]

>>560471
>Would it be taboo among you /lit/-fiends to request a link to a download of the free sort?

Doesn't bother me if people do it; I just don't know where to begin.

>I had trouble finding anything outside of audiobooks and was curious as to how you guys find your books (is this something I'd find at a commercial bookstore? The library?).

Commercial bookstores, yes. I purchased the novels, books, and collections I own at stores like Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

[Anonymous No.560681]

>>559784

[Anonymous No.560710]

"hell is other people."

[Anonymous No.560715]

>>559748
This is why I'm a musician, and why I went for a music major over an English major.

[Anonymous No.560719]

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars. I didn't care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn't know me and I didn't know anybody. I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody'd think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they'd leave me alone.

[Anonymous No.560721]

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.

[Anonymous No.560728]

>>560721
>>560719

Oh, Holden.

[Anonymous No.560774]

>>560710
Oh shut up.
>>559927
Hot damn that's better than I remembered.
>>560057
But she is trash. Sizzling, suicidal trash. You say "I am trash" and life echoes, "you are trash." And if you're hateful and selfish, you won't care that the kids overhear from the next room.

[Anonymous No.560813]

"So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise."

"And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?"

[Anonymous No.560812]

>>560774
>Sizzling, suicidal trash.
>Sizzling

You got me; I lol'd.

[Anonymous No.561655]

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack. An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The main in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender, We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said . . .

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”

He seemed immensely pleased by this.

[Anonymous No.561839]

I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break; and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter - the Eternity they have entered - where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness.

[Anonymous No.561856]

The Rev snorted. “Autumn years, what a joke! Your kind don’t last that long.”

“Sometimes we do. And we hate to be caught without contingency plans. I plan to ripen into an old rake.
My pastimes will consist of getting schoolgirls into trouble, fighting duels with irate fathers and brothers,
and giving witty oratories in the courthouse. And if I survive into the winter of life, I’ll get myself into a
comfortable prison and write my memoirs.”

“My son, the only way you’ll get old enough to write your memoirs is if you get yourself into prison now,
quickly, and stay there. But don’t expect anyone to read them. After you’re dead no one’ll give a shit,
mark my words.” The Rev tilted his head back and poured drink down his throat. Gwynn shrugged and
played on.

“Vanity, all is vanity,” burped the Rev, “and grasping for the wind.” He picked at a spot where the
piano’s dark-stained wood was chipped, and made it bigger. “You get a little life, a few years of feeling
important, or of feeling as if you ought to be important. Then, long before you’re ready, it’s all over.
Judgement time. Wheat or chaff, sheep or goat, fair or foul. No second chances; no appeal. You, my
son, cheat yourself with your indifference. You should be terrified, when instead you’re arrogant!”

Gwynn smiled and took his hands off the keys. “If I am, so are you, Father, to assume that the judge, if
one exists, shares your opinion of what is worthy.”

[Anonymous No.561859]

>>561856

The Rev snorted again. He operated out of a belief that Gwynn was always wrong when it came to moral
questions, and that if his arguments convinced it was because of clever phrasing alone and not because of
any actual merit in their content.

“Don’t you ever feel the slightest fear that you might be terribly wrong, and that you’ll suffer for having so
wretchedly misused your intellect?”

Gwynn appeared to consider the question. “No, I don’t,” he finally said, as he closed the piano’s lid. “I
doubt I’d really enjoy paradise, anyway. And as for you, you’d hate it. So much of your god’s breast,
but so little of any others, if your literature is to be believed . . .”

The mention of breasts distracted the Rev. “Calila only has little breasts, but they’re very nice. No,
perfect. She reminds me of Nessima. Did I ever tell you about that girl?”

“Skin of burnished copper, pretty ankles, willing and able?”

“No. That was Eriune. Lovely girl. But Nessima . . . ah, she was something else. She had a smile like the
sun when it first comes up over the dunes. Hips that swayed like a boat on the ocean. A belly like a soft
little pillow.” A gleam came into the Rev’s weary eyes. “Her breath was of frankincense and cloves. She
was the fountain in the dry land. The grapes on the vine. The desert breeds beautiful girls the way it
breeds flowers after rain, but they’re too much like the flowers: they don’t last long. Middle-aged at
twenty-five, and old and hating men by thirty. And who can blame ’em? For we do crush ’em when
they’re young, don’t we?”

“Yes, sometimes we do.”

[Anonymous No.561860]

"And there the wicked old Witch stayed for a good long time."
"And did she ever come out?"
"Not yet."

[Anonymous No.561913]

"... Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voices crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secrect of origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization..." - Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Inspired me to travel. I love this man.

[Orhan !3VNuRGq.ek No.562566]

>>561860
:3

[Anonymous No.562578]

>>561860
Reading that now.
My favourite has to be:
"She is no longer the Queen?" asked Turtle Heart, confused.
"She died in an unfortunate accident involving some rat poison," said Frex.

[Anonymous No.562632]

"Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves" - Henry and June by Anais Nin

[/co/mrade.Chocobro !FFI4Mmahuk No.562650]

This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppresssion, like the heat.
Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle's cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they've chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play. "Shortstop," the boy says. "Short's the best position they is." Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all - it's that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.
The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

>~from A Bullet in the Brain - a short story by Tobias Wolf.

>A really good english teacher set it as a 1 hour long class assignment for us to analyse and de construct once. but the way he read it to the class before hand just showed how well it was written. this passage in particular. I read it out loud to myself all the time.

[Anonymous No.562682]

>Jenny picked up some silly psychology game at work one day and made me play it. If one had to pick three partners for an eternal desert island, which sex would they be?
>"Three women."
>"I knew you'd say that."
>"Then you needn't have asked."
>"Balanced men say one man and two women."
>"Certainly better for mixed doubles."
>"What you don't know is that three women means you hate women. You want to see them destroy one another."
>"I once knew two who never would. That leaves me only one to find."
>"It jolly well wouldn't be me."
>"Then that leaves us two to find."
>But she wasn't mollified. "Who were they?"
>"Angels in disguise."
>"You're making them up."
>"One day I shall make you up."
>"What makes you think you're not doing that already?"
>"Against the rules."
>"What rules?"
>"Of the present tense."
>"Pig." I smiled, but she didn't. "I keep having to revise what I hate about you most. I've now decided it's the loathsome way you use other people's games to play your own."

and

>Yet it did not take place as he had dreamed, did not reach that non-physical climax he wanted, fused melting of all further doubt. She had been wiser in not expecting it; though he still felt obscurely cheated by her not trying to create what she had not expected. But nor, finally, was she merely indulging him, comforting him. For a brief while she was the female animal; possessive, wanting possession to endure. It came to him, immediately afterward, when he was still lying half across her, that the failure could have been put in terms of grammatical person. It had happened in the third, when he had craved the first and second.
>It left, too, a sad, sour presentiment of age, of the death of the illusion that they could find each other as simply as this. It was too small, too short, too childlike a thing. Perhaps that was why he had always preferred, in more recent years, younger women: Jennies too green not to stay one with the myths of their bodies.

[sandwiches !!jvCuWJ8NrnK No.562994]

awesome thread, but I gotta hand to OP, that quote is fucking amazing.

Must read Madame Bovary as soon as possible!

[Anonymous No.563067]

"I saw death rising from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbed color. ...Stopping down, Bruce picked one of the stubbed blue plants, then placed it in his right shoe, slipping it down out of sight. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving."

[Anonymous No.563486]

>>560441
I know its junk food - but I love this

[Anonymous No.563574]

Flaubert sucks. Fuck you, OP.

[Anonymous No.563583]

"Snape killed... Dumbledore."

[Anonymous No.563606]

>>563574
>>562994

Well . . . you win some, you lose some.

[Anonymous No.564021]

He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

[Anonymous No.565912]

how does this make you feel

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844467/