Quotes and excerpts you enjoyed

[Anonymous No.8613003]

>Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men, tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is - having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is - alas, we don't know.

[Anonymous No.8613008]

>I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...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 of 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.8613011]

>I began, I remember, because I felt I had to. I'd reached that modest height in my career, that gentle rise, from which I could coast out of gear to a soft stop. Now I wonder why not. Why not? But then duty drove me forward like a soldier. I said it was time for "the Big Book," the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to have: a pyramid, a column tall enough to satisfy the sky. Duty drove me the way it drives men into marriage. Begetting is expected of us, and in those days of heavy men in helmets the seed was certain, and wanted only the wind for a womb, or any slit; yet what sprang up out of those foxholes we fucked with our fists but our own frightened selves? with a shout of pure terror, too. That too—that too was expected; it was expected even of flabby maleless men like me. And now, here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving and unfeeling eye?...my eye. So sentences circle me like a toy train. What could I have said about the Boche, about bigotry, barbarism, butchery, Bach, that hasn't been said as repeatedly as I dreamed by dream of glory, unless it was what I've said? What could I have explained where no reason exists and no cause is adequate; what body burned to a crisp could I have rebelieved was bacon, if I had not taken the tack I took?

[Anonymous No.8613015]

>For a moment it seemed that Adela would throw a fit: her beautiful eyes blazed with rage. But Father did not wait for her outburst. With one leap, he reached the windowsill and spread his arms wide. We rushed after him. The market square, brightly lit, was crowded. Under our houses, eight firemen held fully extended a large sheet of canvas. Father turned round, the plate of his armor flashing in the light; he saluted us silently, then, with arms outspread, bright like a meteor, he leaped into the night sparkling with a thousand lights. The sight was so beautiful that we all began to cheer in delight. Even Adela forgot her grievance and clapped and cheered. Meanwhile, my father jumped onto the ground from the canvas sheet and, having shaken his clanking breastplate into position, went to the head of his detachment, which, two by two, slowly marched in formation past the dark lines of the watching crowd, lights playing on the brass of their helmets.

[Anonymous No.8613020]

>Now, however, the war was over, and Arthur was beginning to feel the same urges again, especially when his co-workers watched his wife sashay out of the Minister's office after feeding him lunch, all of their eyes (at least in his head) tracking her fine ass as it swayed hypnotically out of the room. Arthur imagined them taking her holes, one after the other, as she screamed and moaned and gasped in pleasure that he would never be able to give her.

[Anonymous No.8613024]

>And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

[Anonymous No.8613030]

>We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.