Post your favourite quotes from books you love
Mine
>Suicide is what Hemingway does when the world gets so out of focus he can no longer commit it to paper
- From A Fan's Notes by Fredrick Exley
So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
Honkas Bazonkas that's a bookb
>>24507061nobody readin allat
>>24507066>can't read one single sentenceMight as well give up.
>>24506966 (OP)Lower the book so I can see the milk trucks
>>24506966 (OP)Someone get that bitch Libby and hand her a smartphone.
>This evening had obliterated the past at a single stroke. What had it brought him instead? Nothing as yet; but it was a great thing that there had been any such thing as this evening. Anyone who has not been very much in love will not be able to understand Aurélien and how he had begun all over again, as it were a new life. There is probably no emotion in the world so sharp, like a wind blowing on one’s face, as this feeling of re-birth that comes from having told a woman that one loves her. At the same time Aurélien had re-discovered his self-respect. Now he had something more than a pretext for his life; he had legitimised it. Now his drifting, his lack of resolution, was explained: he had been waiting for this moment. Until now he had lacked a reason for being alive at all.
Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
There's a line in the Alan Lomax Jelly Roll Morton biography where Mr. Jelly Lord reminds us we need to have 'the bitters with the sweet.'
This is a Pauline sentiment. How does Jesus rejoice in His cross. How do we 'rejoice in our suffering'? Why should bitters be appealing? Why should silences be in song? Or hangups and strife amidst our bonds? Can we heal having come from that place, now stronger--more fortified than before. Look to the Japanese pottery kintsugi. This wisdom is of course self-evident. But if you play to win, if your fundamental act of love is a cross, your wounds are nails, and thorns, and lashes... You will love perfectly. But like that jazz music Jelly invented, you can't have it without the blues that hang in the balance of love.
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md5: f590ad25ef09ef9e6e1db67ef71a94e9
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>>24506966 (OP)>All that is left of me is the sound of snow underfoot.
>>24507146Ever since I read Ulysses, whenever I feed a cat I say
MILK FOR THE PUSSENS!
and I often repeat the line to myself when alone, like a mantra. It's a fine, comfy line.
>>24506966 (OP)Now as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
The driver tried to interfere, but he pinned him down in his seat with one elbow, and put on full speed. The rush of air in his face, the hum of the engines, and the light jump of the car beneath him intoxicated his weak brain. “Washerwoman, indeed!” he shouted recklessly. “Ho! ho! I am the Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes! Sit still, and you shall know what driving really is, for you are in the hands of the famous, the skilful, the entirely fearless Toad!”
Used to be a hobo right smart. Back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I’d been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I’m goin to tell you you’ll think peculiar but it’s the god’s truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I’ll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.
>The room around had aged in a split second, as if everything was suddenly covered in a thin layer of white dust
-White nights, Dostoyevsky.
>Coronel Aureliano Buendia fought 17 wars and lost all of them
-One hundred years of Solitude, Gabriel García Marquez
>In my humility, sir, I will tell you that I am the only scholar of the Real Visceralists that exists in Mexico, and if I may be allowed, in the world. [...] Juan García Madero? No, I don't know that one.
-The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño.
>It takes being in love to know something about yourself.
-Stoner, John Williams
>all women think they're worth loving, the plain and the pretty being, in that way, equally vain
-The Art of Love, Ovid
>>24506966 (OP)Would very much enjoy keeping that woman as my no limit breeding slave. I hope to find a woman someday who's into that.
>>24508443God fucking Damn my man!
>>24508874>Juan García Madero? No, I don't know that one.This one is especially funny if the theory that the interviewer in part 2 is Garcia Madero is true
>>24508948>the theory that the interviewer in part 2 is Garcia Madero is trueThat makes no sense to anyone who paid attention to the book. If I had to guess, the interviewer is (you)
>>24506966 (OP)There is in life's flame, life's appetite, life's irrational impulsion, a kind of initial perversity: the desire characteristic of Eros is cruelty since it feeds upon contingencies; death is cruelty, resurrection is cruelty, transfiguration is cruelty, since nowhere in a circular and closed world is there room for true death, since ascension is a rending, since closed space is fed with lives, and each stronger life tramples down the others, consuming them in a massacre which is a transfiguration and a bliss.
— Letters on Cruelty, Antonin Artaud
>>24508978Why wouldn't it? It's been a long while since I finished it so I'm fuzzy on the details, but:
>Madero disappears at the end of part 3>he'd be one of the few people who'd be interested in the movement or in the lives of Lima and Belano>the interviewees who knew Madero never mention him - either because they're talking to him, so why would they, or because he edited mentions of himself out(You) are metaphorically on a hunt for Lima and Belano too, but I think it'd take away from the narrative if (you) were an actual character Calvino-style. I find such straightforward 4th wall breaks cheap.
>Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
— Moby Dick, Chapter 135
>>24507122GOOD MORNING SAAR
>“I’ve considered the whole thing from all points of view, and, as you know, I have my own way of thinking about such things. First of all, as far as Basini goes, it’s my view he’s no loss in any case. It makes no difference whether we go and report him, or give him a beating, or even if we torture him to death, just for the fun of it. Personally, I can’t imagine that a creature like that can have any meaning in the wonderful mechanism of the universe. He strikes me as being merely accidental, as it were a random creation outside the order of things. That’s to say-even he must of course mean something, but certainly only something as undefined as, say, a worm or a stone on the road, the sort of things you never know whether to walk round or step on. In other words, they’re practically nothing. For if the spirit of the universe wants one of its parts to he preserved, it manifests its will more clearly. In such a case it says ‘no’ and creates a resistance, it makes us walk round the worm and makes the stone so hard that we can’t smash it without tools. And before we can get the tools, it has had time to interpolate resistances in the form of all sorts of tough little scruples, and if we get the better of them, well, that just shows that the whole thing has had another meaning all along.
>“With a human being, it puts this hardness into his character, into his consciousness as a human being, into the sense of responsibility he has as a part of the spirit of the universe. And if a human being loses this consciousness, he loses himself. But if a human being has lost himself, abandoned himself, he has lost the special and peculiar purpose for which Nature created him as a human being. And this is the case in which one can be perfectly certain that one is dealing with something unnecessary, an empty form, something that has already long been deserted by the spirit of the universe.”
This is from Young Törless. I don't fully agree with this but from the first time I read this passage, it stuck with me. I'm not sure why, but it's captivating to me.
> “This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
Catcher in the Rye. Again, this one just stuck with me. I find the concept of someone failing - not because of extra difficulties but because of lacking something - interesting.
>>24509066>Why wouldn't it?Because he and Lupe mirror Tinajero. These three are also the single characters in the book who not only know how to let things go but naturally crave unnatachement. He isn't walking around for decades asking about real visceralists, he is being a real visceralist. Part of the book's ending is that for all we have spent hundreds of pages hearing about Lima and Belano, it's Garcia Madero —this guy who disappeared from the face of the earth so many decades and pages ago— who got to know Tinajero's work and embodies the same spirit as her. Both even go around writing dozens of notebooks while giving zero fucks about publishing anything. Writing is just part of who they are.
>I find such straightforward 4th wall breaks cheap.I think it's the opposite of a 4th wall break. Bolaño isn't pulling a "look at my fiction having a dialogue with you, real person" but instead making (you) into a fictional character, a new poet walking in the footsteps of the old ones, chasing the real visceralists from the 70's as they chased the ones from the 20's.
>Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps that he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it.
VALIS by Philip K. Dick
>>24507061This reads like the dumbassery about the meaning of water.
