Quotes from books that have lit you up

a patchwork quilt of quotes sounds like it could be good.

Most androids I've known have more vitality and desire to live than my wife. She has nothing to give me.

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Just finished Do Androids Dream.. and this line is first up whenever it pops into memory.

In the Westwood Studios PC game of Blade Runner, there's another similar line about the androids yearning to live. I'm not sure why it strikes me as so profound but it does.

here is a list of jh prynne quotes i made for a friend with the names of the poems they are taken from also included.

of sanguine fire
("Outwash and Pie face across the table,
synergic coils wound through the house of
Mercury where they dwell.")
a new tax on the counter-earth
("the stupid slow down and become wise with inertia
and instantly the prospect of money is solemnised to
the great landscape. It actually glows like a stream of
evening sun, value become coinage fixed in the grass crown.")
the ideal star fighter
("the eye converts the news image into fear enzyme")
l'estase de .poher
("Rubbish is pertinent; essential; the most intricate presence
in our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole place
turned into a model question.")
the kirghis diasters
("the muse in reckless theophany gives a familiar yell")
the bee target on his shoulder
("do not love this man. He makes Fridays unbearable")
a note on metal
("gradually the item-form becomes iconized...
The metonymic unit is established, and number replaces
strength or power as the chief assertion of presence")
chemins de fer
john in the blooded phoenix
a stone called nothing
("the lights dip as the driver presses the starter
and the bus pulls away to leave for the moonstruck
fields of the lower paid.")
questions for the time being
("as Wyndham Lewis tried so fiercely to explain")
thoughts on the esterhazy court uniform
("the place is entirely musical. No person can live there")
aristeas, in seven years
("and sprang with that double twist into the
middle world and thence took flight over the
Scythian hordes and to the Hyperborean,
touch of the north wind
carrying with him Apollo.")
the common gain, reverted
("the nomad is perfect but the pure motion
which has no track is utterly lost")
on the matter of thermal packing
("the skin porous to the eloquence of")
first notes on daylight
("we owe that in theory to the history of person
as an entire condition of landscape")
the glacial question, unsolved
("we live in that question, it is a condition of fact")
bronze : fish
("that's the human city, & we are
now at the edge of it. Which way
are we facing. Burn the great sphere:
count them, days of the week.")
moon poem
("the night is already quiet and I am
bound in the rise and fall: learning
to wish always for more. This is the
means, the extension to keep very steady
so that the culmination will be silent too and flow
with no trace of devoutness")
the western gate
("the formal circuit is inclusion. the line runs
inflected but the shapes are blue & shining.
It is the orbit, tides, the fluctual spread,
we shiver with reason and with love:")
in the long run, to be stranded
("it's time or more clearly
the sequence of year; a thickening in the words
as the coins themselves wear thin")
numbers in time of trouble
("whichever time standard we're on, the question
of how fast and whether it's worth it, we are
underlaid by drift in the form of mantle, and
that should at least be a start")

one for the dematerialisation thread this, from Rilke's 9th Duino Elegy

Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you
can't impress him with the splendour you've felt; in the cosmos
where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show him
some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,
till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.
Tell him things. He'll stand more astonished: as you did
beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.

jh prynne explaining the basics. from a letter to charles olson

"I am struck with the need to readjust parts of THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER, as a chap-book,
towards some sense of the hinges in European language or it's northern groupings considered in general.
"the transference of force from agent to object," write Feneollosa, "which constitute natural phenomenoa,
occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order." Here EP
interposes the gloss, "Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric." Hence the simple declarative
sentence with one transitive & active verb, furnishes the kinetic type. But where are the sources of this force,
how is access to them won out of the ambient silences which surround man on the brink of speech? From
the things themselves has been the answer, and in the final reckoning must always be. Things are nouns, and
particular substantives of this order are potential storehouses of potential energy, hoard up the world's
available motions. But there are other energies: the compelling human necessities, the exhaling of breath,
the sugar which feeds the muscles of the diaphragm and lung. It seems probable that this source was
channeled into speech simultaneously with if not before, the substantive pictogram or derived lexiograph.
To sing is to modulate and make audible the breathing, declare the bodie's functioning, it's various rhythms,
like shouting or the groan of agony."

Corpsey said:

What is the significance of this quotation for you, or are you completely in the dark?

I don't know who's speaking or the context but it seems to me the interesting part is "She has nothing to offer me". Because it's as if the speaker is judging his wife according to how she acts towards him.

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It's the main character Rick Deckard. He's stuck in a dysfunctional marriage with his depressed wife and he's fallen for one of the androids he's supposed to take out. Guess I like the line because I relate with the android perspective, outside looking in and desiring idealised stuff. And then to tag it with the line about the wife somehow refracts it out into this really bleak image of Rick. Hit me pretty well.

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice” (Heart of Darkness) always stood out to me.

Corpsey said:

Re: the above

Just come across this Blake quotation in a book about Joyce:

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

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which book is this bubz.

i'm in love with this, from mumbo-jumbo

I am always on the lookout for these tbh

have been working my thru the bible- which I'd never read - lately and it is of course absolutely chock full of them. a couple recent faves:

"The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth"

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels...I am become as sounding brass"

the tomorrow + tomorrow/sound + fury soliloquy from Macbeth, of course

also Marlowe's "But that was in another country/and besides, the wench is dead"

the "deserts of vast eternity line" from To His Coy Mistress has for whatever reason always stuck with me

This quote from a biography of Alexander the Great I read awhile back, describing prominent Greeks traveling to the Macedonian court for the wedding of Alexander's father Phillip (where Phillip would very famously be publicly murdered, likely at the behest of Alexander's mother for a complicated mix of personal/political reasons)

"they would have seen no further into this land which they knew for its silver-fir forests, free-ranging horses, and kings who broke their word and never died a peaceful death"

idk I think the combination of silver-fir forests and perfidious, precariously violent kings

version said:

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice”

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recently read James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet and this is the epigraph of one of the books. The Big Nowhere I think, tho I'd have to check to be sure.

there is an astounding passage in The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, describing 1st-hand the conquistadors first sight of Tenochtitlan rising out of the mist

it reads better in Spanish but this still gets it across

"And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico (i.e. Tenochtitlán), we were astounded. These great towns and temples and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It is not surprising therefore that I should write in this vein. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before..."

you have to imagine these basically yokels - conquistadors were largely sons of minor gentry from dusty backwaters like Extremadura, the kind of people who'd travel into the unknown seeking fortune, and their retinues - coming on possibly the greatest city on Earth at that point, at (to them) the very edge of the world.

there are also some very gnarly passages later on about them entering into a conquered, devastated Tenochtitlan after they'd defeated the Aztecs in an apocalyptic war

I'm talking rubble, piles of dead bodies, pack of feral dogs, survivors of plague and siege shuffling out hollow-eyed past the death of their civilization

granted the Aztecs were pretty unpleasant themselves in many ways, but still, like touring Sodom after God smote it with brimstone etc