Quotes from books that have lit you up

version

Well-known member
The Hellfire Sermon in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man put the fear of God in me, felt like I should drop everything and run to the nearest church.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Noted this with interest in Ezra Pound's Paris Review interview:

"Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn’t worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value. All that must be regarded as exercise."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Hopefully not making this a thread in which I just record vaguely interesting stuff from books. But OTOH, why not?

In Martin Gayford's 'The Yellow House', Gauguin describing the Third Republic as a "trompe-l'œil" republic.

And Van Gogh accidentally (through sloppy French) describing the sun, not as 'sulphur' but as 'suffering'.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Not a quote but I want to share this.

Nearing 40

Insomniac since four, hearing this narrow,

rigidly metred, early-rising rain

recounting, as its coolness numbs the marrow,

that I am nearing forty, nearer the weak

vision thickening to a frosted pane,

nearer the day when I may judge my work

by the bleak modesty of middle age

as a false dawn, fireless and average,

which would be just, because your life bled for

the household truth, the style past metaphor

that finds its parallel however wretched

in simple, shining lines, in pages stretched

plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a guttering

rainspout; glad for the sputter

of occasional insight,

you who foresaw

ambition as a searing meteor

will fumble a damp match and, smiling, settle

for the dry wheezing of a dented kettle,

for vision narrower than a louvre’s gap,

then, watching your leaves thin, recall how deep

prodigious cynicism plants its seed,

gauges our seasons by this year’s end rain

which, as greenhorns at school, we’d

call conventional for convectional;

or you will rise and set your lines to work

with sadder joy but steadier elation,

until the night when you can really sleep,

measuring how imagination

ebbs, conventional as any water clerk

who weighs the force of lightly falling rain,

which, as the new moon moves it, does its work

even when it seems to weep.

Derek Walcott
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I thought, in other words, that I could always recover. I was only beginning to learn that the dead stay everlastingly present among us, taking the form of palpable vacancies that only disappear when, as we must, we take them into ourselves. We take the dead inside of us; we fill their voids with our own substance; we become them. The living dead do not belong to a race of fantasy, they constitute the inhabitants of Earth. The longer we live, the more numerous the inviting holes death opens up in our lives, and the more we add to the death inside, until we embody nothing else.And when we in turn we die, those who survive embody us, the whole of us, our individual selves and the crowd of dead men and women we have carried within us.

Harry Matthews, Cigarettes.

The remainder of the novel (this is from the last page) is incredible but I'm not going to type it all out right now.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luke might like this:

"When Godard theorises he becomes very simplistic. But when he doesn’t do that he’s a great poet"
 

other_life

bioconfused
compilation of stuff from levinas' 'talmudic readings':

“Decidedly, with Judaism, we are dealing with a religion of adults... The instrument of forgiveness is in my hands... The ritual transgression that I want to erase without resorting to the help of others would be precisely the one that demands all my personality, it is the work of return for which no one can take my place... Taken by itself, and separated from the impiety it contains, the ritual transgression is the source of my cruelty, my harmfulness, my self indulgence...

In my most severe isolation, I obtain forgiveness. But how do you expect a moral conscience affected to its marrow to find in itself the neccesary support to begin this progress towards its own interiority, and towards solitude? One must rely on the objective order of the community to obtain this intimacy of deliverance... This is the work that is equivalent to God's pardon...

Speech, in its original sense, is a commitment to a third party on behalf of our neighbor – the act par excellence, the institution of society. The original function of speech not in designating an object in order to communicate with the other in a game with no consequence, but in assuming towards someone a responsibility on behalf of someone else. To speak is to engage the interests of people. Responsibility would be the essence of language...

The injury done to God, then, is the abuse of power that the very person put in charge of safeguarding the principle slides into. Who will be able to intercede [for the would-be intercessor]? Who can interven? In the name of what law? Those who are given the responsibility of applying the law reject the law, and turn the scale of values upside down...

Excessive moral sensitivity will become the cause of death... The game of offence and forgiveness is a dangerous one... It is better not to sin than to be granted forgiveness. This is the first and necessary truth, without which the door is open to every perversion...”
 

william_kent

Well-known member
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new"

best first sentence to a novel ever... ( Beckett )

"There will always be pain. Nothing lasts."

best closing to a novel ( translated, but Gunter Grass )
 

catalog

Well-known member
"... later, transport would be general, moving everything to everywhere in a tangled mess of routes and wrong turnings - this was how the streets had come into being, this was why we have had the grid left irregularly to confine the buildings rising ever higher, transporting us in a slow, primitive but persistent manner towards the sky."

From Lights, by Woops. Great opening para.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i'm reading the van gogh letters and i love the way he tries to advise or cheer up his brother in the following little bit:

I advised you to go out quite a lot, but if you don’t like it, don’t do it. You know that I didn’t go out so very much either, and that people often remarked upon it.
How much I’d like for us to be able to breakfast together or drink a cup of chocolate in my room. Keep well, old chap. Don’t take things that don’t concern you directly too much to heart, and don’t let them weigh upon you too heavily. How is it going, eating bread? Have you tried it yet? In haste, I shake your hand heartily in thought.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
i'm reading the van gogh letters and i love the way he tries to advise or cheer up his brother in the following little bit:
Have you seen Loving Vincent? Its mainly about the relationship between Vincent and Theo, plus some other close acquaintances.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
When I read Moby Dick I was really young, I don't think it would have been true to say I was religious, but that bit when he says "I baptise you, not in the name of God, but in the name of the Devil" was shocking to me, it seemed really cool and I loved it but it was so naughty I almost didn't dare say it in case I was struck down by lightning or something. Truly rebellious I guess.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
I still haven't found any new ones since this thread.

 

ghost

Well-known member
IMG_2147.jpegBarthes had some bangers, and I think "Love is neither dialectical nor reformist" is near foremost among them.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
William James ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’
GettyImages-200565417-001-577b53245f9b5858752bfee6.jpg

“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”
 
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