| Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|08:19 pm] |
I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards-presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|09:09 pm] |
EXT. Black Palace, Steps - Night (All CGI)
We hear the QUEEN scream.
Down the steps come hordes of creatures. Everything that the budget will run to. Thousands upon thousands of Orcs and mighty Uruk-hai, their weapons glinting as they prepare to do the bidding of the evil Saruman. . . Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Wrong movie. No budget.
Whatever we've got comes down the stairs.
Black birds come out of the windows.
Black tendrils and tentacles explode out of the door.
Mirrormask: The Illustrated Film Script - Dave McKean & Neil Gaiman. |
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| Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|09:35 pm] |
"No. I think you can provide some insight and advance this study."
"And what possible reason could I have to do that?"
"Curiosity."
"About what?"
"About why you're here. About what happened to you."
"Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You' ve got everybody in moral dignity pants - nothing is ever anybody's fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I'm evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?"
The part in italics is the quote. The stuff before is just for context. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|05:46 am] |
"Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
the men of Troy and Argives under arms havesuffered
years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!"
the iliad, book III, ln 180-190 |
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| The Darcy Connection by Elizabeth Aston |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|10:45 pm] |
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"Her voice was so husky with emotion that she was barely audible, and when she finished, she was beyond words. It was as though her world had shrunk, leaving her nothing but this box of a room and future which held uncertainly unhappiness and probably ruin. She lifted her hand and rubbed it over her eyes. There were no tears in her eyes, she was trying to wipe away an immense weariness." |
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| Two I like |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|06:29 pm] |
Just finished reading Taught For America by Sarah Sentilles, a woman who taught elementary school in Compton several years ago. My favorite quote from the book is actually a Desmond Tuto quote, from his book No Future Without Forgiveness - it describes his feelings on voting in a democratic election for the first time.
"It was a mountaintop experience. The black person entered the booth one person and emerged on the other side a new, transfigured person. She entered weighed down by the anguish and burden of oppression, with the memory of being treated like rubbish gnawing away at her vitals like some corrosive acid. She reappared someone new, 'I am free.'...The white person entered the voting booth burdened by the load of guilt for having enjoyed the fruits of oppression and injustice. He emerged as somebody new. He too cried out, 'The burden has been lifted from my shoulders, I am free.' "
And one of the author's own, summing up her 2 years of teaching:
"I struggled while I was teaching in Compton. When I stopped teaching, I struggled harder still. I didn't know what to do with what I had experienced. I asked myself, again and again, 'How must my life change in response to what I have witnessed?' My conversion, my awakening to the understanding that I am responsible and accountable for what is happening in Compton and in places like Compton across this country, devastated me. But it also liberated and empowered me.If I am accountable and responsible, then what I do matters. I believe something else is possible for me and these children. I hope that my life, lived with integrity, lived awake and engaged, lived with these children in my heart and mind, will do more good than harm. I don't know what the outcome of my actions will be, but I will keep at it, knowing other people are keeping at it too, and hope that something good and just might emerge. This is faith for me." |
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| For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|02:37 am] |
Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.
~ June Jordan ~ |
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| mood du jour |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|04:34 pm] |
"I want to be free of you... the way you, obviously, are free of me."
-Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo |
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| Jacob's Room; Virginia Woolf |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|07:00 pm] |
"Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title."
"In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows."
Jacob's Room; Virginia Woolf
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| Gatsby; Fitzgerald |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|10:56 am] |
This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
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Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
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--to-morrow 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.
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selections from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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| Love as an obsession |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|03:59 pm] |
Hi there!
I'm here because I have a (little) request.
Actually, I've read a bunch of quotes about love viewed as an obsession, but few of them were acutally from literary works.
So, do you know any good quote about that subject from novels or novelettes? :)
Thank you so much!
Bye! |
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| Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|08:31 pm] |
"'But tell me one thing, one thing from that lofty height. What was it like... making love?'
"I was walking away from her before I meant to, I was searching like a dim-witted mortal man for cape and gloves.
'You don't remember?' she asked with perfect calm, as I put my hand on the brass door handle.
"I stopped, feeling her eyes on my back, ashamed, and then I turned around and made as if to think, Where am I going, what shall I do, why do I stand here?
" 'It's something hurried,' I said, trying now to meet her eyes. How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest. 'And it was seldom savored... something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.' "
To clarify: Claudia, a vampire trapped forever within the visage of a prepubescent girl, asks her companian Louis what it was like having sex. To which he replies 'I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.'
The pale shadow of killing.
What a concept.
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|12:59 am] |
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
sylvia plath. |
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| About History |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|02:32 am] |
I've just began Small Gods from Terry Pratchett and I read this very part and it made the social science student in me smiles.
Things just happens, one after another . They don't care who knows. But history... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well things just happens, one after another. And, of course, it has to be controlled. Otherwise, it might turn into anything. Because history, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles. And these things have to happen at the right time.This is difficult. In a chaotic universe there are too many things to go wrong. It's too easy for a general's horse to lose a shoe at the wrong time, or for someone to mishear an order, or for the carrier of the vital message to be waylaid by some men with sticks and a cash flow problem. Then there are wild stories, parasitic growths on the tree of history, trying to bend it their way .
So history as its caretakers.
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|12:50 am] |
"I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
"Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.
the white oleander -- janet fitch. |
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| the perks of being a wallflower - stephen chbosky |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|11:26 am] |
| [ | music |
| | hatsukoi - mayumi kojima | ] |
And Sam looked at the paper and then she looked at me."Charlie. . . Have you ever kissed a girl?"
I shook my head no. It was so quiet.
"Not even when you were little?"
I shook my head no again. And she looked very sad.
She told me about the first time she was kissed. She told me that it was with one of her dad's friends. She was seven. And she told nobody except Mary Elizabeth and then Patrick a year ago. And she started to cry. And she said something that I won't forget. Ever.
"I know that you know that I like Craig. And I know that I told you not to think of me that way. And I know that we can't be together like that. But I want to forget all those things for a minute. Okay?"
"Okay"
"I want to make sure that the first person you kiss loves you. Okay?"
"Okay" She was crying harder now. And I was, too, because when I hear something like that I just can't help it.
"I just want to make sure of that. Okay?"
"Okay"
And she kissed me. And it was the kind of kiss that I could never tell my friends about out loud. It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life. |
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| Hemingway |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|08:06 pm] |
"Probably Golz knew all about this too and wanted to make the point that you must make your whole life in the two nights that are give to you; that living as we do now must concentrate all of that which you should always have into the short time that you have it."
-Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
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| The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|03:25 pm] |
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"Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction." |
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