Literary Blurt Thread

[BlackShanglan]

"...in the long term, excess information was even more dangerous than Communist censorship because it provoked not a reaction and the will to resist but instead weariness and resignation."

--Patrick Ourednik, from Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century​

Oooh. I really must read that. I think he's got the point by its vitals there.

Hmmm. What to add. So many books, so much to choose from! I think I shall go with ...

The most representative literature of the day – the writing which appeals to, which has done so much to form, the younger generation – is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the Classic, the Romantic. After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence: an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art – those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities – then this representative literature of today, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease.

-- Arthur Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," 1897

 

[maggot420]

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
~ Thomas Babington

 

[Munachi]

The jungle has swallowed them.

(final sentence of "La vorágine" by José Eustasio Rivera)

 

[Munachi]

from one of my favorite books, "Why the child is cooking in the polenta", by Aglaja Veteranyi:

"Anyway, men don´t believe in God as much as women and children do, because of the competition. My father doesn´t want God to be my father as well."

 

[Varian P]

My final few from Miller's "Tropic of Cancer"

"The insanity of it! Learning, the empty breadbasket!..There's something obscene in this love of the past which ends in breadlines and dugouts. Something obscene about this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives. Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race."

O O O O

"The night hung close, dagger-pointed, drunk as a maniac."

O O O O

"Time beating away like a meat ax."

 

[Varian P]

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

George Orwell, Why I Write​

 

[Varian P]

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

George Orwell, Why I Write​

 

[McKenna]

"Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once."

-From Julius Caesar, W. Shakespeare

 

[Guest]

"Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once."

-From Julius Caesar, W. Shakespeare

SWEET TITTIES OF HEAVEN!!~ jbw (on seeing Mck's av

 

[Guest]

SWEET TITTIES OF HEAVEN!!~ jbw (on seeing Mck's av

you clack me up~ vella of the love shack

 

[Munachi]

But after the believe in Santa Claus had turned out to be a believe in the gas man, without taking care of the order in the letter to the corinthians, they tried it with love: I love you, they said, oh, I love you. Do you love you too? Do you love me, pray tell, do you really love me? I love me too. And for so much love they called each other radish, loved radish, bit each other, one radish bit off the other's radish out of love. And told examples of beautiful heavenly and also earthly love between radishes, and whispered shortly before biting freshly, hungrily, and sharply: Radish, tell, do you love me? I love me too.

Günter Grass: The Tin Drum
(quote translated by me)

 

[Varian P]

"The ugly little window proved accessible to the sunset; a fiery parallelogram appeared on the side wall. The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments."

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading​

 

[maggot420]

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars
~Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

 

[Varian P]

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are 'only doing their duty', as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1940​

 

[McKenna]

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anais Nin

 

[Munachi]

You could also claim right in the beginning, that these days it is impossible to write a novel, but then, in a way behind your own back, write quite an impressive novel, so in the end you appear to be the last possible writer of novels.

(Günter Grass: The tin drum)

 

[shereads]

Old whores don't giggle much.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

 

[Varian P]

The kisses I spied. Your and his kisses, which most resembled some sort of feeding, intent, untidy, and noisy. Or when you, with eyes closed tight, devoured a spurting peach and then, having finished, but still swallowing, with your mouth still full, you cannibal, your glazed eyes wandered, your fingers were spread, your inflamed lips were all glossy, your chin trembled, all covered with drops of the cloudy juice, which trickled down onto your bared bosom, while the Priapus who had nourished you suddenly, with a convulsive oath, turned his bent back to me, who had entered the room at the wrong moment.

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading​

 

[Varian P]

"...a glance as moist as a kiss..."

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading​

 

[Varian P]

"wandering in the pulsating labyrinths of another's flesh…"

Victor Pelevin, The Life of Insects​

 

[neonlyte]

'You were milk-white and fresh to drink. Will your skin discolour, its brightness blurring? Will your neck and spleen distend? Will the rigourous contours of your stomach swell under an infertile load? It may be so and the private drawing I keep of you will be a poor reproduction then. It may be so but if you are broken then so am I.' Jeanette Winterson - Written On The Body

 

[Varian P]

Not exactly a "blurt," but I think insect porn seems worthy of an exception.


Natasha unbuttoned Sam's shirt and pressed the tender suckers on her palms against the coarse hair of his chest…Natasha's palms slid lower and encountered something reminiscent of the warm cylinder block of a racing car. Natasha realized that this was the spot from which Sam's legs grew, and she stroked it gently, then moved her hand lower until it touched the first stripe on the membranous abdomen covered with short stubble.

"Oh yeah, honey," Sam muttered. "I can feel it."
He put a hand on Natasha's cold, hard back and fondled the damp moss at the base of her trembling wings.

"It's been my dream for ages," Natasha whispered in English, repeating the optimistic intonation of the Linguaphone course, "to learn American bed whispers."

Sam felt his proboscis straightening up under Natasha's dexterous hands, and he looked ecstatically into her eyes. A long dark tongue with a shaggy tip divided into two short hairy branches hung from her jaw. The tongue shuddered in excitement, and dark green drops of a thick secretion trickled down it.

"Eat me," whispered Natasha, tugging on the antennae protruding from beneath Sam's eyes, and he buzzed and groaned as his proboscis crunched through the green chitin of her back.

Natasha pressed herself close against Sam's rapidly swelling and hardening abdomen, which had turned crimson, and pushed against it with all of her six legs.

"Oh," she whispered in English, "it's getting so big and hard…"

Viktor Pelevin, The Life of Insects​

 

[Varian P]

By the time he began wondering whether he was doing everything right, his life had become a routine consisting for the most part of events very much like each other repeated in a monotonous sequence.

Viktor Pelevin, The Life of Insects​

 

[shereads]

Evelyn Waugh spent a fortune on semi-colons to construct this sentence:

Aimée Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind - the objects which barked the intruder's shins - had been aquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the adverisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product, but the spirit - ah, the spirit was something apart; it had to be sought afar; not here in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas.

~ Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

 

[Munachi]

...But I have just gone to bed. Und already the alarm clock is ringing. A quarter after six. That can't be. Maybe a quarter after seven. A closer look: A quarter after eight. This alarm clock might be a master work of the swiss art of making clocks, but it's hands are so small you can hardly see them. A quarter after nine. Not that, either. My glasses. A quarter after ten. Exactly.

Alejo Carpentier: El Recurso del Metodo (translation by me, as I don't have an english version here)...

not really any intelligent wisdom about life, this part, but somehow it sounds quite familiar to me...