"And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate malted milkshakes and other rich foods until we were all covered with baby fat. Then we were sent home, and I married a pretty girl who was covered with baby fat, too."
The first time I read this it made me cry. It brought up every lonely feeling and I felt everything drop. Why is making a connection with a woman so difficult?
I had to put the book down and stave off thoughts of killing myself.
inb4 2edgysperglord
>>7788262
>"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" - James Joyce
>>7788262
because you're reading vonnegut.
>>7788262
How the fuck did you come to the conclusion that that passage is representative of how it's difficult for men to connect with women?
I need r9k to leave forever
for sale baby shoes never worn
There's a part of Blood Meridian that describes the group's trek through the desert at nighttime that just blew me away. Chapter 12. I had to read it over and over again and then go outside for a walk because the words were just soaked in a power I couldn't conceive of.
>>7788306
I think OP was sad because the author mentioned connecting with women as something that 'just happens'
Its like 'yeah then I just went and married this girl'
When for an r9k guy doing that would seem impossible and he wouldnt even know where to begin
It shows how easily normal people stumble into relationships
>>7788262
passage in GR about the journey of rocket and how people had always awaited it, ends with something like 'it, the rainbow and they, its children'. got shivers down my spine, pretty much inspired me to read the book and see how amazing it is, and more than just a meme.
>>7788262
“He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Had to have read Joyce for this though
"I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy one, I will induldge in the other."
Maybe it's pleb but Frankenstein way back when was the first book I wver truly loved, and it sent me on the way to a lifetime of reading. Fuck man, I just feel so bad for the monster. After all of the misery and pain he went through, he still just wants to love and be loved, dammit. But it never works so instead he just fucks up Victor's whole life
>>7788790
yeah, Joyce is marvelous. Araby is likewise as glorious and plenty of passages in Ulysses, not to mention Stephen's soul soaring flight through the forest where he encounters the girl.
"Daboded"
>>7788790
Which book
>>7789001
The Dead from Dubliners.
Tearing his eyes from the empty place in the sky where the sun had set, he stopped stumbling back by years and ran, vaulted through centuries. The letter he had torn in pieces lay on the moving air for an instance, was caught, spread up over the ground and blew away from him like a handful of white birds startled into the sky.
>>7788287
>not posting the best thunderword
>Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar
>from "The Cat and the Moon" by W.B. Yeats
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
Things were better then than now.
>>7788466
for you big guy nothing said
'Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.'
From Proust's 'Swann's Way'. Nearly made me cry the first time I read it. It's fairly whimsical, but it hit me like a ton of bricks, because I've done this so many times and never once considered that it happened to others too.
Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water. When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she would be strong enough to open them again.
"She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him."
"...paths that divide and become two paths, paths that lead to a golden kingdom, paths that lead to death, or life, paths where one meets wolves, and who knows? even mountain lions, paths where one loses one's way, paths that not merely divide but become the twenty-one paths that lead back to Eden."
“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs
#me #greg #so random, lol!
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."
Obligatory
I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.
-The gospel of Eve.
I first encountered this passage during a very Gnostic time in my life.
Whenever I read it, my heart wells over with light
>>7788262
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honourable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
>>7789460
>Yeats
Yeats is really good at getting to me.
"Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
this might be one of the edgiest things ever said
but it's beautiful
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
>>7790318
It's edgy, but in the right way. Thanks for sharing that, I mean it.
From The Count of Monte Cristo:
"It is the way of weakened minds to see everything through a black cloud. The soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears stormy and unpromising."
>>7788817
Frankenstein was the monster anon. Not the monster, he was the most human character in that book.
"I drink because I'm bored."
>>7790401
So many great quotes in that book.
"So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Other than that Mrs. Kennedy,
How was Dallas?
>>7790478
Well of course, anon, but I could literally talk about the duality/duplicity of the two and the conjoining semantics, for like, FOREVER.
I'd do it right now, too, but I'm on mobile and can't phone-type for my life
From Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
"O son, how many bodies have we to pass through, how many bands of demons, through how many series of repetitions and cycles of the stars, before we hasten to the One alone?" —Hermes Trimegistus
>>7788306
You're a fool.
>>7788790
I know this gets posted a lot and has become pretty cliche in threads like this but damn if it doesn't get me every time. Fuck I love Dubliners.
>>7790307
Stroope's choral rendition of this is beautiful.
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
>He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.
Easily one of the greatest opening sentences in literature.
"They buried his father in a small plot on the outskirts of Booneville, and William returned to the farm with his mother. That night he could not sleep. He dressed and walked into the field that his father had worked year after year, to the end that he now had found. He tried to remember his father, but the face that he had known in his youth would not come to him. He knelt in the field and took a dry clod of earth in his hand. He broke it and watched the grains, dark in the moonlight, crumble and flow through his fingers. He brushed his hand on his trouser leg and got up and went back to the house. He did not sleep; he lay on the bed and looked out the single window until the dawn came, until there were no shadows upon the land, until it stretched gray and barren and infinite before him."
Though really I could post just about any excerpt from Stoner and fall to pieces. What a marvelous book.
"Those who love seek a philosophy and, because of this, are fond of solitude."
Eiji Yoshikawa
>>7790318
Reminds me of:
«A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.»
>>7788262
“A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
>>7790989
>he dressed
He's... he's not talking about cross-dressing, is he?
>>7792194
Yes. Isn't that obvious?
>>7792200
>trouser leg
>>7792347
>>trouser leg
his hand on his (feminine) trouser leg
“You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him--the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints--is a fool and a Don Quixote."
>>7792166
what did he mean by this?
>>7788817
at first I assumed it was an Elliot Rodger quote
>>7788262
>Why is making a connection with a woman so difficult?
u just have to stop respecting them, once u accept that women are kind of like defective men (the greeks wrote about this, either plato or aristotle) then u can get tons of punnany, it's when u treat a woman as ur equal that it's not going to work, she's looking for a dad and a real man is like for a sexmaid, if u want someone as intelligent and creative as u then get a boyfriend, faggot
“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.” Dick, Scanner Darkly
Used to be /420/ and things got a bit heavy before I was able to quit.
There were two quotes from The Red and the Black that really got me.
>"Like Hercules, he found himself faced with a choice, not between vice and virtue but between comfortable mediocrity and the heroic dreams of youth."
Too close home
>"…Madame de Renal thought about the passions as we think about lottery: a certain disappointment and a happiness sought by fools alone. "
Too close home 2
I'll try to translate a quote from Confession of the Lioness, but it'll probably end up being a shitty translation that wont capture how great it is.
>"I'm not one of those, who in affliction, asks for God's help. Pray, I only pray while asleep. Dreams are my only way of praying. God, please don't get me wrong. It's because there only remains in me one tiny and temporary soul. Only at night this soul lights up, in a delicate whisper so no one else hears it. I apologize for this demotion to animal. Having a soul, however, is a weight that, only dead, i'm capable to bear. That's why i loved so many, in such mistaken loves. That's why i hunt. To keep myself hollow. Free of being a man."
>>7792518
He meant that society hardly recognize the true geniuses of its time. Because most societies tend to misunderstand true geniuses.
>>7788466
please clap
>>7792863
You're a mess.
>>7788262
>The great rocks was not rocks, nor the sea sea, yet they was real as real; and the clouds was gates of glory, and every way I turned my eyes the view was waves of joy and golden light.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page made me cry. A moment of pure happiness at the end of life is all anyone can wish for.
I'm glad NYRB published it, or I wouldn't have given it a chance.
from the greatest of all:
"If I can not have it, I will rise above it. If I can not rise above it, I will destroy it." E.R.
>>7790307
That's not even the best Yeats though, senpai.
"Dolorous Interlude
Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not."
Thought this was a great, short way to get his sentiments across.
>>7792860
Are you pretending to be retarded or are you really that stupid
"As I reached for the cold, perspiring glass, our fingers touched"
-Watchmen
For some reason this quote has stuck with me so solidly. The imagery, while so simplistic, fulfills so wholly idk
