January 5, 2013
"As long as we’re young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you’ve come to. There’s no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you’ve lived this long, it’s because you’ve squashed any poetry you had in you. Life is keeping body and soul together."

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

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(Notes: 6)
  
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December 19, 2012
"the gray day, the red bulblight, I had never heard such a story from such a soul except from the great men I had known in my youth, great heroes of America I’d been buddies with, with whom I’d adventured and gone to jail and known in raggedy dawns, the boys beat on curbstones seeing symbols in the saturated gutter, the Rimbauds and Verlaines of America on Times Square, kids—no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I’d roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity, the hugeness of her face now like the sudden vast Tiger head on a poster on the back of a woodfence in the smoky dumpyards Saturday no-school mornings, direct, beautiful, insane, in the rain."

— Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans

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(Notes: 5)
  
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December 3, 2012
"In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already fully provided what what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed only by the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their willful inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But if the eminent Juggularius himself ever advocated in mere words a doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still more of that superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath nothing at all, even that which he hath,—then is the truest book in the world a lie."

— Herman Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities

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November 22, 2012
"Hope elevates, and joy
Brightens his crest, as when a wand’ring fire,
Compact of unctuous vapour, while the night
Condense, and the cold environs round,
Kindled through agitation to a flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads th’ amazed night-wanderer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool,
There swallowed up and lost, from succour far."

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

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(Notes: 1)
  
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November 10, 2012
"My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.
What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.
The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety’s extended cheek.
The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is ‘not to bow down before the law’).
A poet doesn’t justify — he doesn’t accept — nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it."

— Georges Bataille, “Poetry”

1:13pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZY511yW-BMyz
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: Georges Bataille poetry quote literature 
November 7, 2012
"My life only has a meaning insofar as I lack one: oh, but let me be mad! Make something of all this he who is able to, understand it he who is dying, and there the living self is, knowing not why, its teeth chattering in the lashing wind: the immensity, the night engulfs it and, all on purpose, that living self is there just in order … ‘not to know’. But as for GOD? What have you got to say, Monsieur Rhetorician? And you, Monsieur Godfearer? — GOD, if He knew, would be a swine. I said ‘GOD, if He knew, would be a swine.’ He (He would I suppose be, at that particular moment, somewhat in disorder, his peruke would sit all askew) would entirely grasp the idea … but what would there be of the human about him? Beyond, beyond everything … and yet farther, and even farther still … HIMSELF, in an ecstasy, above an emptiness … And now? I TREMBLE. O Thou my Lord [in my distress, I call out unto my heart], O deliver me, make them blind! The story — how shall I go on with it?
But I am done.
From out of the slumber which for so short a space kept us in the taxi, I awoke, the first to open his eyes … The rest is irony, long, weary waiting for death …"

— Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda

2:26pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZY511yWoxOAI
(Notes: 3)
  
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November 6, 2012
"For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity."

— Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

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(Notes: 7)
  
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October 22, 2012
"That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things. That was when it was sad, when you stood by the bed and undressed, thinking, ‘When he kisses me, shivers run up my back. I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words. But something about the darkness of the streets has a meaning.’"

— Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

7:14pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZY511yVo6WTp
(Notes: 4)
  
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October 15, 2012
"She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.
But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally ‘pure’. Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels."

— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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October 8, 2012
"She hummed to herself, and I could barely hear the sound of it above the noise of the big motor. It was a strange lonesome tune that no one had ever hummed before but everyone had heard it at some time, sounding clear above the low beat of fear in their hearts."

— John Farris, Baby Moll

6:08pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZY511yUwAb-x
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: John Farris Baby Moll quote literature 
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