in the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man
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And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass
Ezra Pound, And The Days Are Not Full Enough (poem)
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Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them?
- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
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It is to be understood that so proper and modest a man did not give vent to his sighs in public. However, as far back as the time of Aristotle, it was observed that love and smoke cannot be hidden…
– Eça de Queiroz, from “José Matias,” The Mandarin and Other Stories (The Bodley Head, 1966)
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But I speak softer, every year a little softer.
— Samuel Beckett, from “Texts for Nothing: 8,” The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (Grove Press, 1995)
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While we were kissing, the winter wind known locally as the Hawk soared off the lake on vast wings of snow.
While we were kissing, verbs went uncommitted to memory.
– Stuart Dybek, from “Córdoba,” Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (FSG, 2014)
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Dune Messiah
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Abandon certainty! That's life's deepest command. That's what life's all about. We're a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can't you hear Muad'Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that's only death disguised! Such a future becomes now! He showed you this!
- Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
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Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself -- a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.
- Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
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passages that make you whisper "oh my god"
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“My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.”
— Don DeLillo, Underworld
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This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.
Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race
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In short, my opening was to be a masterpiece of wit and subtlety, irresistible-because I, since I loved her, could not imagine that she did not share my feelings. I had it wrong, like all lovers; I had given her my heart and asked her to do as I would have done, but that is how things have gone for millennia. Were it otherwise, literature would not exist.
– Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
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- Disco Elysium
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