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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 09-2010
Posted From: 86.177.251.205
Posted on Thursday, July 31, 2014 - 02:42 pm:   

Mine, collected over some years:
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"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."
from 'The Area' by Stefan Grabinski

An amusing and provocative description by the narrator of meeting, when playing chess, the eponymous ‘hero’ of RAMEAU'S NEPHEW by Denis Diderot, an eponymous 'hero' who is also “the nephew of that famous musician [...] who wrote such reams of incomprehensible visions and apocalyptic verities on the theory of the music, of which neither he nor anyone else ever understood a word, and who left us with a number of operas where we can enjoy various harmonies, unfinished songs, unrelated ideas, uproars, flights, triumphal fanfares, spears, ennoblements, seditious whisperings, endless victories; he also left us dance tunes that will live forever;…”
This somewhat stirs me to recall the passage above from a more modern author about Wrzesmian. But Diderot’s narrator (Diderot himself?) conjures up the obverse side of the ‘eccentric’ coin: “If one of them [an eccentric] appears in a group, he’s like a grain of yeast that ferments, and restores to each of us his natural individuality. He shocks us, he stirs us up; he forces us to praise or blame; he brings out the truth;…”

"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
From 'Ravissante' by Robert Aickman
.
"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things – by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?"
from 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)

"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it."
– John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')

"She was the part of you which you had never been able to untie and set free, the part that wanted to dance and run and sing, taking strong draughts of wind and sunlight; and was, instead, done up in intricate knots and overcast with shadows; the part that longed to look outward and laugh, accepting life as an easy exciting thing; and yet was checked by a voice that said doubtfully that there were dark ideas behind it all, tangling the web; and turned you inward to grope among the roots of thought and feeling for the threads."
– from 'Dusty Answer' (1927) by Rosamond Lehmann
.

“So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.”
From 'Wizard and Glass' by Stephen King
”There are faces made for moonlight. There are faces created to respond to the wind. There are faces for sandy deserts, for lonely seashores, for solitary headlands, for misty dawns, for frosty midnights. Cordelia’s face was made for rain. It had nothing in it that was normally beautiful; and yet it became at this moment the living incarnation of all those long hours when rain had mingled with her secretest hopes. Her face was charged with the rain that had streamed down the window-panes at Cardiff Villa, twilight after twilight, while her thoughts had been flying far away; far over dripping forests, far over swollen rivers to green-black castle walls of which she fancied herself the mistress or the captive.”
— from 'A Glastonbury Romance' by John Cowper Powys
.
“Unseen or at least unremarked, I orbit the camp. That’s what I want: a place in which I have no part. I want to ride through space like wind in wind and sleep on the void, and be a go-between with nothing but between. I only know useless knowledge. The camp spins there to one side of me like so many floating candles collecting in a weak eddy. What I feel inside myself is fierce and calm; it’s a ruthless desire for an immortality of perfect weakness where I can be a tirelessly efficient functionary turning things over from one end of the message circuit to the other and back again, so that I never stop going back. As long as I’m going back, logically speaking, I yet won’t be back, only now am I getting under way. No one sees you while you’re in transit and the moment you arrive is the moment you have to turn around and leave again, provided there is some return correspondence, and even if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing to do but wait for some other message which will sooner or later have to go out and take you along with it.”
— From MEMBER by Michael Cisco
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“To your mind, there was no greater injustice than to be doubted when you had told the truth, to be called a liar when you hadn’t lied, for there was no recourse then, no way to defend your integrity in the face of your accuser, and the frustration caused by such a moral injury would burn deep into you, continue to burn into you, becoming a fire that could never be extinguished.”
— from ‘Report from the Interior’ by Paul Auster

“’Tis well we know you were loth to leave us, winding your hobbledehorn, right royal post, but, aruah sure, pulse of our slumber, dreambookpage, by the grace of Votre Dame, when the natural morning of your nocturne blankmerges into the national morning of golden sunup…” – Finnegans Wake
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 108.221.136.29
Posted on Monday, May 17, 2021 - 08:07 pm:   

The barbarian in me wants to scribble pictures of stickmen and penises all over this.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.2.197
Posted on Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - 11:08 am:   

Woah. Nobody reacted.
I have to say, I could not penetrate any of those passages at all.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 108.221.136.29
Posted on Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - 06:50 pm:   

(Tony, you are clearly either a perceptive mind, or a kindred spirit, or [the more likely] both: you perfectly translated my "shocking" statement... thank god, I didn't want anyone taking that the wrong way!)
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.27.122
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 12:00 am:   

Poor Des. He poured out his heart here, revealed huge gifts he got from literature. But that's the thing, take these lines away from the books and it's like showing us a shaft of light shining through the canopy of a forest you saw but not the forest.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 108.221.136.29
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 07:16 pm:   

[I'm about to say something that will come off as mean as my previous passage seems at first blush, but it's not intended as such - why I am prologuing it like this; because, stood starkly, it would be even meaner! But now, read the following imagining I never wrote this preface:]

He poured out his heart, Tony, yes... but anyone whose "crucial life-changing passages" came from the likes of Aickman, Durrell, Fowles... Finnegans Wake?!?... probably had little of merit to impart to anyone, anyway.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.205.241.214
Posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 08:30 pm:   

No, I get you.
Younknow what changes my life? The things around me right this minute. I don't mean to be dismissive or flippant, I really mean it. Last night I mistakenly went out into the van to look for my phone (it turned out to be in the house). My foot (in socks) stepped on something moist and small and when I returned from the van I saw a slug, contracting, it's guts out. The slug died for nothing, because of a mistake. It made me really sad and ruminate on fate for a long while, more than maybe many passages of books.
I once thought art lay in our eyes, the tone of our lives - like that Greta film, which I loved so much for its craft rather than its content. You know, like you meet up with a friend and it's great but you couldn't remember a thing they said.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.30.111
Posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - 09:04 am:   

No pleasure here now. It's entirely dead.
RIP, RCCMB.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 - 03:53 am:   

That is not dead, which can eternal lie. And with strange eons, even death can die....
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.7.229
Posted on Friday, July 02, 2021 - 09:21 pm:   

See? I just can't do it. Don't think I ever will. :-(
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2021 - 06:38 am:   

I'm sorry, just taking that last quote alone, from FINNEGANS WAKE?... No one EVER had their LIFE CHANGED, from reading that. Sorry. Don't believe it. It's stuff and nonsense, and I defy anyone to tell me their life changed from such stuff and nonsense. Absolutely stupid and inane. There, I said it. Ha! And I don't take it back!
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 99.180.70.140
Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2021 - 06:41 am:   

These might be "favorite" lines from fiction. These are not "crucial" or "life-changing" lines from fiction. Most of these lines are mediocre at best. They're blather. All of the great movement of literature has failed humanity, if THESE lines are "crucial" or "life-changing."
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.31.115
Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2021 - 10:24 am:   

Des is sadly not very chatty... I keep trying to start up conversations with him but he like keeps his hands under his armpits like I'm trying to subpoena him. It's quite rejectiony. I don't think he gets how much it gets me down. Ànd he's still friends and more chatty with that cuntwipe Rhys. I just don't understand.

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