/lit/ - Literature

>>11991139
Unironically Hamlet's opening soliloquy, "To be or not to be"

>Inb4 babby's first
I'm new to literature 2bh but it feels good to finally kind of understand things instead of scratching my head and feeling dumb I guess

>>11991139
"fuck niggers"
some anon frogposter

>>11991147
>opening

>>11991147
>opening
>>11991139
Also Hamlet, but Yorick's scene (maybe not the best but my personal favorite), and Richard II's prison soliloquy, I'm a Shakesfag.
Also "Jesus wept" of course, so much said in just two words.

>>11991139
Caliban’s speech. Melted my heart, justified my life. Like a god whispering to me that everything will be OK.

nigga be nigga see...nigga thee

>>11991139
voyages II hart crane

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

>>11991139
Yes!

>This is the Night Mail crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order. Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Storm of Steel’s passage in the Great Batfle chapter when Junger finds a British officer, is about to kill him when the British officer holds up a picture of his family and Jünger let’s him go.
Wish I could post it here but I can’t find an online PDF of SoS.

>>11992684
Just type it from memory

>Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

>>11991139
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears
C is for Clara who wasted away
D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh
....
Y is for Yorick whose head was knocked in
Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin

>>11993147
I always thought that Clara had it the worst out of the lot

>>11991147
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UrcR_01-bM&t=4s

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

>>11991139
THEY GIVE BIRTH ASTRIDE OF A GRAVE

“If that’s the price of getting together I’ll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn us into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One cannot be punished for being good! One cannot be penalized for ability! If it IS right, then we better start slaughtering one another because there isn’t any right in the whole of the world!”
-Dagny Taggart, Atlas Shrugged

>>11991139
"And then there was Twisk, who usually appeared as an orange-haired maiden wearing a gown of gray gauze. One day while wading in the shallows of Tilhilvelly Pond, she was surprised by the troll Mangeon. He seized her about the waist, carried her to the bank, ripped away the gray gauze gown and prepared to make an erotic junction. At the sight of his priapic instrument, which was grotesquely large and covered with warts, Twisk became frantic with fear. By dint of jerks, twists and contortions she foiled the best efforts of the sweating Mangeon. But her strength waned and Mangeon's weight began to grow oppressive. She tried to protect herself with magic, but in her excitement she could remember only a spell used to relieve dropsy in farm animals, which, lacking better, she uttered, and it proved efficacious. Mangeon's massive organ shriveled to the size of a small acorn and became lost in the folds of his great gray belly.

Mangeon uttered a scream of dismay, but Twisk showed no remorse. Mangeon cried out in fury: "Vixen, you have done me a double mischief, and you shall do appropriate penance."

He took her to a road which skirted the forest. At a crossroads he fashioned a kind of pillory and affixed her to this construction. Over her head he posted a sign: DO WHAT YOU WILL WITH ME and stood back. "Here you stay until three passersby, be they dolts, lickpennies or great earls, have their way with you, and that is the spell I invoke upon you, so that in the future you may choose to be more accommodating to those who accost you beside Tilhilvelly Pond."

- Jack Vance, "Lyonesse"

>>11991139

The opening passage of Quentin's chapter in The Sound and the Fury:

>When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o'clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

When, long ago, the gods created Earth

In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.

The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;

Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,

Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,

Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

My favorite poem is probably Speak White, but it's obviously due to biases, as it relates to the history of my people a lot. And I think also because the author recites it so well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCBCy8OXp7I

Relatively good but amateur translation there :

https://everything2.com/title/Speak+White

>>11991139
I always loved these lines from Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Paul Schmidt translation, but I have read better ones)
>Whenever he seemed depressed, I would follow him into strange, complicated adventures, on and on, into good and evil: but I always knew I could never be a part of his world. Beside his dear body, as he slept, I lay awake hour after hour, night after night, trying to imagine why he wanted so much to escape from reality. No man before ever had such a desire. I was aware - without being afraid for him - that he could become a serious menace to society. Did he, perhaps, have secrets that would remake life? No, I told myself, he was only looking for them.

>>11991139
I unironically like Kipling's "Law of the Jungle". Also his description of how Bagheera freed himself
>Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. "Little Brother," said he, "feel under my jaw."
>Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera's silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.
>"There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the king's palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the Panther—and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away. And because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?"
>"Yes," said Mowgli, "all the jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli."
>"Oh, thou art a man's cub," said the Black Panther very tenderly. "And even as I returned to my jungle, so thou must go back to men at last—to the men who are thy brothers—if thou art not killed in the Council."

>>11993147
It wasnt even rhyme enough to say it was good quote/passagem

>>11993617
spare a thought for Xerxes

>>11996237
what are you even on about anon

>>11993993
Please. No.

>>11991139
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

>>11995220
>and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away
yes
YES

>>11996315
Damn Xerxes

>>11991139
Saint Peter is just fine in Rome.

>>11991139
I am so young, so young, but I
Am not, alas, too young to die.

>...Immobile, bearded and hand palm-lifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the captive architect huddled quietly, carrying in bloodless paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest. Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light. Then hearing would reconicle and he would seem to listen listen to two separate Quentins now - the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts...

Chapter 60 - The Line

bitches aint shit but hoes and tricks

>>11991139
I had one enemy. Two if you counted God.

>>11994063
My man! Came here just to post this.

yall really read some pointless wank

>>11991592
Really? Explain

probably something from The Recognitions. The book's amazing prose gets overshadowed by its length and difficulty

>>11991139
To write a blues song/
is to regiment riots/
and pluck gems from graves.

Fucked my shit up for a while

>The world is not dying, it is being killed. >And those that are killing it have names and addresses.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

>>11998365
this is beautiful what is this from

Convinced myself; I seek not to convince.

>>11991139
what has history to do with me? mine is the first and only world!

>>11991139
"All the niggers and jews are dead"

>>11996321
>yes
>YES
?

“How could he be a genuine mystic and be so addicted to nicotine and alcohol?’ Or have occasional shudders of anxiety? Or be sexually interested in women? Or lack enthusiasm for physical exercise? Or have any need for money?

Such people have in mind an idealized vision of the mystic as a person wholly free from fear and attachment, who sees within and without, and on all sides, only the translucent forms of a single divine energy which is everlasting love and delight, as which and from which he effortlessly radiates peace, charity, and joy. What an enviable situation! We, too, would like to be one of those, but as we start to meditate and look into ourselves we find mostly a quaking and palpitating mess, and that this, in turn, is a natural form of the universe like rain and frost, slugs and snails, flies and disease. When the “true mystic” sees flies and disease as translucent forms of the divine, that does not abolish them. I - making no hard-and-fast distinction between inner and outer experience - see my quaking mess as a form of the divine, and that doesn’t abolish it either. but at least I can live with it.

Perhaps all this is a way of saying that I see the same problems in being natural, genuine, or authentic as the saints have found in their efforts to be truly humble, contrite, and in love with God. You can’t make it without faking it, for the real thing is a grace not of your own making, which comes upon some people as involuntarily as their lovely eyes or golden hair. It is thus that by grace or by nature (take your choice) I am a mystic in spite of myself, remaining as much of an irreducible rascal as I am, as standing example of God’s continuing compassion for sinners or, if you will, of Buddha-nature in a dog, or of light shining in darkness. Come to think of it, in what else could it?"
>Alan Watts

Him followed his next mate;
Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood
As gods, and by their own recovered strength,
Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.
‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’
Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat
That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reigh secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Milton's Satan is one of the most appealing characters in poetry.

>>11991139
>These bitches act local and think global
Chief Keef

>>11991147
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks-NbCHUns

Randy went down to Portland, he was looking for a hole to steal.
He was on a find for a good behind, and he was willing to force a squeal.
-Me, the year of our Lord, 2016

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion- most seen here at the Equator- denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel- forbidding- now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.

Ahab turned.

“Starbuck!”

“Sir.”

“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky....."

>>11998862
See >>11997733

>>11998928
based