/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10491701]

What's the best sentence you've ever read and how did it impact on you? Not on the purpose to be compared to others, as if it's better or worse, but just why it is good to you.
It can be taken from poetry, fiction or non-fiction, anything /lit/ related.
My vote goes to this part of Tabacaria by Pessoa's heteronym Álvaro de Campos:
"O mundo é para quem nasce para o conquistar
E não para quem sonha que pode conquistá-lo, ainda que tenha razão."
or in the english translation: "The world is for those born to conquer it
And not for those who dream they can conquer it, even though they may be right."
To those wanting to start Pessoa, this poem could be a door.

[Anonymous No.10491713]

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

[Anonymous No.10491802]

"And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world weary flesh" [Shakespeare, anticipating Freud, tells us that as long as we live, we will be trying to shrug off unfortunate facts about nature/nurture, and even more that we look foolish and putrid against the vastness of the cosmos]

"Life's but a walking shadow... It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." [Shakespeare telling us, centuries before Darwin, that all of human life is bubbling, awful noise; all the aggregate of pain and pleasure, fortune and misfortune, is meaningless.]

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment, in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." [Shakespeare telling us that all endeavor is in fact nothing but retreat from death]

[Anonymous No.10491894]

>>10491701
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.

[Anonymous No.10491911]

You need to bring your wife a healthy bull — David Foster Wallace

[Anonymous No.10491926]

When reason fails, the devil helps!

[Anonymous No.10492184]

She was hurt, therefore loved.

[Anonymous No.10492245]

“Yet in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love”

[Anonymous No.10492255]

>>10491701
أيها الناس، أين المَفَرُّ؟ البحرُ من ورائكم، والعدوُّ أمامَكم وليس لكم واللَّهِ إلا الصدقُ والصَبْرُ.
O people, where Flee? Sea from behind you, and the enemy in front of you and in Gods name you only have honesty and patience.

Tareq ibn ziead said that to his men on the conquest of Andalusia, prior to that his men wanted to flee, so he burned all the boats, and told them either we win or we die, and they ended up wining the battle and the conquest for spain.

[Anonymous No.10493501]

>>10491802
“Everything under the sun is meaningless...all the rivers rush into the oceans they never overflow” Solomon telling us this over 1000 years before Shakespeare, the Bible has facts b

[Anonymous No.10493989]

>>10493501
people who have this adulatory opinion of shakespeare are completely ignorant of literature

[Anonymous No.10494031]

>>10491701

"I fetched a rug (that my uncle Pisemsky had stolen from a merchant in Tashkent in the belief that it was an expensive Turkish relic, not realising that Turkish rug-weavers might well have woven epigrams from the Quran into their rugs but that they probably wouldn't have done it in Russian and they definitely wouldn't have used the Cyrillic alphabet to spell them out) and laid it out in the hallway in an attempt to keep the brackish water that still leaked from my boots off the once-expensive hallway carpet."
- wet socks, by nikolai kingsley

[Anonymous No.10494808]

>>10491713
Which book is that?

[Anonymous No.10494815]

>>10494808
Alice.