/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22232435]

Post passages from things you've read recently that resonated with you

[Anonymous No.22232444]

[Anonymous No.22232479]

“People appeared who began devising ways of bringing men together again, so that each individual, without ceasing to prize himself above all others, might not thwart any other, so that all might live together in harmony. Wars were waged for the sake of this notion. All the belligerents firmly believed at the same time that science, wisdom, and the instinct of self-preservation would eventually compel men to unite in a rational and harmonious society, and therefore, to speed up the process in the meantime, ‘the wise’ strove with all expedition to destroy ‘the unwise’ and those who failed to grasp their idea, so that they might not hinder its triumph. But the instinct of self-preservation swiftly began to weaken; arrogant men appeared, and sensualists who baldly demanded all or nothing. To obtain the all, they resorted to villainy and when that did not avail—to suicide. Religions sprang up, which preached the cult of non-existence and self-destruction for the sake of eternal rest in nothingness. At length, these people wearied of their senseless toil; marks of suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering was beauty, because thought existed only in suffering.” - Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Dostoevsky

[Anonymous No.22232612]

>>22232435
No. I don't cast pearls before swine.

[Anonymous No.22232919]

[Anonymous No.22232921]

>>22232919
i'm actually taking a piss i just wanted to post something off my pc

[Anonymous No.22232927]

"Envidio tanto a los que se pierden todavía... Esa magia de la primera vez cuando llegué y vi que todo era grandioso se fue perdiendo a pesar de los flashes ajenos y los miles de turistas boquiabiertos que la inundan. Me guíe acostumbrando a la belleza como quien se acostumbra al amor y dejar de darse cuenta de que está ahí, al lado. A su lado."

[Anonymous No.22233687]

>>22232444
?

[Anonymous No.22233689]

"Her lips seemed to have just finished a long, warm kiss with which they were not yet
satisfied."

[Anonymous No.22233713]

>>22232435
I had a dream which was not all a dream
The bright sun was extinguished and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space
Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air
Morn came and went and came and brought no day
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation. And all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light

I've memorized about half of this poem so far.

[Anonymous No.22233794]

>The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?”
>“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,”
>said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old
>fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason
>for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct!
>One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
>Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that’s
>philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to
>believe in God.”
the whole dialogue is amazing, but the part about philosophy really resonated with me

[Anonymous No.22234552]

“What else do you do there except lie—lie to yourself and others, lie about everything you recognize in your heart to be true? You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
― Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden

[Anonymous No.22234605]

>Florence borrowed her light from Athens, as the Moon shines with rays reflected from the Sun.
On the subject of Italian scientific and mathematical development in the early 15th century, leading up to the period which we call the renaissance.

[Anonymous No.22235839]

[Anonymous No.22235971]

[Anonymous No.22236033]

The people who inherited from him came from the northeast, through the Tennessee mountains by stages marked by the bearing and raising of a generation of children. They came from the Atlantic seaboard and before that, from England and the Scottish and Welsh Marches, as some of the names would indicate--Turpin and Haley and Whittington, McCallum and Murray and Leonard and Littlejohn, and other names like Riddup and Armstid and Doshey which could have come from nowhere since certainly no man would deliberately select one of them for his own. They brought no slaves and no Phyfe and Chippendale highboys; indeed, what they did bring most of them could (and did) carry in their hands. They took up land and built one- and two-room cabins and never painted them, and married one another and produced children and added other rooms one by one to the original cabins and did not paint them either, but that was all. Their descendants still planted cotton in the bottom land and corn along the edge of the hills and in the secret coves in the hills made whiskey of the corn and sold what they did not drink. Federal officers went into the country and vanished. Some garment which the missing man had worn might be seen--a felt hat, a broadcloth coat, a pair of city shoes or even his pistol--on a child or an old man or woman. County officers did not bother them at all save in the heel of election years. They supported their own churches and schools, they married and committed infrequent adulteries and more frequent homicides among themselves and were their own courts judges and executioners. They were Protestants and Democrats and prolific; there was not one Negro landowner in the entire section. Strange Negroes would absolutely refuse to pass through it after dark.

[Anonymous No.22236285]

The tools of liberation are the same as those of oppression.

[Anonymous No.22237067]

Sighing over white hair

How long will my years last?
The hair at my temples grows whiter each day.
Amidst the cycles of Heaven and Earth
For how long can we be sojourners?
Grieving over the clouds on my homeland hills,
I pace about, wasting the days and nights.
Why am I with these people of my time
Once more in the south streets of this eastern city?