“I took her to the picture show. The pictures ‘moved.’ We saw ‘pictures.’ A certain number of apologies were offered. I have divided the ‘moving’ pictures into forty-eight squares, eight across, six down. Each square contains a part of either Greta Garbo, C. Aubrey Smith, John Gilbert, or pseudo-medieval décor. The ‘picture’ is of course Queen Christina. The length of the film is, I don’t know, an hour or so. If each ‘frame’ is divided into forty-eight squares and each square described meticulously, in the Turkish manner, there is a danger of tedium. Especially if we also ‘fold in’ (Rombauer) the emotions and responses excited in the brains and breasts of those hired to ‘watch’ the ‘picture.’
“‘All this is literary criticism,’ Elspeth said to Paul. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I like it. I don’t know if it pleases me.’ They regarded the Ankara critic on the shelf.”
—Donald Barthelme, “Several Garlic Tales”
(Also featured in Object Lessons with an introduction by Ben Marcus)
Image Credit Reanimation Library
Reblogged from theparisreview with 32 notes / lit prose donald barthelme film
"It was Ada’s castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time."
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor (via yesyes)
"I envied the people around me, hermetically closed in their mysteries and isolated from the tyranny of the objects. They were prisoners under their overcoats, but nothing coming from outside could harm them, […] nothing could infiltrate their magnificent prisons, while between me and the outer world there was no boundary, I was invaded by everything surrounding me, as if my whole skin were pierced. The attention […] with which I was looking around me, was not a simple act of will. The world was prolonging in me, naturally, all its tentacles, and all the long arms of the hydra were crossing my entrails. I was facing with despair the conviction that I was living in the world I was seeing. And I had no weapon to fight against this certitude."
Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Unreality (1936)
Reblogged from poeticsofdeath with 104 notes / absurdity blecher existentialism lit literature max blecher philosophy poetry prose romania surreal surrealism unreality avant-garde modernism
"Help! Help! I shouted, just to see if it would have any effect on them. None whatsoever. Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn’t care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I’ve tried. It’s a waste of time."
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
Reblogged from poeticsofdeath with 89 notes / Celine Céline Journey to the end of the night Louis Ferdinand Celine books france french lit literature loneliness prose solitude
“My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe—where nonetheless everything repeats itself—will it never come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: ‘I loathe this life I idolize?’”
— Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949)
"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."
Fernando Pessoa (via troubled)
Virginia Woolf, A Summing Up.
Reblogged from violentwavesofemotion with 17 notes / lit virginia woolf prose soul humanity quotes pain death
"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head."
William Shakespeare (via tonightorforever)
Reblogged from tonightorforever with 6 notes / lit Quote Prose William Shakespeare
“It seems that the world, life, is always important to me solely as raw material for writing. The moment I cannot make creative use of life, it become either fearsome and perilous to me, or fatally tedious. To sustain curiosity, creative incentive, to fight the process of sterilization, boredom—these are my most important and urgent tasks. Without the zest this adds to life I would fall—alive—into a lethal lethargy. Literary art has accustomed me to its stimuli and sharp sensations. My nervous system has a delicacy and fastidiousness that are not up to the demands of a life not sanctioned by art. I am afraid this school year may kill me.”
— Bruno Schulz, Letter to Romana (August 30, 1937)
Reblogged from poeticsofdeath with 25 notes / literature Bruno Schulz Schulz lit writing boredom prose
