| Ravaged |
[16 May 2005|08:50pm] |
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public
place a man came up to me. He introduced himself
and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says
you were beautiful when you were young, but I want
to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then.
Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your
face as it is now. Ravaged."
From The Lover by Marguerite Duras
This is my favorite book. Ever.
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| from Chapter 22 |
[16 Mar 2005|03:03pm] |
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| Pure Poetry |
[20 Feb 2005|03:58am] |
All of Max's sheets were stained. Stained, signed, and dated. The very first time I had occasion to say, "I've got my period," and Max dipped his finger inside me. With my blood, Max drew a heart on the sheet. The perimeters of love. Paleolithic art. Like the cave paintings at Lascaux. As primal as the beat of a drum, and by the time we were done for the night, there was blood everywhere. As if he'd made a meal of me and used the sheet for a napkin, and blood was on Max's hands and wrists and mouth and groin and thighs and chin and between his toes. In the morning, Max stripped the sheet from the bed, but instead of putting it in the hamper along with his dirty clothes and towels, he spread it flat on the dining room table. As if it were a linen cloth and he were going to put out plates and silverware. Between the heart and a blot that could've been a piece of a Rorschach test, Max wrote with a felt-tip pen our names -- Max and Lila -- and the date. O romance! O chivalry! O lift me off my feet and out of my head. Take my wrists and shackle me. Take my heart. My lungs. My liver. O love. Sweet and wondrous love. The stuff of bucolics, aubades, and canzones. Kisses like couplets, and pleasures of the idyll. -- Binnie Kirshenbaum, Pure Poetry |
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[11 Feb 2005|10:11am] |
Hello everyone! Newkanada and I over at livejournal have started a excerpts-esq community called wereadbooks
www.livejournal.com/users/wereadbooks
I hope you all join us over at livejournal!
Warmth,
Eve (crewfalcon the co-mod)
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| The Prince of Tides |
[07 Feb 2005|01:45pm] |
Repression was both a great theme and a burden in her life. Her madness was a ruthless censor; it was not content only to ruin the quality of her daily life in New York, but it also effaced the past and replaced it with the white baffled noise of forgetfulness. Her journals preserved the particulars of her life. She filled them with hard facts and nothing else. They were her rose windows into the past. Writing in her journals was but one other technique Savannah has devised to save her own life. -- Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides |
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| The Omen |
[05 Feb 2005|11:42pm] |
The life she led was fraught with confusion, and she felt she no longer knew who she was. She remembered who she used to be and what she once wanted, but that was all gone now, and she could envision no future. The simplest things filled her with fear: the phone ringing, the oven timer going off, the teapot whistling as though demanding to be attended to. She was coming to the point where she simply could not cope, and the act of getting through each day required continual courage. -- David Seltzer, The Omen |
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| The Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut |
[26 Jul 2004|02:16pm] |
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mood |
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Kurt Vonnegut is a genius. I just finished reading The Sirens of Titan, and as I was reading I made sure to highlight some of the lines that I thought were especially brilliant. The following are a few quotes I liked from the book:
( page 27 )
( page 89 )
( page 100 )
( page 233 )
And finally, an excerpt from Dead-eye Dick, another one of my favorite Vonnegut novels:
( Dead-eye Dick )
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| Excerpt from "The History" by Herodotus |
[06 Jun 2004|12:57pm] |
Did you see the film, "The English Patient?" This is the book that he carries around with him and the book that he has Juliette Binoche, his Italian nurse read to him.
The History by Herodotus"
173. The Nearest neighbors of the Nasamones are the Psylli, who were destroyed in the following way. There was a south wind that blew upon them and dried up all their water tanks, and the whole country within the region of the Syria was waterless. They took common counsel and marched wothward (the story I am telling is that of the Libyans), and when they got to the sandy part, the south wind blew a storm upon them and buried them. When they met their end thus, the Nasamones took over their country.
174. Southward and inland of thses are the Garamantes, who live in a beast-haunted country. These people avoid everyone and the company of anyone. They have no warlike arms at all, nor do they know how to defend themselves.
175. These live inland of the Nasamones. But along the seacoast, to the west, the neighbors of the Nasamones are the Macae, who shave their heads but let the middle of their hair grow, shaving of ostriches for bucklers.
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| On Creativity |
[06 Jun 2004|11:30am] |
Julia Cameron Walking in the World
from the chapter: "Discovering a Sense of Personal Territory"
( Creative & Sexual Energy )
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[05 Jun 2004|01:56pm] |
hi everybody!
i couldn't find anything against advertising in the rules of this community, so i just wanted to leave a note that i created a  bookcrossing community which still is in need of some members.
it's all about bookcrossing, literature, writing, book reviews...
so please join!
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| Graham Greene's: "The Honorary Consul" |
[21 May 2004|10:12pm] |
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( God )
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| From Jacques Reda's The Ruins of Paris |
[20 May 2004|08:06am] |
:/A froth of acacia blossom hangs above the pavement. I can only
see three young ladies who might want to pick clusters of them:
they will not be able to reach. I'd find it natural enough to come to
their assistance, but what would they think, and then what about me as I perform
an unsteady leg up? So I wait for them to disappear before I plunge my arms into the bubbling
cool milk of these giants of the Petite-Ceinture. The blossoms smell like haylofts
from a summer of raining downpours (I remember the summer of '43), like Senior Service
cigarettes, the neck of a young girl and a camomile - in short, they smell first and foremost like
acacias. They are so innocently white, so fragile, that I fill my saddlebag with some reluctance:
the elastic strap is going to snap in the rue d'Alesia and get tangled up in the chain, and this will add prosaic
complications to the rest of the day, when what I had in mind was to change my life drastically
by offering these flowers... but I digress, or more particularly, I anticipate. I haven't even reached
the corner of the rue de Patay near the Pente douce restaurant; I am still only starting on
the descent towards the last hanging kitchen gardens of the rue Regnault, and there it is in the misty
distance of a dreamed-of Africa, of horizons photo-engraved like a geography atlas, absurd but ineviatble, nameless, senseless, useless, that fresh-blown fragment of the absolute, the mountain peak in Vencennes zoo.
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[17 Apr 2004|06:30pm] |
( words )
The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.
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| Excerpt from Nudist on the Late Shift |
[11 Apr 2004|09:36am] |
True Tales of Silicon Valley: The Nudist on the Late Shift
By Po Bronson
( The Salespeople )
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| Excerpt from Dalva |
[10 Apr 2004|09:34pm] |
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( ”Dalva” )
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