Literary Boxer Briefs

Brief Passages from Human Literature that Possess Verve and Punch

[literaryboxers]

...there is an anarchic quality about desire which is a threat to an orderly plot.

— Terry Eagleton, 2013

[literaryboxers]

...a work of fiction is a balance of forces with a mysteriously autonomous life of its own...

— Terry Eagleton, 2013

[ceneresufoglidicarta]

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[nauseadaily]

But the dog-faced young man smiles.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (via nauseadaily)

[literaryboxers]

Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’

Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

[wordsnquotes]

I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness…

Toni Morrison (The Guardian, 2012)

[wordsnquotes]

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (via wordsnquotes)

[cruciform-solidarity]

What ‘is not of this world’ is not elsewhere: it is the opening in the world, the separation, the parting and the raising.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

Do not touch me, do not detain me, seek not to hold or retain, renounce all adhesion, think not of a familiarity or a security. Don’t believe that there is an assurance of the kind Thomas wanted. Don’t believe, in any manner. But remain firm in this nonbelief. Remain true to that alone which remains in my departure: your name, which I utter. In your name, there is nothing to grasp and nothing for you to appropriate, but there is this: that it has been addressed to you, from the immemorial and up to the unachievable, from the ground without ground that is always in the process of leaving.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

Revelation—this revelation of which the resurrection must be the summit and the last word—reveals that there is nothing to show, nothing to make appear out of the tomb, no apparition, and no theophany or epiphany of a celestial glory. Thus there is no longer a last word.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

The resurrection is not a resuscitation: it is the infinite extension of death that displaces and dismantles all the values of presence and absence, of animate and inanimate, of body and soul.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

This would be a parable. The arisen would be like the gardener of the garden at the tomb. He knows the emptiness well, the emptiness of this tomb, and he does not fear it. He maintains the garden and tends the borders of death without, for all that, presuming to have access to it. He knows that the dead do not return. He looks after the appearance of what surrounds their absence. He cultivates not their memory but what is immemorial in parting and in provenance, the one mingling with the other.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

The glorious body is the one that leaves and at the same time the one that speaks, that speaks only in leaving, that withdraws, withdrawing as much into the darkness of the tomb as into the ordinary appearance of the gardener. Its glory radiates only for eyes that know how to see, and those eyes see nothing but the gardener. But the gardener speaks, and he says the name of she who mourns the departed. To say the name is to say that which both dies and does not die.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere  (via spiritandteeth)

[70sscifiart]

Cover art to American Cinematographer, July 1977, via Martin L Kennedy

[neil-gaiman]

My English teacher says we shouldn't refer to authors by their first names because they aren't our friends. Will you confirm our friendship and let me call you Neil on my American Gods book report?

Absolutely. 

[jewish-pride]

The Sad, Short, Brilliant Life of Amy Levy, Female Victorian Jewish Novelist

A Londoner from an assimilated upper-middle-class family—her parents, Isabelle and Lewis, were cousins whose forebears had arrived in England in the 18th century—Levy published her first poem at the age of 13. At 17, she became the first Jewish woman to study at Newnham College, Cambridge. During her short career, she published three volumes of poetry and three novels, and contributed journalism and short stories to periodicals including The Gentleman’s Magazine and Oscar Wilde’s Women’s World. Once hailed as a genius by Wilde, today Levy is little-known outside academic and poetry circles. Yet, in more ways than one, she was a catalyst to Zangwill’s immortality. In fact, had she not tragically committed suicide at the age of 27, we might never have heard of him at all.

[cruciform-solidarity]

The Trial of Joan of Arc (dir. Robert Bresson)