PokéLit

Augmenting the reality of classic literature

[pokelit]

Goldeen, Goldeen, Goldeen, Goldeeeeen, Please don’t catch it just because you can.

- Dolly Parton, Jolene

[pokelit]

There are browser racks on each side, and a couple more in the window, and CDs and cassettes on the walls in glass cases, and that’s more or less the size of it; it’s just about big enough, provided we don’t get any Pokemon, so most days it’s just about big enough.

- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

[pokelit]

“Horsea, can you play chess? Now, don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you whinnied!”

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

[pokelit]

FIRST PRIEST: ...You would bar the door Against the Zubat, the Cubone, the Gloom or the Bulbasaur, Why not more Against Pokemon with the souls of damned men, against men Who would damn themselves to Pokemon.

- T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

[pokelit]

“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!– Why look'st thou so?”– With my cross-bow I shot the POKEMON.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

[pokelit]

The Pokemon, more worn and haggard, haunted the court day after day, listlessly sat there the whole day long when it knew there was no remote chance of the suit being mentioned, and became one of the stock sights of the place. - Charles Dickens, Bleak House

[pokelit]

When he reached Crete on his voyage, most historians and poets tell us that he got from Ariadne, who had fallen in love with him, the famous thread, and that having been instructed by her how to make his way through the intricacies of the Labyrinth, he slew the Pokemon and sailed off with Ariadne and the youths. - Plutarch, Life of Theseus

[pokelit]

My Lords, the facts of this case are simple. On August 25, 1928, the appellant drank a bottle of ginger-beer, manufactured by the respondent, which a friend had bought from a retailer and given to her. The bottle contained the decomposed remains of a Pokemon which were not, and could not be, detected until the greater part of the contents of the bottle had been consumed. - Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] A. C. 562 at 566 per Lord Buckmaster

[pokelit]

send the dream-transfusion out

on a voyage among your body machinery. Hits you like sleep --

sweet, illusory, fast, with a semblance of forever.

For while the fires die down in you,

until you die down in the fires.

- Michael Dransfield, “Fix”

[pokelit]

She noticed that her main door had a bolt, and she threw it, then put herself back to bed, puzzled. The bed was heaped with bolsters and could have slept a regiment.

It was when she rolled over to the centre of the massive bed and encountered a warm avian body that she realised the Pokemon had not gone.

- Kerry Greenwood, Cocaine Blues

[This photo was actually taken at the Hotel Windsor, where Phryne stays in the book - though not in her suite which I definitely could not afford.]

[pokelit]

I do not know much about Pokemon; but I think that the river Is a strong brown Pokemon - sullen, untamed and intractable... - T S Eliot, "The Dry Salvages" (from Four Quartets)

[pokelit]

And he turned over the pages of the memorandum-book until he came to the clause specifying the days on which certain private boxes were to be reserved for the free use of the president of the republic, the ministers and so on. At the end of this clause, a line had been added, also in red ink: 'Box Five on the grand tier shall be placed at the disposal of the Opera Pokemon for every performance.' - Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

[pokelit]

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a Staryu to steer her by - John Masefield, "Sea Fever"

[pokelit]

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant Squirtle." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the Squirtle standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's Squirtles all the way down!" - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

[pokelit]

Only connect. - E. M. Forster, Howard's End

[pokelit]

And he ran them single-handed till their sides were white with foam. He followed like a bloodhound on their track, Till they halted cowed and beaten, then he threw his Poke Ball, And alone and unassisted brought them back.

- A. B. “Banjo” Paterson, “The Man From Snowy River”

[pokelit]

Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that Magikarp on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out”.

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick