common place

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parody Brian De Palma trailer on SNL (1981)

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I took her dainty eyes, as well   As silken tendrils of her hair: And so I made a Villanelle!   I took her voice, a silver bell,   As clear as song, as soft as prayer; I took her dainty eyes as well.   It may be, said I, who can tell,   These things shall be my less despair? And so I made a Villanelle!   I took her whiteness virginal   And from her cheek two roses rare: I took her dainty eyes as well.   I said: “It may be possible   Her image from my heart to tear!” And so I made a Villanelle.   I stole her laugh, most musical:   I wrought it in with artful care; I took her dainty eyes as well; And so I made a Villanelle.  

-Ernest Christopher Dawson, "Villanelle of His Lady's Treasures"

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Mikio Naruse, Sound of the Mountain (1954)

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Louis Pons in Varda's Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000)

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He would declare and could himself believe That the birds there in all the garden round From having heard the daylong voice of Eve Had added to their own an oversound, Her tone of meaning but without the words. Admittedly an eloquence so soft Could only have had an influence on birds When call or laughter carried it aloft. Be that as may be, she was in their song. Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost. Never again would birds’ song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came.

-Robert Frost, "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same" (1942)

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Solaris (dir. Tarkovsky), 1972

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Krzysztof Grzybacz, Primary Colors II (2025)

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Frappez sans entrer

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All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment. Our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.

-Lampedusa, The Leopard

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For all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context—or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about.

-Wimsatt & Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"

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He thought he saw an Elephant, That practiced on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. "At length I realize," he said, "The bitterness of Life!"

-Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song"

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That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!

-Robert Browning, "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad"

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Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, 1988)

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L'Atalante (1934)

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As into the garden Elizabeth ran Pursued by the just indignation of Ann, She trod on an object that lay in her road, She trod on an object that looked like a toad.

It looked like a toad, and it looked so because A toad was the actual object it was; And after supporting Elizabeth's tread It looked like a toad that was visibly dead.

-A. E. Housman