#floyd dell

[emmasmoke8]

I was looking through short monologues because I have to memorize one for an audition when I found one that is so Sonadow coded to me:

“Enigma” by Floyd Dell: She’s monologue

“No—it happened to me. It didn’t happen to you. You made up your mind and walked in, with the air of a god on a holiday.

It was I who fell—headlong, dizzy, blind. I didn’t want to love you. It was a force too strong for me. It swept me into your arms.

I prayed against it. I had to give myself to you, even though I knew you hardly cared. I had to—for my heart was no longer in my own breast.

It was in your hands, to do what you liked with. You could have thrown it in the dust. It pleased you not to. You put it in your pocket.

But don’t you realize what it is to feel that another person has absolute power over you? No, for you have never felt that way.

You have never been utterly dependent on another person for happiness. I was utterly dependent on you. It humiliated me, angered me.

I rebelled against it, but it was no use. You see, my dear, I was in love with you. And you were free, and your heart was your own, and nobody could hurt you.”

Am I brainrotted or am I cooking, chat?

[ma-pi-ma]

L’ozio non è il non far nulla.

L’ozio è essere liberi di fare qualsiasi cosa.

.

Floyd Dell

[publicdomainbooksdevotee]

I wasn't expecting much from this, but there's a sort of Lady Windermere's Fan vibe going on.

This business of telling the truth is like any other drug habit. It grows on you.

An unmarried father : A novel by Floyd Dell

Free eBook digitized and proofread by volunteers.

[davidpatrickjohn]

During his first hours with Elva Macklin, it had seemed to Felix that he knew the profoundest secret of human wisdom—the vanity of desire. He desired nothing in the world, least of all any gift from his light-hearted companion in Nirvana. She had nothing to give; and whatever she might give and he might take, it was still nothing. It was strange, how like fire ice could be; but fire burns, and leaves nothing the same as before—it transmutes, or destroys; and this crystal flame left them both as they had been. They felt no need of each other; and they could not be disappointed. They were satisfied with themselves; and they could be content to remain strangers for all their nearness. No kiss could bridge the gulf between them; they did not want it bridged; and if they kissed, it was as though to prove that no intimacy, none whatever, could shatter their splendid and perfect isolation, no mere happy human closeness merge their triumphant individual identities. There was a defiance in their kisses—they were proving that they could be to each other everything and yet nothing.

Dell, The Briary-Bush 1921, p326

[lizardgoats]

[Floyd Dell] saw what he wanted to see. And then he saw some things he really preferred not to see. According to an “unpublished interview” Dell granted to Norman Britten…Dell was uncomfortable with Millay’s “preoccupation with lesbianism.” When he asked her to address the “problem” through psychoanalysis, she refused, saying she disliked Freud.

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Daniel Mark Epstein

[quafaie]

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except . . . the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.

Floyd Dell

[the-incompletionist]

“Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except… the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.” - Floyd Dell

[poetrybooksarelamebutsoami]

"You see, my dear, I was in love with you. And you were free, and your heart was your own, and nobody could hurt you."

-Floyd Dell, Enigma