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The diving would make a suitable literary symbol. To go off the high board you had to wait in a line along the poolside and up the ladder. Fellows tickled girls and goosed one another and shouted to the ones at the top to hurry up, or razzed them for bellyfloppers. Once on the springboard some took a great while posing or clowning or deciding on a dive or getting up their nerve; others ran right off. Especially among the younger fellows the idea was to strike the funniest pose or do the craziest stunt as you fell, a thing that got harder to do as you kept on and kept on. But whether you hollered Geronimo! or Sieg heil!, held your nose or “rode a bicycle,” pretended to be shot or did a perfect jackknife or changed your mind halfway down and ended up with nothing, it was over in two seconds, after all that wait. Spring, pose, splash. Spring, neat-o, splash. Spring, aw fooey, splash.

--John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

#John Barth #metaphor #mortality

Roth’s suburbia

Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!

--Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus

#Philip Roth #suburbia #materialism

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

--William Faulkner’s Nobel Banquet Speech (1950)

#William Faulkner #spirit #mortality

But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price -

--Emily Dickinson

#Emily Dickinson #spirit #economy #money #materialism

Homer’s meter

The long line, no matter how it varies in the opening and middle always ends in the same way, builds up its hypnotic effect in book after book, imposing on things and men and gods the same pattern, presenting in a rhythmic microcosm the wandering course to a fixed end which is the pattern of the rage of Achilles and the travels of Odysseus, of all natural phenomena and all human destinies.

--Bernard Knox in his introduction to Robert Fagles’ translation of The Iliad

#poetry #meter #Homer

“What do any of us really know about love?” Mel said. “It seems to me we’re just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. [...] But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. [...] There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

--Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

#Raymond Carver #love #marriage

At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it.

--Albert Camus, The Plague

#Albert Camus #love

Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.

--Albert Camus, The Plague

#Albert Camus #time #productivity #paradox

the hot thunder of her whisper

--Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

#Vladimir Nabokov #good prose

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

--Homer, The Iliad

#Homer #life #death #nature #spring #mortality

As for being abysmally stupid, she could see Michael’s point, but she could also see beyond it. It seemed to Jean that intelligence wasn’t as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person’s company and yet wicked in another’s. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence. Though Michael was her husband, who had led her from virginity and adolescence to womanhood and maturity (or so the world presumed), who had protected her physically and financially, who had awarded her the name of Curtis in exchange for that of Serjeant, he had strangely failed to give her confidence. In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent. It seemed an unkind turn of events: first Michael made her less intelligent, and then he despised her for being what he had made her.

--Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

#Julian Barnes #intelligence #marriage #confidence

He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her. It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam. "Tell me about yourself." And she gave the answer that Adam must have given. "There's nothing to tell."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

#F. Scott Fitzgerald #conversation

August in Waterton, Alberta

Above me, wind does its best to blow leaves off the aspen tree a month too soon. No use wind. All you succeed in doing is making music, the noise of failure growing beautiful.

--Bill Holm

#Bill Holm #poem #failure #autumn

The truth is that whenever I speak about philosophy myself or hear others doing so, I am highly delighted, besides believing that it does me good. But when I hear other kinds of talk, especially among you rich men and moneymakers, it annoys me, and I pity you, my friends, because you are doing nothing while you think you are doing something. Well, perhaps again you believe I am a poor devil, and I think you think right; but I don't think you are, I know it well.

--Plato, Symposium

#Plato #philosophy #wealth #worldliness #happiness #wisdom #knowledge

For suffering is the lot of man, but not inevitable failure or worthless despair which is without end--suffering, the mark of manhood, which bears within its pain a hope of felicity like a jewel set in iron....

--Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, Romance

#Joseph Conrad #Ford Madox Ford #suffering #hope

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venemous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

--William Shakespeare, As You Like It

#William Shakespeare #adversity #nature #optimism #learning

Blow, blow thou winter wind. Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude.

--William Shakespeare, As You Like It

#William Shakespeare #winter #nature #ingratitude #humanity

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