Passages

[adorefaith]

and another moment...

i love this one because i think it paints such an accurate picture of what so often happens between people...i think sometimes the people we love the most are the ones we can't properly express ourselves to...not until sometimes it is too late...i watch people do this sometimes, hold back from saying and asking things they've always wanted to say....from crying and forgiving and confronting...and it has always motivated me to try to be completely honest and open in my life, especially with the people i love the most...

*but at the same time this scene is beautiful because it makes me wonder if maybe all those things don't have to be said...if they are mutually understood, silently agreed upon by these two people who love each other so much... it's such a painful but beautiful moment...this unbreakable bond between a mother and her son.. maybe through the mundane details and the simple discussions they are confirming their love for each other and resolving things in their own minds...so that really there is nothing left unsaid...not in the ways that matter.. makes you wonder...

In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation. When the guard announced the end of the visit, Aureliano took out a toll of sweaty papers from under the cot. They were his poetry, the poems inspired by Remedios, which he had taken with him when he left, and those he had written later on during chance pauses in the war. "Promise me that no one will read them", he said. "Light the oven with them this very night." Ursula promised and stood up to kiss him good-bye.

"I brought you a revolver", she murmured.

"Colonel Aureliano Buendia saw that the sentry could not see. "It won't do me any good", he said in a low voice, "but give it to me in case they search you on the way out". Ursula took the revolver out of her bodice and put it under the mattress of the cot. "And don't say good-bye", he concluded with emphatic calmness. "Don't beg or bow down to anyone. Pretend that they shot me a long time ago". Ursula bit her lip so as not to cry.

"Put some hot stones on those sores", she said.

She turned halfway around and left the room.

 

[eternitygoddess]

Excerpts from the L'Amant (the Lover), one of the most hauntingly beautiful novels.

*****

And weeping he makes love. At first pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changted, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clapsed to it.

The sea, formless, simply beyond compare

*****

And then he told her
Told her it was as before
That he still loved her
He could never stop loving her
That he'd love her until death

 

[MulletProof]

I just found this quote from one of my all time favorite plays.. it's so beautiful I get goosebumps every time I read it. and it just seems so appropriate now. .

You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dssolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping looking, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like a veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

Long day's journey into night by Eugene O'Neill

 

[milk_x_honey.]

oh what a thread!
mullet and milk..great minds think alike...you two are divine...great idea!.

right back at you adore. . !
my sister has a strict 'no fold policy' for all her books . . makes me wonder how i'm going to avoid the temptation when i start reading her copy of 'a thousand splendid suns' this evening.



mullet . . gorgeous snippet.
esp the last few lines. wow.

an excerpt from the 2nd instalment of colette's 'claudine'; 'claudine in paris'
my favorite.

Well, after all, its not so terrible going out alone in Paris. I brought back some very interesting observations from my little walk: (1) its much warmer in montigny; (2) your nose is all black inside when you get home; (3) people stare at you if you stand still in front of a newspaper kiosk; (4) people also stare at you when you don't let yourself be disrespectfully treated on the pavement.

Let me narrate the incident that gave rise to observation (4). A very goodlooking gentleman followed me in the Rue des Saints-Peres. During the first quarter of an hour, inner jubilation of Claudine. Followed by a very goodlooking gentleman, just like in Albert Guillaume's pictures! Second quarter of an hour . . the gentleman's step came closer; I hastened mine, but he kept his distance. Third quarter of an hour; the gentleman passed me, pinching my behind with a detached expression. A leap in the air from Claudine who raised her umbrella and brought it down on the gentleman's head with typical Fresnois vigour.

Gentleman's hat in the gutter, immense delight of passers-by, disappearance of Claudine, overwhelmed by her too sensational success.

Aunt Coeur is very nice. She's sent me, with a friendly note, a necklace, a thin gold chain with little round pearls strung on it at intervals of ten centimetres. Fanchette thinks this piece of jewellery is charming; she has already flattened two of the links and she bites the pearls with her teeth, like an expert in precious stones.

fyi, for those who are not familiar, fanchette is claudine's cat

& much later on in the book . .

He did not press me further. Elbow to elbow, we stayed silent; little by little, I relaxed against that kind, reassuring shoulder. At one moment, I lifted my head to him. His intelligent eyes looked down into mine and I smiled at him with all my heart.

I have seen that man exactly five times; I have known him all my life.

sigh.

 

[adorefaith]

so beautiful..

 

[MulletProof]

^^ short and sweet that last passage, brought back many memories.. I need to find me that book.

 

[eternitygoddess]

I have seen that man exactly five times; I have known him all my life.

That is beautiful.

I'm going to take a look at this "Claudine" book.

 

[classicalbang]

I posted these two in the Inspiration thread awhile back. They remain my favorites...

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up empty handed. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he.

-Albert Camus, The Stranger

There was a boy standing in front of the jukebox. He had on one of those summer shirts with holes in it, a white shirt hanging outside his pants. Through the shirt, in a halo of hideous man-made colors, chlorophyll greens, res and oranges of synthetic soft drinks, the purples of a fluorescent-lighted cocktail lounge, the ghastly light pinks and blues of religious objects, I could see the lean young body alive with animal alertness. He was leaning against the jukebox, his hip thrown to one side, his face bent over, reading the song titles, all the awkwardness and grace and sweetness of adolescence in his stance, those terrible colors playing over him.
He looks like and advertisement for something, I thought, but that wasn't exactly what I meant. There was some significance in the young figure leaning over the jukebox that eluded me. Then he turned around, pivoting with a sudden movement. I could hear my own breath suck in with a sharp hiss of air. He didn't have any face. It was a mass of scar tissue. . . .

- William S. Burroughs, Interzone

 

[ParadEyes]

your favourite book quotes

share them here..

 

[ParadEyes]

"A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free like a country dance of Mozart. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh -Gift From the Sea.

 

[eternitygoddess]

Dear god, that's beautiful.