May 2013
3 posts
“But should a man carry out impossible orders knowing what they lead to? Even though they come from Golz, who is the party as well as the army? Yes. He should carry them out because it is only in the performing of them that they can prove to be impossible. How do you know they are impossible until you have tried them? If everyone said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, “Impossible,” when orders came?”
—For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
April 2013
1 post
: The Elixir of Life by Honoré de Balzac →
royalrex.tumblr.com
TO THE READER
At the very outset of the writer’s literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he found the same story in a collection published about the beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it is some stray fancy of the brain of…
March 2013
3 posts
February 2013
11 posts
“We watched the beginning of the evening of the last night of the fiesta. The absinthe made everything seem better. I drank it without sugar in the dripping glass, and it was pleasantly bitter.”
—The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
January 2013
18 posts
“But in years later I came to understand that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes derived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed) but as a reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it imparted.”
—Excerpt from Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search for Lost Time) by Marcel Proust
December 2012
9 posts
“These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible: and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster. If these people who crave distress felt the strength inside themselves to benefit themselves and to do something for themselves internally, then they would also know how to create for themselves, internally, their very own authentic distress. Then their inventions might be more refined and their satisfactions might sound like good music, while at present they fill the world with their clamour about distress and all too often introduce into it the feeling of distress. They do not know what to do with themselves—and therefore paint the distress of others on the wall; they always need others! And continually other others! —Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.”
—Excerpt from Book One of The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche
“Fate’s dealt him
A spirit whose impetuous striving
Overleaps the joys of earth—that rushes on
Headlong, ungovernable. I’ll haul him
Through wanton life, through stale inconsequence—
I’ll make him flounder, I’ll dumfound him,
I’ll mire him down. Meat and drink shall hover
Above his greed and insatiate lips,
In vain shall he beg me for refreshment,
And even if he’d not surrendered
His soul to the Devil, still, he’d be done for!”
—
Mephistopheles about Faust
(Goethe’s Faust)
