Book Quotes

[TokyoPewPew]

“Oh! I wanted to ask you—”

He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected the question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation she went on:

“Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room there—you remember?”

“I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks. Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us—watching you, at least. That's why I asked you to smile.”

“Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!”

“And you did it very well, too—very readily, as if you had understood my intention.”

“Readily!” she repeated. “Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's the truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I felt disposed to smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my life, I can tell you; especially of late.”

“But you do it most charmingly—in a perfectly fascinating way.”

He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.

“It astonished me,” he added. “It went as straight to my heart as though you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I left you. It made me restless.”

“It did all that?” came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.

“If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out here tonight,” he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. “It was your triumph.”

— Joseph Conrad, Victory

[TokyoPewPew]

_ Life is an ever-rolling wheel And every day is the right one. He who recites poems at his death Adds frost to snow. Mumon Gensen _ Empty-handed I entered the world Barefoot I leave it My coming, my going— Two simple happenings That got entangled. Kozan Ichikyo _ My sword leans against the sky. With its polished blade I'll behead The Buddha and all his saints. Let the lightning strike where it will. Shumpo Soki _ No sign in the cicada's song that it will soon be gone Aki-no-Bo _ In all my six and fifty years No miracles occurred. Doyu

_ Give my dream back, raven! The moon you woke me to is misted over. Onitsura _ Raizan has died to pay for the mistake of being born: for this he blames no one, and bears no grudge. Raizan _ Time to go . . . they say the journey is a long one: change of robes. Roshu _ I borrow moonlight for this journey of a million miles. Saikaku _ Katsu! Katsu! Katsu! Katsu! Kogetsu Sogan

— from Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets at the Time of Death, compiled and translated by Yoel Hoffman

[TokyoPewPew]

I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.

So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with nought but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.

— Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire, "Angel Language, AD 1618"

[TokyoPewPew]

Abelman’s Dry Goods
Kansas City, Missouri
U. S. A.

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:

We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.

“Why? Why?” you are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.

The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)

We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, may you feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.

Yours in anger,
Gus Levy, Pres.

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

[Mole]

It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.

— John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

[TokyoPewPew]

When they got up in the morning, Jurgis was sent out to buy a paper; one of the pleasures of committing a crime was the reading about it afterward. “I had a pal that always did it,” Duane remarked, laughing—“until one day he read that he had left three thousand dollars in a lower inside pocket of his party’s vest!”

There was a half-column account of the robbery—it was evident that a gang was operating in the neighborhood, said the paper, for it was the third within a week, and the police were apparently powerless. The victim was an insurance agent, and he had lost a hundred and ten dollars that did not belong to him. He had chanced to have his name marked on his shirt, otherwise he would not have been identified yet. His assailant had hit him too hard, and he was suffering from concussion of the brain; and also he had been half-frozen when found, and would lose three fingers on his right hand. The enterprising newspaper reporter had taken all this information to his family, and told how they had received it.

Since it was Jurgis’s first experience, these details naturally caused him some worriment; but the other laughed coolly—it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock. “It’s a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow, every time,” he observed.

“Still,” said Jurgis, reflectively, “he never did us any harm.”

“He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could, you can be sure of that,” said his friend.

— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

[Lucian]

“If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought