Post some excerpts (books, poems, speeches etc.) that have brought

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

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>>8979902
Tatiana's letter to Onegin by A. Pushkin.

I write to you . . . when that is said
What more is left for me to say ?
Now you are free (I know too well)
To heap contempt upon my head.
Yet if some sparks of pity dwell
Within your breast you'll surely not
Abandon me to my hard lot.
When first I saw you I desired
To hold my peace : my shame ('tis true)
Would ne'er have been revealed to you
Had life's conditions but inspired
One gleam of hope that you would come
To see us in our country home
From time to time, so that I might
Hear but one word, catch but one tone,
And live by dreaming on alone
Till our next meeting, day and night.
But then it seemed there was no hope;
Our rustic quiet bored you so,
Folk said you were a misanthrope;
And we—we do not make a show—
You found us narrow in our scope.

Why did you come to visit us
I n this forgotten quiet place ?
I need not have been tortured thus
If I had never seen your face.
My inexperienced heart maybe
Had grown resigned to this dull life,
And future years had brought to me
Some other love—my destiny
An honoured mother and true wife.
Another's! Nay, to none on earth
Could I have given this heart of mine.
By the decree of the Most High,
And by Heaven's willing, I am thine.

Allotted unto you was I
E'en from the moment of my birth
And loyal to my future fate;
And God, I know, sent you to be
My champion and my advocate
Till the grave closes over me. . . .

Oft in my dreams you did appear;
I loved you then before the days
When palpably I saw you here ;
I languished in your wondrous gaze
And in my heart your voice rang clear
Long since. ... It was no dream to me!
You came—at once I understood
This swift confusion in my blood,
While my thoughts whispered : ' Lo, 'tis he.'
Was it not true ? Am I not sure
You spoke with me in hours of peace
When I went visiting my poor,
Or when I strove by prayer to ease
The pain in which my spirit toss'd ?

Was not your image wont to rise
A vision sweet—too quickly lost—
To light my gloom ? Did not mine eyes
See you bend gently o'er my bed ?
Were not some words low whispered
Of love and hope ? Now in what guise
Come you ? As guardian angel good,
Or tempter in some wily mood ?
0 speak, and set my doubts at rest!
What if all this should prove at best
The empty dream, more light than froth,
Of a heart simple and untried ?
Well, be it so! But from henceforth
I must to you my fate confide.
Must weep my tears about your feet
And for your sheltering love entreat.
Picture me now. ... I sit alone
With none to heed or guess what ails . . .
And now my very reason fails!
I wait for you. One glance of yours
Fresh hope unto my heart restores;
Or else the cruel dream comes back
Of merited contempt. . . . Alack!

[She seals the letter.]

'Tis done! I scarce dare read it through,
But overcome with shame and fright
I trust my honour now to you,
And dare to think I trust aright.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves

For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.

ONE hour to madness and joy!
O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)

O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings!
(I bequeath them to you, my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you, whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me, in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me—to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d man!

O the puzzle—the thrice-tied knot—the deep and dark pool! O all untied and illumin’d!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
O to be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions—I from mine, and you from yours!
O to find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature!
O to have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
O to have the feeling, to-day or any day, I am sufficient as I am!

O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
O madness amorous! O trembling!
O to escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts—with invitations!
To ascend—to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate Soul!
To be lost, if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

Done bcos we are 2 menny

At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then velocity—wings and engines—a smiling stewardess—but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone!—they were naked, they were light and free—it was all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements—Sin loi! they yelled. I'm sorry, motherfuckers, but I'm out of it, I'm goofed, I'm on a space cruise, I'm gone!—and it was a restful, unencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves, sailing that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald's, it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing—Gone! they screamed. I'm sorry but I'm gone!—and so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne.

>>8979902
I am surrounded by dancing monkeys entertaining their immediate desires and indulging in wild self-destructive pleasures that rot away at the very essence of their spirit and reduce them in to pawns in the grand free market. Humans are like trash now, litter in the system of efficiency clogging the pistons of the motor of the world with their disgusting meat sacks. Humans, who had made so much progress, were reduced in to whimpering lambs at the mercy of the shepherd to be slaughtered for an easy sacrifice at any moment. Why are we obsessed with annihilating everything we've stood for and succumbing to this fate?

When you are born you are handed a little checklist of things to do in life, polished and commercialized for your convenience, separating the green paper from your wallet while you chase after the goose known as satisfaction. In a spontaneous explosion we immolate ourselves for just a moment's escape from the existential reality of utter meaninglessness.

I am hollow inside. All I can do is sit and watch the assisted suicide of everyone around me by the organized machine of slaughter known as the First world. I wish I could fall in to hibernation and awaken to see the result, but I fear it would just be an empty wasteland of rubble devoid of all human life and all human effort. Just the skeleton of a past no one will care to remember, because there's no one left to remember it.

>>8979936
That was beautiful, thank you. What translation is this from? And what's the context of this letter?

>>8980149
What's this? Chuck?

>>8980353
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Onegin
I don't know if this is the translation by Nabokov, but its rather good, isn't it?
This letter is almost at the last part of the book.
Give it a try and read it, anon.

>>8979902

I dont even like Joyce's work that much, but this:

>yes and all the
queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine
and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I
put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I
put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes
and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

>>8979959

I'd recognise Grapes of Wrath anywhere, the start of that chapter is unbelievable

>>8981849
that is fucking dope, how he ends it with the word Yes


summerize the whole book, conclusion: his heart was going like mad, yes

>>8981849

Writing shit like this is how you get hipster girls to give it up. Take notes friends.

>>8981849
How the fuck did he do it??

The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures - on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.