Posts tagged lit.

The one thing that used to piss me most about the Sex Pistols was our audience all turning up in identically cloned punk outfits. That really defeated the point. There was no way I was going to give them a good time for that, because it showed no sense of individuality or understanding of what we were doing. We weren’t about uniformity.

John Lydon (via mariposima)

#punk #sex pistols #john lydon #lit #johnny rotten #i'm reading his book #good doogs

1 year ago on October 06, 2011 at 09:12pm

The word comes along out of the mountain every once in awhile to chill me.

Emily Warn, from “The Word” (via proustitute)

#Emily Warn #poetry #lit #words #mountains #chills

1 year ago on September 29, 2011 at 09:25pm

via proustitute

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Charles Péguy (via wwnorton)

(via proustitute)

#Charles Péguy #lit #prose #words #writing #writers

1 year ago on September 29, 2011 at 10:05am

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, ‘being alive is a crock of shit.’

from Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut (via bpgonzo)

#kurt vonnegut #timequake #quote #lit

1 year ago on September 24, 2011 at 10:27pm

A letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, ‘Go on then, read what the letter tells you!’ whereas the dull-witted will say, ‘Go on then, read what he’s written!’

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red, trans. Erdag Goknar (via proustitute)

(via proustitute)

#Orhan Pamuk #lit #prose #letters #words #books #reading #meaning

1 year ago on September 24, 2011 at 10:09pm

via clueless-stargazer

We often notice that a writing subject does not have his writing ‘in his own image’: if you love me ‘for myself,’ you do not love me for my writing (and I suffer from it).

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (via proustitute)

#Roland Barthes #lit #prose #philosophy #writing #images #love #suffering

1 year ago on September 21, 2011 at 12:06am

via proustitute

Begin at the beginning, as if the beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.

José Saramago (via whiskey river)

#José Saramago #lit #beginnings #thread #skeins #life

1 year ago on September 20, 2011 at 11:34am

via proustitute

If somebody says, ”I love you,” to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? I love you, too.

Kurt Vonnegut (via uber-alles)

(via uber-alles)

#Kurt Vonnegut #Lit #Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons #Love #required #forced #i love you

1 year ago on September 16, 2011 at 06:24pm

Oh what a grind it is embodying all these ideas and having perpetually to expose my mind, opened and intensified as it is by the heat of creation, to the blasts of the outer world. If I didn’t feel so much, how easy it would be to go on.

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 18 March 1935 (via proustitute)

#Virginia Woolf #lit #prose #diary #ideas #intensity #creation #writing #feeling #emotion #exhaustion

1 year ago on September 15, 2011 at 10:00pm

via proustitute

Time passes, and the system turns on you. When
all is sacred, nothing is safe: silent lampposts suddenly
pipe up in irresistible colloquy a tone too high, the sky
calls you but does not want your replies, and
water-bound birds decline pronouns in Latin. It is a hotbed
that cannot stand the addition of an offending
presence; it whispers until you are well on your way.

Rachel Wetzsteon, from “The Other Stars” (via proustitute)

#Rachel Wetzsteon #poetry #lit #time #sacred #speech #confusion #offensiveness #whispers #hordes #safety

1 year ago on September 11, 2011 at 09:05pm

via proustitute

hello, hello ellephanta

Celine Song
i n t r o d u c t i o n & i ii iii iv v rec

I am a Manhattan-based playwright who writes letters to dead people.

"What, after all, is a clock? Without your grownup it is nothing. It is the grownup who winds it, who sets it back or ahead, who takes it to the watchmaker to be checked, cleaned, and when necessary repaired. Just as with the cuckoo that stops calling too soon, just as with upset saltcellars, spiders seen in the morning, black cats on the left, the oil portrait of Uncle that falls off the wall because the nail has come loose in the plaster, just as in a mirror, grownups see more in and behind a clock than any clock can justify."

Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum

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