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House of Fortitude

House of Fortitude

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House of Fortitude posts

- Joan Didion / The White Album

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on...

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- Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated By Stephen Mitchell) / Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
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- Elena Ferrante / Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re ...

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- Elena Ferrante / My Brilliant Friend

“You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the street...

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- Tom Stoppard / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary i...

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- Dylan Thomas / The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by t...

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- Richard Siken / Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

"Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all sp...

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- Tom Stoppard / The Invention of Love

“Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame an...

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Poll 9.

It's a fine, sunny morning in London Town and I am feeling curious. With a few notable exceptions, I don't actually know who the members of this humble little endeavour are. I would love to find ou...

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- Annie Dillard / The Force That Drives the Flower

"I wakened myself last night with my own shouting. It must have been that terrible yellow plant I saw pushing through the flood-damp soil near the log by Tinker Creek, the plant as fleshy and featu...

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- Tom Stoppard / Jumpers

“Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's b...

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- James Joyce / Ulysses

"Because in middle youth he had often sat obser

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- Richard Siken / Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

"Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all sp...

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- Richard Siken / Crush

Scheherazade

“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
                              ...

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- Cormac McCarthy / All the Pretty Horses

“He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since...

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- James Joyce / Ulysses

"… I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country...

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- Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in ...

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- Cormac McCarthy / The Road

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss...

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- Walter M. Miller Jr. / A Canticle for Leibowitz

"

We are the centuries.

We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers, and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.

We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, an...

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- H.P. Lovecraft / Cats and Dogs

“Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as i...

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- Annie Dillard / The Writing Life

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another b...

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- James Joyce / Ulysses

“What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her sat...

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- Anne Carson / Candor

“If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after ...

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- Milan Kundera / The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is...

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- John Barth / Sabbatical: A Romance

“I'll try. The Big Bang banged, a naked singularity. Lots happened in the first three minutes; I forget just what. Then eons passed: galaxies condensed and sprang away from one another like disen...

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- Roland Barthes / A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I catch myself carefully scrutinizing the loved body (like the narrator watching Albertine asleep). To scrutinize means to search: I am searching the other's body, as if I wanted to see what was...

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- John Banville / The Sea

“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the g...

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- Anne Carson / Autobiography of Red

“Children make you see distances. What do you mean “distances”? Lazer paused and picked an olive from the plate. He spun it slowly on the toothpick. Well for example this morning I was sittin...

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- Ursula K. Le Guin / The Farthest Shore

“Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the h...

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- Ursula K. Le Guin / Always Coming Home

"

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your...

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