SakeTami
House of Fortitude

House of Fortitude

patreon


House of Fortitude posts

- Ben Okri / The Famished Road

"IN THE BEGINNING there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

 In that land of be...

View Post

- Susanna Kaysen / Girl, Interrupted

Etiology

This person is (pick one):

1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns;

2. possessed by (pick one):

a) the god...

View Post

- Lev Shestov / All Things Are Possible and Penultimates Words and Other Essays

“Practical advice.—People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and ...

View Post

- Attar of Nishapur / The Conference of Birds

The world’s birds gathered for their conference
And said: ‘Our constitution makes no sense.
All nations in the world require a king;
How is it we alone have no such thing?
Only a ki...

View Post

- Margaret Atwood / Corpse Song

I enter your night
like a darkened boat, a smuggler

These lanterns, my eyes
and heart are out

I bring you something
you do not want:

news of the country
I am trapp...

View Post

- Patrick Süskind / Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Two

A FEW WEEKS later, the wet nurse Jeanne Bussie stood, market basket in hand, at the gates of the cloister of Saint-Merri, and the minute they were opened by a bald m...

View Post

- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet

"The static blooms of Adonis provide us with an answer to our question 'What would the lover ask of time?' As Plato formulates it, the answer brings us once again to the perception that lovers and ...

View Post

- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too...

View Post

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple ...

View Post

- Patrick Süskind / Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Eleven

GIUSEPPE BALDINI had indeed taken off his redolent coat, but only out of long-standing habit. The odor of frangipani had long since ceased to interfere with his abilit...

View Post

- Stanley Kunitz / The Wild Braid

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”

View Post

- Halldór Laxness / Under the Glacier

“Because no one of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. For if we live, then we live for the Lord; and if we die, then we die for the Lord. Therefore whether we live or die, we belon...

View Post

- Hazrat Inayat Khan / The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan

“When a person begins to see all goodness as being the goodness of God, all the beauty that surrounds him as the divine beauty, he begins by worshiping a visible God, and as his heart constantly ...

View Post

- Roberto Bolaño / The Savage Detectives

“And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality....

View Post

- Hazrat Inayat Khan / The Dance of the Soul: Gayan, Vadan, Nirtan

“I have loved in life and I have been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar,
and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love,...

View Post

- Yasunari Kawabata / Dandelions

“The bonds between men and women predate language, and while the words we have used to express those ties may have grown exceptionally subtle and refined since language first arose, they are stil...

View Post

- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet

“As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the thing...

View Post

- Anne Carson / Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
All mortals owe a debt to death. View Post

- Halldór Laxness / Under the Glacier

“Dr. Syngmann: I am talking about the only quality that was worth creating the world for, the only power that is worth controlling.

Pastor Jón: Úa?

Dr. Syngmann in a tired, gravel...

View Post

- Halldór Laxness / Under the Glacier

“Pastor Jón: It is pleasant to listen to the birds chirping. But it would be anything but pleasant if the birds were always chirping the truth. Do you think the golden lining of this cloud we se...

View Post

- Walt Whitman / Song of Myself (1892 version)

1

I celebrate myself, an

View Post

- Jean Genet / Our Lady of the Flowers

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a b...

View Post

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seep...

View Post

Poll 8.

It's been a little while since I have done a poll and I was just deliberating something that I would love to hear your thoughts or at least gauge your views about.

I generally try to create...

View Post

- Paul Bowles / The Sheltering Sky

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we...

View Post

- Mario Vargas Llosa / Letters to a Young Novelist

“Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturall...

View Post

- John Barth / The Sot-Weed Factor

“My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal ...

View Post

- Ebenezer Cook / THE SOTWEED FACTOR or A VOYAGE TO MARYLAND

Condemn'd by Fate to way-ward Curse,
Of Friends unkind, and empty Purse:
Plagues worse than fill'd Pandora's Box,
I took my leave of Albion's Rocks:
With heavy he...

View Post

- Ray Bradbury / Zen in the Art of Writing

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful du...

View Post

- Mario Vargas Llosa / In Praise of Reading and Fiction (Nobel Lecture December 7, 2010)

“I have always been fascinated to imagine the uncertain circumstance in which our ancestors – still barely different from animals, the language that allowed them to communicate with one another...

View Post