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aliascae
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let's live our lives heroically / let's live our lives with style
various short stories.

here's something from the frolic, by thomas ligotti. cw (?): horror?

Dr. Monk, read the note from inside the animal, we leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums… my awe-struck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon. Jonathan Doe.

"David?" he heard his wife's voice inquire from the bottom of the stairs. "Is everything all right?"

Then the beautiful house was no longer quiet, for there rang a bright freezing scream of laughter, the perfect sound to accompany a passing anecdote from some obscure hell.
last edit on Feb 16, 2020 20:10:29 GMT by cae
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The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum

Currently at Canto XVIII (OG Italian first, then English underneath):



«Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge,
tutto di pietra di color ferrigno,
come la cerchia che dintorno il volge.

Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno
vaneggia un pozzo assai largo e profondo,
di cui suo loco dicerò l’ordigno.

Quel cinghio che rimane adunque è tondo
tra ’l pozzo e ’l piè de l’alta ripa dura,
e ha distinto in dieci valli il fondo.»


There is a place in Hell called Malebolge,
made all of stone the color of crude iron,
as is the wall that makes its way around it.

Right in the middle of this evil field
is an abyss, a broad and yawning pit,
whose structure I shall tell in its due place.

The belt, then, that extends between the pit
and that hard, steep wall’s base is circular;
its bottom has been split into ten valleys.
last edit on Feb 25, 2020 8:18:14 GMT by Ven ☆

take it easy.
aliascae
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i thought i was going to read Finnegans Wake but the first page is like this

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor
had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse
to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper
all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to
tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in
vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a
peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory
end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.
 


last edit on Feb 29, 2020 19:21:04 GMT by cae
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Just finished The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. A couple passages of varying lengths


For father and son, the silence conveyed more information than words. Growing up, his father had used silence rather than speech to educate him, and words were merely the punctuation between the silences.


As the elderly passed away, the departed Golden Shore vanished into the smoke of history. The ship of human civilization floated alone in the vast ocean, surrounded on all sides by endless, sinister waves, and no one knew if there was even an opposite shore.


The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big bang, all matter existed in the form of light, and only after the universe turned to burnt ash did the heavier elements precipitate out of the darkness and form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and civilization.


Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.

last edit on Mar 13, 2020 5:21:39 GMT by gimmick
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If you are reading this, I am beautiful.
I'm a massive fan of all the replies here, but also, I would like to share one of my favorite passages of all time, from a book I love dearly.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

'Oh, and do you remember' - she added - 'a conversation we had once about driving a car?'

'Why- not exactly.'

'You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean, it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.'

'I'm thirty.' I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it an honour.'

She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

[googlefont=Open+Sans]
last edit on Jan 9, 2021 19:26:27 GMT by Mizo

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The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Synopsis: On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with no power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath the floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her wiring as the last way of preserving the past.
take it easy.
aliascae
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rereading crush (richard siken) & crying bc he writes stuff like this:

- But the minutes don't stop. The prayer of going nowhere going nowhere

- You wanted happiness, I can't blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you're not miserable.



- I've been in your body, baby, and it was paradise. I've been in your body and it was a carnival ride.

- They want you to love the whole damn world but you won't, you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath,
who knows what to do with his body, with his hands

- You could drown in those eyes, I said, so it's summer, so it's suicide, so we're helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.


last edit on Jul 24, 2020 3:34:04 GMT by cae
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All birds and men are sure to die but songs may live forever
“What if I sold my soul to the devil when I was a kid?”

“You didn’t sell your soul to the devil.”

“What if I did but I don’t remember it?”

“You didn’t sell your soul to the devil.”

“But what if I did?”

“Okay, but think, Henry, what did you get for it?”



Made me chuckle. From Weather by Jenny Offill.
last edit on Oct 8, 2020 3:12:57 GMT by gimmick
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Currently breaking things.
I feel like an alpha weeb because all of these are books with more words than images, but hell, whatever. 
I'm totally getting into Berserk. I know this is a lot of nUdItY and other harsh stuff, but jeez, I'm lovin it so far. I'm a total sucker for dark fantasy stuff, so if you have any suggestions I'd be totally down to hear. 

(Also, since I'm an intellectual, I read the books with no images. I just finished this amazing series called 'Cherub', which is basically a spy school type series, you should check it out.)
last edit on Oct 16, 2020 17:12:13 GMT by TheMysteriousMan
This guy is awesome.
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mankind, be vigilant; we loved you.
I had finished One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London a few days ago, and this particular passage just made me go feral. I love it.

"I'm afraid that you're looking for your next chapter, and I'm looking for the whole rest of the book."


Currently reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab after the years time I've spent waiting for it to be released. There's so many gorgeous passages in it, but some that's really stuck out to me thus far have been:

Don't you remember, she'd told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?

Darling, he'd said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.



"You cannot decline."

One dark brow lifts, but there is no amusement in that face.

"I am not some genie, bound to your whim." He pushes off the tree. "Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no."



Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it's not lonely.




last edit on Oct 25, 2020 17:51:49 GMT by CEL



coming soon.
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Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
It's about lesbian space necromancers, and that is simultaneously all I know and all I need to know

I'm only little more than a chapter in, and already the descriptions are wonderfully concise and vivid, with the odd commentary from Gideon to contrast it all. Some stand-outs so far:

"You ordered a shuttle through deception," bubbled the marshal of Drearburh, whose main claim to fame was that he was more decrepit alive than some of the legitimately dead. He stood before her on the field and gurgled with indignation.
Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda.
She looked up at the scarecrow towering before her and he stared back, one-eyed, horrible, baleful. The antiquated armour seemed to be rotting right off his body. Even though the livid, over-stretched skin on his skull looked in danger of peeling right off, he gave the impression that he simply wouldn't care. Gideon suspected that--even though he had not a whit of necromancy in him--the day he died, Crux would keep going anyway out of sheer malice.
Crux spat on her. That was disgusting, but whatever.
The Lady of the Ninth House stood before the drillshaft, wearing black and sneering. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality. Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.
Sorojin's Labyrinth
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mankind, be vigilant; we loved you.
Finished A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles earlier while the power had been cut and can I just say—damn, what a book. The ending is probably one of my all-time favorites to date.
Some favorite passages include:
Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.



Looking around the restaurant with renewed appreciation, the architect observed:

"I suppose a room is the summation of all that has happened inside it."

"Yes, I think it is," agreed the Count. "And though I'm not exactly sure what has come of all the intermingling in this particular room, I am fairly certain that the world has been a better place because of it."



"I'll tell you what is convenient," he said after a moment. "To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment's notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it had been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most."

Anna Urbanova took the cigarette from the Count's fingers, dropped it in a water glass, and kissed him on the nose.



"I have had countless reasons to be proud of you; and certainly one of the greatest was the night of the Conservatory competition. But the moment I felt that pride was not when you and Anna brought home news of your victory. It was earlier in the evening, when I watched you heading out the hotel's doors on your way to the hall. For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim."

"If I am to play the piano in Paris," said Sofia after a moment, "I only wish that you could be there in the audience to hear me."

The Count smiled.

"I assure you, my dear, were you to play the piano on the moon, I would hear every chord."


last edit on Nov 13, 2020 12:02:06 GMT by CEL



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Just finished two books back to back. Both are from The Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, last of which is sadly not out yet. Some figures of speech that I really enjoyed...


The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

Gone was the handsome, arrogant, fearless man who had made ten thousand wives into widows and forged the crowns of the Seven States into one. His body had been usurped by an old man, consumed by fear of death.



Men and women were the zyndari letters and punctuation marks of this grand epic that the gods composed on the fly, changing their fickle minds from one moment to the next... Just as the wax clumps that refused to be shaped properly would be scraped away by the writer, to be replaced by new, pliant wax, so would men who resisted the fates be swept away, to be replaced by those sensitive to the shifts of fortune.



She wore the title of princess like a sentimental cloak, too shabby to keep her warm, but too dear to shed.



It was men like him who had made her into a symbol, had put her into this impossible position. But, in a way, that made the task easy. She knew exactly what to say or do, and she even enjoyed the challenge of playing the role of his ideal: She was worthy only insofar as she oriented herself to men, like a sunflower adoring the sun.



The Wall of Storms, naturally also by Ken Liu

It was as impossible to recall the words of her mother accurately as it was to hold on to the sand slipping between the fingers of a squeezing fist. But the hearts of the tales remained, and the scent of home lingered in those memories. They were the landscape of her childhood dreams, the shores of her first narratives.



After a man had been drenched by one wave of grief, sometimes he was numb to far greater waves.



“The Islands of Dara shelter the Tan Adü now like lips shielding teeth from a wintry blast. But if the lips are gone, will the teeth not feel the chill?”



“The ocean in the north was a pale blue canvas upon which were inscribed a masterpiece of complex patterns: long, flowing arcs like the tentacles of the octopus; intricate curlicues like the swirl of the nautilus; bold, thick strokes of starburst passion that demonstrates the brush painter’s skill and soul. The canvas was tinctures in deep aquamarine and pastel periwinkle, purplish black and sun-pale white—it was a painting the likes of which I had never seen, an abstract seascape drawn by the gods.”


last edit on Nov 16, 2020 0:36:38 GMT by gimmick
take it easy.
aliascae
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i'm (re)reading the antimemetics series. marion wheeler is a Cool protag...i think the writing is also really concise and pretty?
there's a line that's like "we're the only ones between life and death. when we're gone, there's nothing left [sic]" and it's so hardcore but i can't find it atm

The room's interior walls are made from milky white glass (bulletproof, knowing Hughes) and plastered with paperwork, taped and Blu-Tacked up in vaguely coherent masses. Where there is no paperwork, people have drawn directly on the walls in marker pen. There is a conference table, long and elliptical, covered with more paperwork and a tangle of laptop computers and serpentine power supply cables. Power has returned to the machines and they are slowly booting. A data projector warms up and shines a map of the world over the far wall, almost lining up with a network of scribbled annotations on the same wall. Post-It notes of all colours litter the carpet like autumn leaves.


Wheeler is almost there. She sees the shape of what Adam is describing. It's distant and unclear, but if she concentrates she might be able to bring it into focus. It worries her, for nebulous reasons she can't completely articulate, but she can almost understand how there could be room for it. How it could lock into her life as it currently exists, and still make sense.
 
last edit on Dec 12, 2020 3:45:33 GMT by cae
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From A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab

Her words were hollow, and his own fear ricocheted inside them, filling the space.



It was better not to care—she tried not to care—but sometimes, people got in. Like a knife against armor, they found the cracks, slid past the guard, and you didn’t know how deep they were buried until they were gone and you were bleeding on the floor.


last edit on Jan 8, 2021 3:44:01 GMT by gimmick
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