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House of Fortitude

House of Fortitude

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House of Fortitude posts

- John Steinbeck / The Log from the Sea of Cortez

“Within our own species we have great variation between these two reactions. One man may beat his life away in furious assault on the barrier, where another simply waits for the tide to pick him ...

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- Fyodor Dostoevsky / White Nights

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dr...

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- Jenny Hval / Paradise Rot

“I'll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterwards the apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Ada...

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- Ludwig Wittgenstein / On Heidegger on Being and Dread

“Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, a...

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- Djuna Barnes / Nightwood

“We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pa...

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- Anaïs Nin / The Four-Chambered Heart

Let him burn them all; they deserved their fate.

(Rango thinks he is burning moments of my life with Paul. He is only burning words, words which eluded all truths, eluded essentials, eluded ...

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- Vladimir Nabokov / Pale Fire

“Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or ot...

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- Frances Hodgson Burnett / The Secret Garden

“She heard a chirp and a twitter, and when she looked at the bare flower-bed at her left side there he was hopping about and pretending to peck things out of the earth to persuade her that he had...

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- Anaïs Nin / Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“When does real love begin?

At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, ...

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- Mary Oliver / Flare

1.

Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the pu...

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- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits,...

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- Haruki Murakami / Kafka on the Shore

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out...

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- Raymond Carver / What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“It seems to me we're just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don't doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I...

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- Donna Tartt / The Goldfinch

“I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. A...

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- Fyodor Dostoevsky / The Brothers Karamazov

“The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, ye...

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- Vladimir Nabokov / Pale Fire

"Now I shall spy on beauty as none has

Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as

None has cried out. Now I shall try what none

Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

An...

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- Nikolai Gogol / Dead Souls

“Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful reality, approaches characters that manifest the lofty dignity of man, who from the great pool...

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A very merry ...

... Christmas to those of my patrons who celebrate such things. May it be a season of minimal family drama and maximum holiday frivolities. May your credit cards survive the onslaught and your sani...

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- Albert Camus / The Myth of Sisyphus

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more ...

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- Anaïs Nin / Delta of Venus

"Dear Collector:

We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us ...

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- Donna Tartt / The Secret History

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw...

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- Ray Bradbury / Something Wicked This Way Comes

"For, he thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad, y...

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- Ben Okri / In Arcadia - Intuitions before Dreaming (1)

"If music was born out of grief, painting was born out of transience within an immortal universe. Painting is the charmed presence of what will no longer be there. An enchanted absence, a visible d...

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- Sister Corita Kent and John Cage / 10 Rules for Teachers and Students

RULE 1

Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

RULE 2

General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything...

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- Alfred North Whitehead / Process and Reality

“Whenever we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understanding leads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to its past, to its future, and to the universals...

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- Frances Hodgson Burnett / The Secret Garden

“Might I,” quavered Mary, “might I have a bit of earth?”

In her eagerness she did not realize how queer the words would sound and that they were not the ones she had meant to say. Mr...

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- James Baldwin / The Fire Next Time

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our troubl...

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- Alfred Tennyson / The Princess

PROLOGUE

Sir Walter Vivi

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- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy d...

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- Georges Bataille / Death and Sensuality, 1957

"The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a par...

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