Oh, but self-loathing was just so enticing, so holy, so unassailable! The cynic in him cried, Take my hope! Take my life! Who cares? As if surrender could make up for his failures or help the people he loved. What a lie to think he could whip himself to redemption. What a loathsome lie!

From The Hod King by Josiah Bancroft

#lit #literature #poetry #poet #poem #prose #fiction #entropy quotes #quote #quotes #book #novel #books #writing #contemporary lit #words #josiah bancroft #the books of babel #thomas senlin #the hod king

hush-syrup reblogged

danseurs

I don’t know you. The only thing I know about you is, you’re reading this. I don’t know if your happy or not; I don’t know whether you’re young or not. I sort of hope you’re young and sad. If you’re old and happy, I can imagine that you’ll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You’ll remember someone who broke your heart, and you’ll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can’t, you smug old git. Oh you’ll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?

By Nick Hornby (via danseurs)

#nick hornby #lit #literature #prose #writing #writer #letter #words #quote #quotes #book #books #contemporary lit #contemporary literature

hush-syrup

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion - put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

by Wendell Berry

#Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front #lit #literature #poem #poet #poetry #writing #write #word #words #contemporary lit #Wendell Berry

hush-syrup

Once the people I knew died of suicide and motorcycle crashes and other forms of violence. Now it’s diseases: heart attacks, cancer, the betrayals of the body. The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies-drive them on?

From Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

#cat's eye #margaret atwood #lit #literature #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #writing #book #books #quote #quotes

hush-syrup reblogged

decaying-organic-matter-deactiv

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

By Anais Nin (via thechocolatebrigade)

#anais nin #lit #literature #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #quote #quotes #book #books

hush-syrup reblogged

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

From Murphy by Samuel Beckett (via thewildernessunderground)

#murphy #samuel beckett #lit #literature #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #prose #contemporary prose #fiction #contemporary fiction #writer #writing

hush-syrup reblogged

The cause of most of man’s unhappiness is sacrificing what he wants most for what he wants now.

By Gordon B. Hinckley (via myquotelibrary)

#Gordon B. Hinckley #Hinckley #lit #literature #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #philosophy #prose #words #writer #life

hush-syrup

I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterward, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear holes, the nosehairs.

From Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

#margaret atwood #cat's eye #art #contemporary art #contemporary artist #sexuality #lit #literature #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #contemporary prose #prose #contemporary fiction #fiction #book #books #quote #quotes

hush-syrup

What we share...may be a lot like a traffic accident, but we do share it. We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

From Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

#margaret atwood #cat's eye #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #lit #literature #contemporary #contemporary prose #contemporary fiction #prose #fiction #quote #quotes #book #books #novel #novelist

hush-syrup

It was a distress she'd not felt since childhood when somebody (she'd forgotten who) had taught her the trick of looking at infinity by putting two mirrors face to face, each staring into the other's reflection. She'd been twelve, thirteen at most, and completely spooked by the idea of this emptiness echoing emptiness, back and forth, back and forth, until they reached the limits of light. For years after she'd remembered that moment, confronted with a physical representation of something her mind revolted at.

From The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker

hush-syrup

Among the Attributes of a Basically Cruel Man

Today began a dreamsicle made of dirt and up to us to pilot this sky's specific dye lot. And why not?

Our lives are six or seven people a lot, a couple dozen less so, and an even call it hundred lesser still. Today

it's the cinnamon blush of rust on a dumpster. It's the city's talc of salt and still ice bites onto the lot

in a couple spots. Took the skull for a crawl is all and tried not to fall through a city ultimately solvable, mere matter

of form. The locksmith's truck fits surely into traffic. I've climbed through four windows twelve times, emerged smudged

or scraped, but home, where the thing about charm's it doesn't give a fuck what comes after adoration, only

more and more.

by James D'Agostino

#poem #poet #poetry #contemporary poem #contemporary poet #contemporary poetry #writer #writing #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #the diagram #diagram #diagram magazine #James D'Agostino #among the attributes of a basically cruel man

hush-syrup

I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.

From Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

#margaret atwood #cat's eye #quote #quotes #book #books #contemporary #contemporary literature #contemporary lit #lit #literature #contemporary prose #prose #contemporary fiction #fiction #writer #novel #novelist

hush-syrup reblogged

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

By David Foster Wallace (via tel0s)

#david foster wallace #lit #literature #prose #contemporary literature #contemporary lit #contemporary prose #contemporary #quote #quotes

hush-syrup reblogged

Your letters got sadder. Your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. It didn’t help. You said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.

From Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski (via freins)

#love is a dog from hell #bukowski #charles bukowski #contemporary #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #lit #literature #prose #contemporary prose #book #books #quote #quotes

hush-syrup reblogged

larmoyante

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (via larmoyante)

#ray bradbury #Fahrenheit 451 #lit #literature #prose #fiction #contemporary #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #contemporary fiction #contemporary prose #quote #quotes #book #books

hush-syrup reblogged

collageriae

Usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, is us , you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it.

From Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (via collageriae)

hush-syrup reblogged

chasingafeatherinthewind

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they are simply unbearable.

By Marguerite Duras (via chasingafeatherinthewind)

#marguerite duras #quote #quotes #lit #literature #men #relationships #sex roles #gender #contemporary lit #contemporary literature #prose #writer #novelist