House of Fortitude posts
Posts: 436
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- Raymond Carver / Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
“V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that...
- Vladimir Nabokov / Lectures on Literature
"The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time of space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with dan...
- Ocean Vuong / On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
- 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'm talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as we...
- Buckminster Fuller / And It Came To Pass — Not To Stay
“I haven't learnedHow or whyUniverse contrived to implodeAnd intellectually codeThe myriadly uniqueChromosomically orchestratedDNA-RNA,Quadripartite moleculed,Binary paired,Helically extendedAnd unzippingly dichotomiedRegenerative symphonicjazz, asA one and two,Three and fourMe---You,Thee---Th...
- Ocean Vuong / On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous ...
- Joseph Conrad / Heart of Darkness
“Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes p...
- Mark Twain / The Lowest Animal
"The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses.Manis the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and withcalmpulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only anima...
- Nikolai Gogol / Dead Souls
“Everywhere something could be detected that seemed to be on the point of betraying some secret, something elusively subtle oh, how subtle!...'No,' Chichikov said to himself, 'women are a subject such as...' Here he dismissed it with the wave of a hand: 'What's the use of t...
- John Gardner / On Becoming a Novelist
“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishn...
- John Steinbeck / The Grapes of Wrath
“Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.' . . . . I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. ...
- Jack Kerouac / On the Road
“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars an...
- László Krasznahorkai / Satantango
“God is not made manifest in language, you dope. He’s not manifest in anything. He doesn’t exist.” “Well, I believe in God!” Petrina cut in, outraged. “Have some consideration for me at least, you damn atheist!” “God was a mistake, I’ve long understood there is zero difference be...
- Will Self / My Idea of Fun
“How can it be so, this hovering sense of being both victim and perpetrator, both us and them, both me and him? Have we been expelled from an arcadia of fun where nature provided us with innocent automata, lowing and braying machines for our amusement?I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I tell you w...
- Patrick Rothfuss / The Name of the Wind
“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passi...
- Vladimir Nabokov / Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
“Poor L.We are sorry that you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid into a naughty prank. That sort of game will never again be played with you, firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers ans membranes of beauty make artists and morons loose all se...
- Jorge Luis Borges / The Garden of Forking Paths
On page 224 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Cap...
- Vladimir Nabokov / Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
"‘I am Van Veen — in case you are no longer lucid enough to recognize somebody you have seen only twice. Hospital records put your age at thirty; I thought you were younger, but even so that is a very early age for a person to die — whatever he be tvoyu mat’ — half-baked genius or full...
- Marcel Proust / The Guermantes Way
“Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we e...
- 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 trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves ...
- Annie Dillard / Tickets For A Prayer Wheel
A son, a scholar, speaks:Our family is lookingfor someone who knows how to pray.Ora pro nobis, pray for us nowand now.We sentall our strong cousins out as runners. . . .One of the cousinsbrought back a dollwhich he had purchased at great price.The doll is dressed in feathersand beads of mistletoe.Hi...
- Maggie Nelson / Bluets
"1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty t...
- Hélène Cixous / The Laugh of the Medusa
I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.Woman must put herse...
- Oliver Sacks / Gratitude: Essays
“There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path...
- Vladimir Nabokov / Speak, Memory
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred ...
- Annie Dillard / For the Time Being: Essays
“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray ...
- Kahlil Gibran / The Prophet (On Beauty)
"And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.And he answered:Where shall you seek beauty, and howshall you find her unless she herself be yourway and your guide?And how shall you speak of her exceptshe be the weaver of your speech?The aggrieved and the injured say,“Beauty is kind and gentle.Like a ...
- Kahlil Gibran / The Prophet (On Pain)
"And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.And he said:Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of y...
Crete / May 2025 (BTS)
Peeks into a week in Crete, spent frolicking, suffering (aka hiking), talking to many a goat and, of course, shooting. Prepare for too many images from that trip to be shared here in the coming weeks and months ...
- John Steinbeck / East of Eden
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. ...
