quote dump and ficathon pimping.

[minxy]

Hellooooo, fandom.

On the occasion of the prompt based galpalficathon (multifandom, no commitment!) I thought I would clear out my quotes folder. This is an attempt at organization before I head over there to drop prompts (prompts accepted between September 2-8th, writing due November 16th.) I love prompting from literary quotes and poems, but sometimes I do tend to repeat myself, so I thought, you know, in the interests of not ending up with both apocalypse_kree and galpalficathon prompts being identical...

On the other hand, wouldn't that be awesome? Seeing the same prompt taken to an apocafic place and a women's friendship place? That might be amazing.

Anyway, I'm still going to clear out the folder. You are most welcome to use these for whatever nefarious purpose your little heads can devise. Please let me know if your nefarious heads devise fic, though; don't want to miss that.

Quote Dump 6


just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
--Amy Hempel, Tonight is a Favor to Holly


His own opinion, which he does not air,
is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins
of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and
rather empty human soul.
--J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace.


I will not praise your body after sex
naked on the small, white bed

as prayer is sent to gods, and you,
thin-boned and sleeping,

vulnerable to my hands and mouth,
are too humane for ancient games.

if you had come a whirl of smoke, deified
exhausted fire, turned inside me

burning till my tongue learned flames,
then I might praise you.

If you had put on feathers and descended,
pulled me into sky or water, hung me

weightless, pinned inside your beating wing,
then I might praise you.

But you entered the way a man is made to
enter, asked mv name, then waited

for an answer the way men do. It's praise
to watch you listen in your sleep, to fit

the curve your body questions; praise enough
to guard you until morning. Then gods will

lie down on mountaintops and dream their human
dreams of prayer, of women, of love.
-- Erin Belieu, Prayer for Men


I made no choice
I decided nothing

One day you simply appeared in your stupid boat,
your killer's hands, your disjointed body, jagged
as a shipwreck,
skinny-ribbed, blue-eyed, scorched, thirsty, the usual,
pretending to be - what? a survivor?

Those who say they want nothing
want everything.
It was not the greed
that offended me, it was the lies.

Nevertheless I gave you
the food you demanded for your journey
you said you planned; but you planned no journey
and we both knew it.

You've forgotten that,
you made the right decision.
Thre trees bend in the wind, you eat, you rest,
you think of nothing,
your mind, you say,
is like your hands, vacant:

vacant is not innocent.
--Margaret Atwood, an untitled poem from “You Are Happy.”


I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
--John Masefield, Sea-Fever, 1902


Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner


Too much feeling may seem instead like no feeling at all:
I realize that only when we drink. The laughter will not come.
The wax candle has a heart that feels sorrow at our parting;
it shed tears for us until the day grows bright.
- Du Mu, Presented at Parting


Your sleeves trailing, you serve us;
your master bids you sing for the guests.
When you break off, it is like lightly cracking jade;
as you conclude, strands of mist spun afar.........

For your sake I will become drunk again.
-Du Mu, Presented to Academician Shen's Singer, Zhang
(Chinese Tang dynasty poems)


And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
-Toni Morrison, Sula


I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

-T.S. Eliot, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


i say this because i feel you down here with me,
this thing i have for you, it is as noble
as being wronged from birth, is as fierce
as a fight for something impossible
that i know you understand.
wait. i will. it is like sleeping,
how it keeps you still
and fills your head with pictures.
-Michelle Tea, from “Dive”


"(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands"
--e.e. cummings, "somewhere i have never travelled"


At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.

For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is.
--Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus


It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, or those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say, you must think of them for a while, a good while, every day several times a day, until they sink for ever in the mud. That’s an order.
--Samuel Beckett, The Expelled


It is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first "ravished." Someone would have to be able to tell me: "Don't be anxious anymore - you've already lost him/her."
- A Lover's Discourse, by Roland Barthes


B: To translate . . . you can go around fixing the world, patching everything up—everyone—and they're grateful to you—grudgingly, but grateful—but once you fall yourself, prove you're not quite as much better than they are, than they thought, then they'll let you go right on doing everything for them, fixing the world, etcetera, but they won't hate you quite so much . . . because you're not perfect.
- Edward Albee, Three Tall Women


"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle


"Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices."
Women, Charles Bukowski


"I was sentimental about many things: a woman's shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, "I'm going to pee..."; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3 AM; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she's now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same, sleeping together...."
Women, Charles Bukowski


I`ll always have to wonder whether I`m truly wanted or whether I`ve just been settled for.
-Libba Bray, A Great And Terrible Beauty


I want to
let her know
though
that all the nights
sleeping
beside her

even the useless
arguments
were things
ever splendid
--Charles Bukowski, from Confession


And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

It was a kind of self-hypnosis. Partly willpower, partly faith, which is how stories arrive.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
--The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien


"When she was unhappy she would lock herself in the bedroom until she felt better. 'It's none of your business,' she told him. 'I don't want anybody to see me when I'm like that. He used to call her a clam. 'Open up,' he hammered on all the locked doors of their life together, basement first, then maisonette, then mansion. 'I love you, let me in.' He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam. "
-Salman Rushdie, the Satanic Verses



There is hope, but not for us.
-Franz Kafka: A Biography



"There's more than one History of the World,"
--John Crowley, Ægypt


“The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other is this: “What scent drives men wild?” After years of intense research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.”
-- Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide


I had to make up all the words myself. The way
they taste the way they sound in the air. I passed
through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled
around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made
this place for you. A place for you to love me.
If this isn't the kingdom then I don't know what is.
So how would you catalog it? Dawn in the fields?
Snow and dirty rain? Light brought in in buckets?
I was trying to describe the kingdom, but the letters
kept smudging as I wrote them: the hunter's heart,
the hunter's mouth, the trees and the trees and the
space between the trees, swimming in gold. The words
frozen. The creatures frozen. The plum sauce
leaking out of the bag. Explaining will get us nowhere.
I was away, I don't know where, lying on the floor,
pretending I was dead. I wanted to hurt you
but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have
swallowed him up, they said. It's beautiful, it really is.
I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room
where everyone finally gets what they want.
You said Tell me about your books, your visions made
of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is
the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you
there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar
cube...We were in the gold room where everyone
finally gets what they want, so I said What do you
want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.
-Richard Silken, Snow and Dirty Rain from Crush


"One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manners being different, each feels affronted by the other, taking even the most surface choices for challenges."
--Judith Martin, Common Courtesy


When I visit you, and the moon
Isn't around to show me the way,
Comets of longing set my heart
So much ablaze, the earth is lit
By the holocaust under my ribs.
-Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf (1200 yr old Arabic poetry)


Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow
flat on the wall.
The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,
the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light
pummeling you in a stream of fists.
You raised your hand to your face as if
to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streamed straight to the bone,
as if you were the small room closed in glass
with every speck of dust illuminated.
The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
from passing through.

-- Richard Siken, Visible World, from “Crush.”


My soul?
A broken harmony
that hops over its dementia
on the cushion of time.

How they want to lay her down,
acclimate her,
recompose her,
the long-dead mortals!

Desire detached from achievement.
Agitator!

The madness of my soul
cannot repose,
it lives in the restlessness
in the disorder
in the imbalance
of things dynamic,
in the silence
of the free thinker, who lives alone,
in quiet exile.

Strong harmony broken
that of my soul:
broken at birth;
today more than ever she plants
her innate rebellion
in stanchions of strategic leaps.
-Julia de Burgos, My Soul


"One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people"
Diane Setterfield ~ The Thirteenth Tale