posted April 25, 2013 12:22 PM              

"The wildest colts make the best horses, if the only get properly broken in and trained."
~ Themistocles

posted April 25, 2013 12:58 PM            

According to wikipedia, In Search of Lost Time consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters.

I will probably never read that, but it's fascinating to me that some people do.

I have a copy of Fyodor's Notes from Underground on my little stack of books to read. It's nice and short, and I inherited it from my father. I was going to throw it out last week but glancing through it, I was magnetized to certain passages (which seldom happens...I call it the "flip test": if I flip through a book and want to stay on a page, any page, I will try reading the whole thing. Few modern works of fiction pass this test.) So I'm looking forward to that book.

posted April 26, 2013 10:50 AM              

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Originally posted by Faith:
I've never read anything by either author; even though I was an English major, these just weren't assigned, and oddly enough, I lost my taste for literature through my college years. Now I barely ever read any fiction.

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I think Twain said something like, "I've tried never to let my schooling interfere with my education." You could say I live by that. Go ahead, just try to school me on the Bible.

quote:

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According to wikipedia, In Search of Lost Time consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters.

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It's not really a novel, in the traditional sense. I mean, you can't really call it a novel when an author spends a hundred pages ruminating over a single painting at a dinner party (where nothing else happens).

I read the Modern Library one. That's why, as I said, I spent a year with him. I suppose I could have finished it sooner, but I had at least a dozen other books going at the same time. I always do. Damn Mercury in Sagittarius!

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I will probably never read that...

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But it's positively decadent!

Well, here, at least, have a taste:

"Never shall I find again that divine thing; a person with whom I could talk freely of everything, in whom I could confide. Confide? But did not others offer me greater confidence than Albertine? With others, did I not have more extensive conversations? The fact is that confidence and conversation are ordinary things in themselves, and what does it matter if they are less than perfect if only there enters into them love, which alone is divine. I could see Albertine now, seated at her pianola, pink-faced beneath her dark hair; I could feel against my lips, which she would try to part, her tongue, her maternal, incomestible, nutritious, hallowed tongue, whose secret dewy flame, even when she merely ran it over the surface of my neck or my stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superficial but somehow imparted by the inside of her flesh, externalized like a piece of material, reversed to show its lining, at is were, the mysterious sweetness of a penetration."

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the "flip test"...

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The cream always rises to the text.

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Your sun is conjunct Dostoevsky's and trine Proust's

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posted May 04, 2013 12:12 PM              

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
~ George Bernard Shaw

Many live in the ivory tower called reality;
they never venture on the open sea of thought.
~ Francois Gautier

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
~ Mark Twain

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics
or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
~ John F. Kennedy

I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see.
I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
~ Peter Nivio Zarlenga

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination.
~ John Keats

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
~ Vincent van Gogh

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
~ Sam Levenson

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
~ Pablo Picasso

posted May 08, 2013 09:01 AM            

(Mozart's sun is conjunct my Mercury-Eros. I can't see myself ever getting tattoo, but I already decided that if I ever did get one, it would be "What is genius?" across my back on the shoulders, and three "It is love" banners curving across my spine, with Mozart's signature on my lower back.