“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.”
―from "Billy Budd, Sailor"
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”
―from "Billy Budd, Sailor"
Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime. READ more here:
http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/113148/complete-shorter-fiction/
精彩的摘句只放在"英文人行道"BLOG,可惜。
"The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude."
--from ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez
"Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable."
-- from "Anna Karenina" (1875–1877)
"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."放
―from "Billy Budd, Sailor" from COMPLETE SHORTER FICTION by Herman Melville
"I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space…"--Zachary Quinto in "The Glass Menagerie," in 2013.
"There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding."
--from "The Portrait of a Lady"
“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away the bad memories and magnified the good ones. no one was safe from its onslaught.”
―from "Living to Tell the Tale"
EXHIBITION | « Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. »
Paul Klee
Angstausbruch III
Explosion de peur III, 1939
Aquarelle sur papier préparé sur carton
63.5 x 48.1 cm
Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne
Psalm 8King James Version (KJV)
8 O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:
7 All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!