- She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.
Guess the book.
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
Paul Celan, considered one of the greatest German language poets and an eminent poet of the Holocaust. Not that I would expect most people to know that, though - hell, apparently I've read the poetry book of his that I'm reading now before, and completely forgot it.
Danez Smith is an up-and-coming young(ish) Black poet who simply fuggin' rocks my world right now - you might enjoy this, which is amazing: Alternate Names for Black Boys. VERY IMPORTANT TIP: read it slowly. For what it's worth I find this poem very reminiscent of 13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens who I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to take as a personal inspiration because he was a businessman/poet - founded and/or ran MetLife Insurance even after becoming a successful writer, IIRC. Also, do note his bio - he always ends it with "Danez thinks you look good today, so smile!" Aw man, it's not on the Poetry magazine bio. Oh well. Take my word for it. Sometimes he adds on "Twerk on" or a similar variant. I love his attitude. I follow him on Twitter. What amazes me is that he applied to MFA programs this year and recently tweeted about how he was worried about getting in. If fuckin Danez Smith is worried about getting into MFA programs, shmucks like me are doomed - but I say that more as "OMG this person is so insanely talented, he should be accepted anywhere!" than "woe is me." He's just brilliant. There's honestly a lot of really, really great racial poetry going on right now. I was thinking about doing a blog post on it. I don't know about video game poetry or poetry about hip hop so I'm not sure about what might appeal to your other interests but I've read some really, really gripping poetry about race and interracial relations.
'Get the woman,' he whispered to the Baron, laughing impudently as he did so, 'and you'll sell the world!'Beneath the very charm of his gallantry, Mouret thus allowed the brutality of a Jew selling Woman by the pound to show through; he was building a temple to Woman, making a legion of shop assistants burn incense before her, creating the rites of a new cult; he thought only of her, ceaselessly trying to imagine even greater enticements; and, behind her back, when he had emptied her purse and wrecked her nerves, he was full of the secret scorn of a man to whom a mistress had just been stupid enough to yield.
Yeah, I loved it actually, although it's now been about 7 years since I read it. I would really recommend it. I did find myself getting confused with some of the characters and character names, but that's kind of part of the point of the book. I loved the magical realism.
That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.
Picturesque meant - he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word - that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown. Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant 'idiot'.
It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.
The only reason for walking into the jaws of Death is so's you can steal his gold teeth.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
