"
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
" — 1984 by George Orwell(Source: thechocolatebrigade)
"People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it,"
— The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Source: thisisntlisa, via booklover)
"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colours went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides)
(Source: whoopdeedoofus, via booklover)
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull."
— 1984, George Orwell (via andrewharlow)
(Source: pitchforks, via andrewharlow)
Literature Trivia
- Samuel Beckett wrote a play called Breath, which lasts 30 seconds, has no actors and no dialogue.
- Cult author William S. Burroughs’ nicknames included “El Hombre Invisible,” “Godfather of Punk” and “Bill Lee.”
- According to his brother, Leicester, Ernest Hemingway consumed about 17 scotch and sodas a day during his stint in Key West.
- Hunter S. Thompson once remarked that “Crack is ruining the drug culture.”
- The only dog in a Shakespeare play is Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
- Virginia Woolf called James Joyce’s Ulysses, “The Work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
- From 1788 to 1820, King Lear was forbidden from being performed in England due to the insanity of King George III.
- Jack Kerouac was watching “The Galloping Gourmet” right before he suffered a fatal hemorrhage brought on by a mixture of Johnny Walker Red and Dexedrine pills.
- According to legend, Charles Baudelaire walked a pet lobster on a leash through the boulevards of Paris.
- Charles Lamb was in the audience to witness his first play, which was hissed off the stage, and he actually joined in the hissing so that he wouldn’t be recognized.
- Emily Dickinson was such a recluse that she only spoke to visitors from another room.
- November 5, 1664, Samuel Pepys writes in his famous Diary that he has been to Macbeth, a “pretty good play.”
- Ben Jonson, on hearing that Shakespeare never blotted out a single line: “Would he had blotted out a thousand.”
- Dr. Seuss coined the word “nerd” in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo.
- Norman Mailer on J.D. Salinger: “The greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”
- When Edgar Allan Poe submitted the manuscript of “The Raven” to Graham’s Magazine, the editors rejected the poem but took up a collection of $15 to give him because he looked so down and out.
- Thomas De Quincey became an opium addict around the year 1813, taking 8,000 to 12,000 drops daily and losing his teeth in the process.
- Crime fiction author James Ellroy’s mother was strangled to death in 1958 by a killer who has never been identified to this day.
- Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx once referred to Charles Bukowski’s novel Ham on Rye as “an education in rebellion.”
- Harry Crews dedicated his warped novel, Scar Lover, to actor Sean Penn.
- Gore Vidal on Ernest Hemingway: What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not have seen the joke?”
- Oscar Wilde on Henry James: “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”
- The Terror of the Monster was a rejected title for Peter Benchley’s Jaws.
- “Moron” was the name of a character in Moliere’s La Princesse d’Elide.
- Ernest Hemingway claimed to have rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times.
- Herman Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
(via booklover)
October 20th
"Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (via aeloquence)
(Source: beautemillesimee)
