Since I have a blog. I will blithely be putting extracts that I come across in my favorite books. Maybe once in a while I might slip in a few of my own scribblings.
Thursday, 15 December 2011
Unseen Fire
Unseen Fire
This is a damned unnatural sort of war;
The pilot sits among the clouds, quite sure
About the values he is fighting for;
He cannot hear beyond his veil of sound,
He cannot see the people on the ground;
he only knows that on the sloping map
Of sea-fringed town and country people creep
Like ants — and who cares if ants laugh or weep?
The pilot sits among the clouds, quite sure
About the values he is fighting for;
He cannot hear beyond his veil of sound,
He cannot see the people on the ground;
he only knows that on the sloping map
Of sea-fringed town and country people creep
Like ants — and who cares if ants laugh or weep?
— R. N. Currey
Wednesday, 08 June 2011
Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
CHAPTER XII
"She could not bear the notion which I had put into her head of Mr Linton's philosophical resignation. Tossing about, she increased her feverish bewilderment to madness, and tore her pillow with her teeth, then raising herself up all burning, desired that I would open the window. We were in the middle of winter, the wind blew strong from the north-east, and I objected. Both the expressions flitting over her face, and the changes of her moods, began to alarm me terribly; and brought to my recollection her former illness, and the doctors injunction that she should not be crossed. A minute previously she was violent; now, supported on one arm, and not noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made, and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species: her mind had strayed to other associations. "That's a turkey's," she murmured to herself;"and this a wild duck's; and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the pillows- no wonder I couldn't die!"
The Fox- D.H. Lawrence

"If only you did just this, that and the other. And you did this, that and the other, in all good faith, and every time the failure became a little more ghastly. You could love yourself to ribbons, and strive and strain yourself to the bone, and things would go from bad to worse, bad to worse, as far as happiness went. The awful mistake of happiness."
The Adventures of a Bicycle
Once upon a happy day a lone bicycle decides to ride about. It starts off a lone bicycle with it's empty water holder and spider webbed handle bars, but it likes the squeak of it's rusty wheels when it rides down the hill. The lone bicycle happens upon a crossroad, it knows that it desperately has to cross it if it wants to get to the other side yet this was a timid bicycle and it did not feel it was quite ready to do just that. The bicycle turned around and was suddenly surrounded by angry turkeys. The bicycle rang it's bell in surprise and the turkeys answered with "gobble gobble gobble gobble" followed by the threatening fluffing of feathers and the eager retreat of the now frightened bicycle. The bicycle crossed the road.
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
"Actually, no one was around when Yossarian returned from the hospital but Orr and the dead man in Yossarian's tent. The dead man in Yossarian's tent was a pest, and Yossarian didn't like him, even though he had never seen him. Having him lying around all day annoyed Yossarian so much that he had gone to Sergeant Towser who refused to admit that the dead man even existed, which, of course, he no longer did."
Watership Down - Richard Adams
PART 1 THE JOURNEY
"The primroses were over. Towards the end of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dogs mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit-holes. In places the grass was gone altogether and everywhere there were clusters of dry droppings, through which nothing but the ragwort would grow. A hundred yards away, at the bottom of the slope, ran the brook, no more than three feet wide, half choked with king-cups, water-cress and blue brook lime. The cart-track crossed by a brick culvert and climbed the opposite slope to a five-barred gate in the thorn hedge. The gate led into the lane. "
"The primroses were over. Towards the end of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dogs mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit-holes. In places the grass was gone altogether and everywhere there were clusters of dry droppings, through which nothing but the ragwort would grow. A hundred yards away, at the bottom of the slope, ran the brook, no more than three feet wide, half choked with king-cups, water-cress and blue brook lime. The cart-track crossed by a brick culvert and climbed the opposite slope to a five-barred gate in the thorn hedge. The gate led into the lane. "
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