The Coat Room Literary Corner
 

This thread is for sharing excerpts from poems or prose that you particularly enjoyed or found inspiring in some way. You know, the kind of writing that really moved you or made a profound difference in your life.

(Please, no jokes; for that you can open another thread)

Well, here we go...


Like a baby that has not yet learned to smile,
Listless as though with no home to go back to.
The multitude all have more than enough.
I alone seem to be in want.
My mind is that of a fool - how blank!
Vulgar people are clear.
I alone am drowsy.
Vulgar people are alert.
I alone am muddled.
Calm like the sea;
Like a high wind that never ceases.
The multitude all have a purpose.
I alone am foolish and uncouth.
I alone am different from others
And value being fed by the mother.

Lao Tzu - TAO TE CHING


Cheers...

Far Out - Philip Larkin

Beyond the bright cartoons
Are darker spaces where
Small cloudy nests of stars
Seem to float on the air.

These have no proper names;
Men out alone at night
Never look up at them
For guidance or delight,

For such evasive dust
Can make so little clear:
Much less is known than not,
More far than near.

Two from Emily Dickinson, one of my favorite poets.

My life closed twice before its close --
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

-------------------------------------------

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

Good idea, sao.

From Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_:

"Are we to understand," asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?"
"I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals."
"What...what do you mean?"
"I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices."
"Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognize its right to do so?"
"Why yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes--by refusing to buy my product."
"We are speaking of...other methods."
"Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters--and I recognize it as such."
"Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself."
"I said that I would not defend myself."
"But this is unheard of! Do you realize the gravity of the charge against you?"
"I do not care to consider it."
"Do you realize the possible consequences of your stand?"
"Fully."
"It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe."
"Go ahead."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Impose it."

David

"Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation."

- Alasdair Gray
- Scots author, painter and fervent believer in an
- independent future for the Scottish nation
-
- Read Lanark, Poor Things and Unlikely Stories (Mostly)
- if you have the chance ;)

I am pleasantly surprised at the quality of the selections. Looking forward to more...


A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dinning-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without been seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jose, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
"Holy Mother of God!" Ursula shouted.
She followed the thread of blood back along it's course, and in search of its origin she went through the pantry, along the begonia porch where Aureliano Jose was chanting that three plus three is six and six plus three is nine, and she crossed the dining room and the living room and followed straight down the street, and she turned first to the right and then to the left to the Street of the Turks, forgetting she was still wearing her baking apron and her house slippers, and she came out onto the square and went into the door of a house where she had never been, and she pushed open the bedroom door and was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder, and she found Jose Arcadio lying face down on the ground on top of the leggings he had just taken off, and she saw the starting point of the thread of blood that had already stopped flowing out of his right ear.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

Only three full stops in this entire passage. What an astonishing imagination!...


Cheers...

Great thread! Thanks Sao! :)

Here's a passage from a favorite book of mine, which a very dear friend gave me many years ago. I keep going back to it from time to time, and each time I find something new, something to wake me up all over again...

"Them words that say keep off the grass -- them words are like that church we went to this morning."
Then it all became apparent. Like the flower-beds the church service had been to Anna nothing less than a notice saying "Keep off the grass." She couldn't get at the best bits. To be inside a church, not at a church service, but simply to be inside, was for Anna like visiting a very, very special friend, and visiting a very special friend is a happy occasion, and that, surely, is a good enough reason to dance. Inside a church Anna danced; it was the best bit. Church services, therefore, like "Keep off the grass" notices, did not allow her to have the best bit. I smiled as I pictured the kind of service Anna would have liked. I'm not sure that Mister God wouldn't have preferred it too!

from "Mister God This Is Anna" by Fynn

Thanks...

I went back to this book shortly after 9/11 and transcribed this passage:

Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes...I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now...that if it were possible to lift this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth...and all it’s torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables — all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath — how seedlings would sprout, and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills...entanglements of vines, and fields of wild blueberry and blackberry....There would be oak trees for shade against the heat, and white birches and weeping willow...and in winter, snow would lie everlastingly white until it ran off as pure and as glistening as spring water. A season or two of this and the mute, protesting culture buried for so many industrial years under the tenements and factories...would rise again...of the lean, religious Indians of the bounteous earth, who lived without money or lasting architecture, flat and close to the ground — hunting , trapping, fishing, growing their corn and praying...always praying in solemn thanksgiving for their clear and short life in this quiet universe. Such love I have for those polytheists of my mind...those friends of light and leaf...those free men and women...such envy for the inadequate stories they told each other, their taxonomies, cosmologies...their lovely dreams of the world they stood on and who has been holding it up....


The Waterworks, E.L. Doctorow

A poem which is short but very sweet... at least to me...

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow


One more from the same poet...


The Dream Keeper

Bring me your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the World


Langston Hughes in "The Dream Keeper"

I have another quote to share...

“ A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.

“Reuven, the Master of the Universe blessed me with a brilliant son. And he cursed me with all the problems of raising him. Ah, what it is to have a brilliant son! Not a smart son, Reuven, but a brilliant son, a Daniel, a boy with a mind like a jewel. Ah, what a curse it is, what an anguish it is to have a Daniel, whose mind is like a pearl, like a sun. Reuven, when my Daniel was four years old, I saw him reading a story from a book. And I was frightened. He did not read the story, he swallowed it, as one swallows food or water. There was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel, there was only his mind. He was a mind in a body without a soul. It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page, because when he finished it he realized for the first time what a memory he had. He looked at me proudly and told me back the story from memory, and I cried inside my heart. I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, ‘What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!’”

Reb Saunders speaking to his son’s best friend Reuven.
An excerpt from "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok

The book is amazing and so is the movie.

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

'Poetry' - Pablo Neruda


Cheers...

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read and dream of the soft look
You eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty, with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim's soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down below the glowing bars,
Murmur, little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crown of stars.

by W. B. Yeats


Cheers...*************

Another one for the literary corner...

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought--
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

by Lewis Carroll

All the best...

One more...

The Wind

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing thro'.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

by Christina Rosetti

Wow, great thread I really like a lot of the stuff posted here! I especially appreciated the Tao Te Ching quote since I'm something of a wanna-be Taoist.

Anyway, this popped into my head for some reason.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
is also great
and would suffice

Robert Frost - Fire and Ice

I walked a mile with Pleasure,
She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne'er a word said she;
But oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me!

Along the Road - Robert Browning Hamilton


Cheers...

A story about Mulla Nasrudin...


"Nasrudin why is it people laugh at you?"
"Well," said Nasrudin, "Think of me as a turban.
The nature of laughter exposes the false. If
people laughed at themselves they would
feel naked. Therefore I provide them with a
'head covering'."
"But Nasrudin, they are still naked!"
"Shhhhh," said Nasrudin smiling . . .


Another story about Mulla Nasrudin

Nasrudin was invited to give a sermon.
When the people had assembled, Nasrudin asked:
"Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"
"No", they answered.
"In that case", said Nasrudin, "there's no point in telling you anything. You're too ignorant to start with. I'd be wasting my time."
The people were disappointed. They asked Nasrudin to come back the following week.
When he did, he started his sermon by asking the same question.
"Yes!", they shouted.
"Very well", said Nasrudin, "then I see no reason to speak."
And he left.
But Nasrudin was persuaded to come back a third time.
"Do you know -or don't you?", he asked the people.
"Some of us do, and some of us don't."
"Great!", said Nasrudin. "Those who know can share their knowledge with those who don't."
Having said that, he went home.


Thanks...

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
it does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
for it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
It's water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.

They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND*- Wislawa Szymborska


Cheers...

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds
 

Shakespeare Sonnet XCIV.

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

would anyone object to my posting my own poetry or starting another thread for people to post their original pieces?