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Fragments v. 2.0

Great Expectations

My Father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Just starting)
 
Bernard said:
My Father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Just starting)
i LOVE Great Expectations! :) Let me know how you like it. Pip is one of my favorite characters of all time. i guess i really like most of Dickens' main characters, they are perfectly flawed.
 
Jenem said:
Lyra, I'm reading Blindness right now, too. I'm just at the beginning when they start quarantine (so not as far as you). I have the same feelings as you on the book - the writing style is strange and takes some getting used to. I finally figured out that with each run-on sentence of dialogue the next capitalized word that starts a speakers sentence is the other person speaking. For the most part that's how it works. I don't think I described it well - but you must know what I mean. The story is fascinating, I'm really enjoying it. It is somewhat reminscent of "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham - which is one of my favorites.

Took me a little while to figure out the dialogue thing myself :D I am not starting the 'how quickly do you read' debate again but I think I had extra difficulty with this style of writing because I do read quickly and I think it would definately help to take your time with this one. Having said that, I did think this was a powerful book that really makes you examine how thin the veneer of 'civilisation' actually is - hopefully not as thin as Saramago imagines!
 
Lyra said:
Took me a little while to figure out the dialogue thing myself :D I am not starting the 'how quickly do you read' debate again but I think I had extra difficulty with this style of writing because I do read quickly and I think it would definately help to take your time with this one. Having said that, I did think this was a powerful book that really makes you examine how thin the veneer of 'civilisation' actually is - hopefully not as thin as Saramago imagines!

On the contrary, after looking at it, I implore that it is.
 
By the way Wabbit, you owe me nothing. In actuality I owe you, I am but halfway through it, but Was continues to astonish me. The pure reality of life with the idealism stripped away. I hope you are enjoying the Moviegoer, the very reason I liked it, is the reason I like Was. Was is much more abrasive in approaching the falsity of how things appear, bringing together all perspectives of life into one story. The Moviegoer makes a similar point in a more subtle fashion.

It is as if Was explores the fasad's of life, while the Moviegoer shows what we are without them. A great combination to read close together, and I thank you for your part in allowing it to occur. :)
 
...the men burning houses and barns and horses so that for ten years and more the countryside was an inferno of revenge, broken by a fifth season of arson. The tramps who packed guns and overran whole towns. The old men who went mad with jealousy. The old women who jumped down wells. All those mothers: the ones who carried their children into the rivers, the ones who fed them arsenic and strychnine so that, if they had to die, at least it wouldn't be of epidemic disease...All the men who cleansed the putrescence of their lives with carbolic acid. All the others who killed themselves with the same insecticide they used on the potato bugs...
By the end of the nineteenth century, country towns had become charnel-houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings of men asking about jobs. State, county, and local news consisted of stories of resignation, failure, suicide, madness and grotesque eccentricity. Between 1900 and 1920, 30 per cent of the people who lived on farms left the land...
The people who left the land came to the cities not to get jobs, but to be free from them, not to get work but to be entertained, not to be masters but to be charges. They followed the yellow brick roads to emerald cities presided over by imaginary wizards who would permit them to live in happy adolescence for the rest of their lives...It is this adolescent city culture, created out of the desperate needs and fantasies of people fleeing from the traps and tragedies of late nineteenth century counry life, that still inspires us seventy years later.

pg. 145 WAS by Geoff Ryman quoted from Micheal Lesy
 
Night by Elie Wiesel

Page 11

How avid we were at that moment for one word of confidence, one sentence to say that there were no grounds for fear, that the meeting could not have been more commonplace, more routine, that it had only been a question of social welfare, of sanitary arrangements! But one glance at my father's haggard face was enough.

"I have terrible new," he said at last. "Deportation."
 
True@1stLight said:
On the contrary, after looking at it, I implore that it is.
Perhaps, and yet it must be noted the main storyline was the good done by the doctor's wife, and the group's struggle to maintain their humanity amidst the chaos.

What a fabulous book. Cruel and brutal, and yet sparkling moments of poignancy. I loved it :D
 
True@1stLight said:
By the way Wabbit, you owe me nothing. In actuality I owe you, I am but halfway through it, but Was continues to astonish me. The pure reality of life with the idealism stripped away. I hope you are enjoying the Moviegoer, the very reason I liked it, is the reason I like Was. Was is much more abrasive in approaching the falsity of how things appear, bringing together all perspectives of life into one story. The Moviegoer makes a similar point in a more subtle fashion.

It is as if Was explores the fasad's of life, while the Moviegoer shows what we are without them. A great combination to read close together, and I thank you for your part in allowing it to occur. :)

PHEW! Glad that you like the book! :)

I am still working my way though "Love in the time of Cholera" Yes, im slow... :D I'll let you know what I think of "movie" when I read it! If it's similar to "Was" then I am sure to enjoy!
 
Chacko said that in Pappachi's case it meant 2) Bring mind into certain state. Which, Chacko said, meant, tha Pappachi's mind had been brought into a state which made him like the English.
.....

"To understand history, Chacko said, "we have to o inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smeill the smells."

Pp 51, The God of Small Things, a novel by Arundhati Roy.
 
The previous one is what i am reading now. But i would like to post the following fragament i liked when i read Everything is Illuminated.


"So there would be proof that she existed," the hero said. " what?" "evidence. Documentation. Testimony." i told this to Augustine. " but a ring is not needed for this. people can remember without the ring. And when those people forget, or die, then no one will know about the ring. " i told this to the hero. " but the ring could be a reminder, he said. " everytime you see it, you think of her. " i told Augustine what the hero said. " No,"she said. " I think it was in case of this. in case someone should come searching one day." I could not perceive if she was speaking to me or to hte hero. " So that we would have something to find," I said. " NO," she said. " The rieng does not exist for you. You exist for the ring . The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring."

pp. 192, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.
 
Silverthorn by Raymond E. Feist pg 290

Pug looked up and, more than anything appeared suddenly fatigued, as if the weight of two worlds once again was his to bear. Finally he spoke, slowly. 'When Rogen was at last freed of the pain, the last words he spoke were "the Darkness, the Darkness." That is what he saw behind those two figures. The Darkness Rogen saw spoke these words "Intruder, whoever you are, wherever you are, know my power is coming. My servant prepares the way. Tremble, for i come. As was in the past, so shall be in the future, now and forever. Taste my power." He, it, must have somehow reached out and touched Rogen then, causing the terror, the pain.'
Kulgan said, 'How can this be?'
Softly, Hoarsely, Pug spoke. 'I do not know, old friend. But now a new dimension is added to the mystery of who seeks Aruthra's death and what lies behind all the black arts thrown at him and his allies.'
Pug buried his face in his hands a moment, then looked around the room. Gamina clung to Katala, and all eyes were upon Pug.
Dominic said, 'But there is something else.' He looked at Kasumi and Katala. 'What is that tongue? i heard it as well as you, as i heard Rogen's foreign words, but i know it not at all.'
It was Kasumi who said, 'The words were.....ancient, a language used in the temples. I could only understand a little. But the words were Tsurani.'

this is the second book, after the book Magician. im finding this series ok, but quite similar to the Lord of the Rings.

amy :D
 
Badness had not been enough. Badness had not protected her. It was a shield that had cracked. So she was deprived even of that proud sensation. She was not bad; she was nothing, a hole. She was an adult.

~ Was by Geoff Ryman
 
I know I already posted to this thread, but this paragraph is still making me giggle.

Though the logic of the situation led me to regard the future with reasonable optimism, the convergence of all those I SAW YOUs on a single point in my life, a convergence surely fortuitous, due to special conditions of interstellar visibility (the single exception was one celestial body where, corresponding to that same date, a sign appeared saying WE CAN'T SEE A DAMN THING), kept me in a constant state of nerves.

-- Italo Calvino, "Cosmicomics"

Irene Wilde
 
Share a fragment from the book you are reading right now at this moment. Share something beautiful or profound from the pages of your book.

Note it's the book you are reading and the page number you quote from. We can get a glimpse into what each of us is reading now, read something beautiful, and maybe be inspred to buy another book! ( like we need that :D )

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende - Page 3

My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the palce where the hundred rivers meet; he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath a canopy of trees, and the light seemed indecent to him. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold that the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions.

Share your fragment :)
 
Pg 73 - In Norfolk the custom was to give the reapers a good breakfast at around 11am. This would be plum cakes with caraway seeds and a drink of beer. A good dinner with plum puddings and beer was served at four in the afternoon. In the West Country, cider was the preferred drink, but elsewhere, beer was king. Several types of containers were used to take the beer out to the fields, at both haymaking and harvest time. Stoneware pitchers were used for a very long time, as were the small wooden coopered casks holding only a few pints. Later, glass bottle of beer were used and many of these found their way into ditches, hedgerows and streams. Appropriately enough the old banner of the National Agricultural Labourer's Union had a very visual sign. To one side, a fine wooden cask of beer stood proud with the words, 'United - We Stand'. On the reverse side the same wooden barrel is seen exploding into pieces with the words, 'Divided - We Fall'. This surely brought the truth home!

From You Brew Good Ale; A History of Small Scale Brewing
 
Ada Blackjack by Jennifer Niven

page 11

If she was ever going to be able to bring Bennett home again, she would have to save as much money as she could. It was not easy for a mother to be away from her only child, to know that she wasn't able to care for him or heal him or give him what he needed. Ada hoped that it would only be a matter of time before she and Bennett were reunited and living together again, under the same roof.
 
And as the sun went down, the muddy water took on a reddish tinge, a tinge that grew and spread and darkened until it seemed as if the Fevre Dream moved upon a flowing river of blood. Then the sun vanished behind the trees and the clouds, and slowly the blood darkened, going brown as blood does when it dries, and finally black, dead black, black as the grave. March watched the last crimson eddies vanish. No stars came out that night. He went down to supper with blood on his mind.

George R R Martin - Fevre Dream, page 88
 
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