What makes the world go round? Why, cute girls, of course, and the onlookers who appreciate them.

One hundred pulchritudinous quotations to identify. (Anons with long memories may recall a similar quiz some years back. However, that version had many of the wrong cute girls, and /lit/ correctly chose to hold off on answering it, preferring to wait for the corrected version.)

Translations marked [*]. Hints on request.


The authors:

Richard Adams, Dante Alighieri, Kingsley Amis

J. M. Barrie, Samuel Beckett, Captain Beefheart, John Berryman, R. D. Blackmore, John Braine, Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, Edmund Burke, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lord Byron

James M. Cain, Thomas Campion, Miguel Cervantes, Raymond Chandler, Malcolm de Chazal, Peter Cheyney, Wilkie Collins, Padraic Colum, James Fenimore Cooper, Richmal Crompton, e. e. cummings

Carl Dennis, Charles Dickens, Isak Dinesen, John Donne, Alexandre Dumas, Bob Dylan

John Fante, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Robert Frost

Francis Galton, John Gardner, William Golding, Robert Graves

H. Rider Haggard, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Zbigniew Herbert, Homer, Michel Houellebecq, Ted Hughes

James Joyce

Nikos Kazantsakis, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Stephen King

R. A. Lafferty, D. H. Lawrence, Laurie Lee, C. S. Lewis

Christopher Marlowe, G. G. Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, John Milton

Vladimir Nabokov, Sarojini Naidu

John Osborne

Boris Pasternak, Walter Pater, Mervyn Peake, Walker Percy, Petrarch, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Thomas Pynchon

Philip Roth, Patrick Rothfuss, Damon Runyon

J. D. Salinger, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, King Solomon

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Thompson, J. R. R. Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain

John Updike

Stephen Vizinczey

Oscar Wilde, John Williams, P. G. Wodehouse, Gene Wolfe, William Wordsworth

W. B. Yeats

1)
Out of all the millions of women, now and then you see one that brings it all out of you. There is something about the shape of them, the way they are hung together, a special dress that they are wearing, something about them that you cannot overcome.


2)
Miles Archer came forward to stand at a corner of the desk. While the girl looked at the bag he looked at her. His little brown eyes ran their bold appraising gaze from her lowered face to her feet and up to her face again. Then he looked at Spade and made a silent whistling mouth of appreciation.


3)
“ . . . her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.”

[*]


4)
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up.


5)
Some mug by the name of Confucius — who was a guy who was supposed to know his vegetables — once issued an edict that any time he saw a sap sittin’ around bein’ impervious to the weather an’ anything else that was goin’, an’ lookin’ like he had been hit in the kisser with a flat-iron, the said sap was sufferin’ from woman trouble.

I reckon Confucius musta been thinkin’ of me.

It is as dark as hell. It is also drizzlin’ with rain an’ somewhere around in the skies I can hear a Heinkel dronin’. But I am not worryin’ too much about any of these things because I am wonderin’ about that sweet momma Carlette.

This baby has got everything you ever heard about an’ then a couple of trucks-full. So far as I am concerned she is the answer to the travellin’ salesman’s prayer. I could tell you things about that dame’s geography which would make you wonder why you are so stuck on the dame you are gettin’ around with at the moment.

She is not so tall but she is certainly not short. She has got curves that you never saw in a geometry book. She has got deep an’ mysterious blue eyes an’ when she looks at you you can feel snakes playin’ baseball in your spine. I’m tellin’ you mugs with my hand on my heart that when they served out allure that baby collected for the whole family, an’ I will also go so far as to say that if she had been let loose in the Garden of Eden, Adam would have closed down for the afternoon, turned out the serpent, and started pickin’ apples like he was in the jam business.

6)
At fifteen, Annabelle was one of those rare beauties who can make every man’s head turn — regardless of age or physical fitness. She was one of the few who could send pulses racing in young and old and cause old men to groan with regret simply by walking down the street.

[*]


7)
I feel that my lust makes me glow; I grow cold in my chair, like a torch of ice, as I study beauty. I have studied much of it, wearing all styles of bathing suit and facial expression, and have come to this conclusion: a woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, or in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the *sectio aurea* or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that Grace sits and rides a woman’s body.


8)
She had on a white T-shirt like McMurphy’s only a lot smaller, white tennis shoes and Levi pants snipped off above her knees to give her feet circulation, and it didn’t look like that was near enough material to go around, considering what it had to cover. She must’ve been seen with lots less by lots more men, but under the circumstances she began to fidget around self-consciously like a schoolgirl on a stage. Nobody spoke while they looked. Martini did whisper that you could read the dates of the coins in her Levi pockets, they were so tight, but he was closer and could see better’n the rest of us.


9)
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament;
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and way-lay.
I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!


10)
At the age of seven or eight I had the romantic determination to become a missionary, and, if possible a martyr, on the rice-fields of China. I remember particularly one sunny afternoon when I didn’t feel like studying and stood at the window of our room watching the smartly dressed women walking back and forth along our street. I wondered whether, becoming a priest and taking a vow of celibacy, I would find it difficult to go through life without the company of those fluffy women who were walking by our house on the way to the hat-shop or the hairdresser to make themselves look even more angelic. My determination to become a priest thus confronted me with the problem of renouncing women even before I could possibly have wanted them. After feeling ashamed about my concern for some time, I finally asked my Father Confessor, a childlike, grey man in his sixties, how difficult *he* found it to go through life without women. He looked at me sternly and confined his answer to the remark that he didn’t think I would ever be a priest.

[*]

11)
Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.


12)
it would be good to write
a poem about a rosy ear
but not so that people would say
what a subject he chose
he’s trying to be eccentric

[*]


13)
Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you’ll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfectly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet.

That is what happened when Denna smiled at me. I don’t mean to imply I felt as if I stood on brittle ice about to give way beneath me. No, I felt like the ice itself, suddenly shattered with cracks spiralling out from where she had touched my chest.


14)
Your slender body seems a shaft of moonlight
Against the door as it gently closes.
Do you cast no shadow?

Your whisper is too soft for credence,
Your tread like blossom drifting from a bough,
Your touch even softer.


15)
The handsome girl waited for some time idly in her place, and the only sound heard in the stillness was the hopping of the canary up and down the perches of its prison. Then she looked attentively downwards. It was not at the bird, nor at the cat; it was at an oblong package tied in paper, and lying between them. She turned her head to learn if the waggoner were coming. He was not yet in sight; and her eyes crept back to the package, her thoughts seeming to run upon what was inside it. At length she drew the article into her lap, and untied the paper covering; a small swing looking-glass was disclosed, in which she proceeded to survey herself attentively. She parted her lips and smiled.

It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal charm. What possessed her to indulge in such a performance in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and unperceived farmer who were alone its spectators, — whether the smile began as a factitious one, to test her capacity in that art, — nobody knows; it ended certainly in a real smile. She blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more.

16)
The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.


17)
The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood — she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.


18)
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?


19)
As his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions— as his eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high.


20)
The newcomer was a little girl of about nine — a very dainty little girl, dressed in a white fur coat and cap and long white gaiters. Her hair fell in golden curls over her white fur shoulders. Her eyes were blue. Her cheeks were velvety and rosy. Her mouth was like a baby’s. William had seen this vision on various occasions in the town, but had never yet addressed it. Whenever he had seen it, his heart in the midst of his body had been even as melting wax. He smiled — a self-conscious, sheepish smile. His freckled face blushed to the roots of his short stubby hair. She seemed to find nothing odd in the fact of a small boy being in charge of a sweet-shop. She came up to the counter.

“Please, I want two twopenny bars of chocolate.”

Her voice was very clear and silvery.

Ecstasy rendered William speechless. His smile grew wider and more foolish. Seeing his two half-sucked Pineapple Crisps exposed upon the scales, he hastily put them into his mouth.

21)
A woman who knows how to carry herself can create secret openings even in the most enveloping garment. Decolletage is for women with weak sexual imaginations.

[*]


22)
Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her Eye,
In every gesture dignitie and love.


23)
As his lordship stared at the doctor another figure appeared, a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich — her eyes smouldered.


24)
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross and your voice like chimes
Oh, who do they think could bury you?


25)
In the morning before it was quite light he walked out of the compound and down to the river. He walked out over the plank bridge on its stone piers and stood looking down at the clear cold waters of the Casas Grandes running out of the mountains to the south. He turned and looked downstream. A hundred feet away in water to her thighs stood the primadonna naked. Her hair was down and it was wet and clinging to her back and it reached to the water. He stood frozen. She turned and swung her hair before her and bent and lowered it into the river. Her breasts swung above the water. He took off his hat and stood with his heart laboring under his shirt. She raised up and gathered her hair and twisted out the water. Her skin so white. The dark hair under her belly almost an indelicacy.

She bent once more and trailed her hair in the water with a swaying motion sideways and then stood and swung it about her in a great hoop of spray and stood with her head back and her eyes closed. The sun rising over the gray ranges to the east lit the upper air. She held one hand up. She moved her body, she swept both hands before her. She bent and caught her falling hair in her arms and held it and she passed one hand over the surface of the water as if to bless it and he watched and as he watched he saw that the world which had always been before him everywhere had been veiled from his sight. She turned and he thought she might sing to the sun. She opened her eyes and saw him there on the bridge and she turned her back and walked slowly up out of the river and was lost to his view among the pale standing trunks of the cottonwoods and the sun rose and the river ran as before but nothing was the same nor did he think it ever would be.

26)
There is a Garden in her face,
Where Roses and white Lilies grow;
A heav’nly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.


27)
She smiled, and I felt as I had when I had been in the Atrium of Time and had come inside to a warm room and food. She had narrow, very white teeth in a wide mouth; her eyes, each as deep as the cistern beneath the Bell Keep, shone when she smiled.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”


28)
It was then, on a ten-mile straight cut through a forest, that it happened. Triple wind-horns screamed their banshee discord in his ear, and a low, white two-seater, a Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder with its hood down, tore past him, cut in cheekily across his bonnet and pulled away, the sexy boom of its twin exhausts echoing back from the border of the trees. And it was a girl driving, a girl with a shocking pink scarf tied round her hair, leaving a brief pink tail that the wind blew horizontal behind her.


29)
— How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.

— You must not look at her. You look too much at her.


30)
GRADUAL VARIATION.

But as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same right line. They vary their direction every moment, and they change under the eye by a deviation continually carrying on, but for whose beginning or end you will find it difficult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird will illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in a larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new direction, but it soon varies its new course, it blends again with the other parts, and the line is perpetually changing, above, below, upon every side. In this description I have before me the idea of a dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It is smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another; you are presented with no sudden protuberance through the whole, and yet the whole is continually changing. Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness, the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?

31)
The voice swooped out of the sky like a sudden wind. It was a rather good mezzo-soprano —

‘Hi-jo-to! Ho! Hi-jo-to! Ho!’

And after it, mounted on a horse almost as fine as Binky, was a woman. Very definitely. A lot of woman. She was as much woman as you could get in one place without getting two women.


32)
Of Psyche’s beauty — at every age the beauty proper to that age — there is only this to be said, that there were no two opinions about it, from man or woman, once she had been seen. It was beauty that did not astonish you until afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was “according to nature”; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all around her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad — she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes — the toad became beautiful.


33)
With the brains of a peahen, and one whose mental growth had been retarded by being dropped on its head when just out of the egg, she combined a radiant loveliness which made fashionable photographers fight for her custom. Every time you saw in the paper the headlines

WEST END AFFRAY
PHOTOGRAPHERS BRAWL WHILE
THOUSANDS CHEER

you could be pretty certain that trade rivalry concerning Veronica Wedge had caused the rift.


34)
She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.


35)
So charming may she now appear! and you the feathered choristers of nature, whose sweetest notes not even Handel can excell, tune your melodious throats to celebrate her appearance. From love proceeds your music, and to love it returns. Awaken therefore that gentle passion in every swain: for lo! adorned with all the charms in which nature can array her; bedecked with beauty, youth, sprightliness, innocence, modesty, and tenderness, breathing sweetness from her rosy lips, and darting brightness from her sparkling eyes, the lovely Sophia comes!

36)
I see Lola clearly, holding her gin fizz.

“I am glad to see you,” says Lola, who is five feet nine and in her high heels looks me straight in the eye and says what she thinks.

“So am I,” I say, feeling a wonder that there should be such a thing as a beautiful six-foot woman who is glad to see me. Women are mythical creatures. They have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs. I see her clearly, gin fizz in one hand, the other held against her sacrum, palm out, pushing herself rhythmically off the wall. Women! Music! Love! Life! Joy! Gin fizzes!

She is home for Christmas from Texas A & M. She looks like her father but the resemblance is a lovely joke, a droll commentary on him. His colorlessness, straw hair, straw skin, becomes in her a healthy pallor, milkiness over rose, lymph over blood. Her hair is a black-auburn with not enough red to ruin her skin, which has none of the green chloral undertones of some redheads. Her glance is mild and unguarded. It is the same to her whether she drinks or does not drink, talks or does not talk, looks one in the eye or does not look.

She drinks and hisses a cello tune in her teeth and pushes herself off the wall.

The gin fizzes come and go. We find we can look into each other’s eyes without the usual fearfulness and shamefulness of eye meeting eye. I am in love.


37)
The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication.


38)
‘You are the water in rock cisterns and the secret spiders in that water. You are the dead coyote lying half in the stream, and you are the old entrapped dreams of the coyote’s brains oozing liquid through the broken eye socket. You are the happy ravening flies about that broken socket.’


39)
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease . . .


40)
“Luh-let m-me h-h-help,” Lance says, and she looks up. The shadow cast by the cap’s bill falls away, he sees her big blue eyes, the ones she’ll pass on to their daughter. One look into those eyes and the war is over without a single shot fired; he belongs to her as surely as any young man ever belonged to any young woman.

The rest, as they say around here, was just courtin.

41)
I was late and there was a line at the reservations desk. I fell in behind fifteen or so Puerto Ricans and one small blonde girl a few places ahead of me. I pegged her for a tourist, a wild young secretary going down to the Caribbean for a two week romp. She had a fine little body and an impatient way of standing that indicated a mass of stored-up energy. I watched her intently, smiling, feeling the ale in my veins, waiting for her to turn around for a swift contact with the eyes.


42)
His silent approval spoke to her, and she gave a little twitch to her body, letting the ermine stole hang from one shoulder. Then, hips swaying delicately, she came slowly across the room; small chin outthrust; seemingly tugged forward by the bountiful imbalance within the small white blouse.


43)
Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shown to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation. Her turban of yellow silk suited well with the darkness of her complexion. The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the profusion of her sable tresses, which, each arranged in its own little spiral of twisted curls, fell down upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as a simarre of the richest Persian silk, exhibiting flowers in their natural colours embossed upon a purple ground, permitted to be visible — all these constituted a combination of loveliness, which yielded not to the most beautiful of the maidens who surrounded her.


44)
Lightly, O lightly we bear her along,
She sways like a flower in the wind of our song;
She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream,
She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream.
Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing,
We bear her along like a pearl on a string.


45)
How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams — no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish’s skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefulest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dovelike, so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and so bewitching. For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaps her thought — and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: “Auntie, I just *know* I’ve got five hundred fleas on me!”

46)
Bust. 34"

Waist. 27"

Hips, etc. 35"


47)
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals.


48)
There was the difference between her and other women that that there is between an overcast and a starry sky.


49)
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!


50)
Beautiful? Yes, she was beautiful. I must, since then, have heard fifty people say that she was beautiful. But I had already seen beautiful women, perceiving their beauty detachedly, with both eyes and mind; sometimes praising it, as a tone-deaf man at a concert may, for the sake of usage and good manners, and not altogether without sincerity, praise the music. Not merely were her face and figure physically beautiful. Her carriage, movement, air were arrestingly graceful and elegant. Yet even these could not of themselves have brought about that fracture of the day’s continuity which I am trying to recall. An overwhelming femininity seemed to radiate from her, surrounding her like an invisible nimbus. Of what was it composed? Of a certain elusive quality of detachment and beyondness, so that in some strange way I felt myself, even though I had risen to my feet, to be looking up at her; of a floating, quick-glancing self-possession, like that of a dancer; of mischief and gaiety, and of amusement, too, in her consciousness of the effect she knew she had on others (or at all events on men). But yet another constituent there was — disturbing and ambivalent; a suggestion of something gypsy-like, even pagan — unscrupulous and ruthless which would not shrink or hold back where others might feel themselves bound by the dictates of conventional, civilised life. In such a respect, as much as in grace and dignity, might a captive leopard’s beauty transcend the boring ugliness of the sweaty, tobacco-chewing, black-finger-nailed captors surrounding it. Certainly they have the whip-hand, but they had better beware, for the marvel they have trapped and mean to exploit is lethal. The sharp-clawed, instinctive creature does not share their avaricious, purblind world, does not feel as they do, knows nothing of prudence or weighing the cost. There is no telling what it knows. Partly it seems unaware of and indifferent to them, pacing its cage. Partly it is most terribly vigilant and aware of their intrusion upon its deadly, cunning innocence.

Yet at this moment all these things were like so many bursting stars of a rocket, here and gone, flashing before me and leaving me dazzled; uncertain, after the burst, of numbers and colours, and conscious only of a style that disconcerted me, seeming as it did to confer upon me, as an immense and gracious favour, this typist girl’s presence. It was like Miranda the other way round — I had never before seen a real woman.

I have not the least recollection of what she was wearing.

51)
O woman, shapely as the swan,
On your account I shall not die:
The men you’ve slain — a trivial clan —
Were less than I.


52)
Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.

She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.


53)
A fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eye — that is all the drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language, either. The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.


54)
Sinbad Sailors watches her go by, demure and proud and schoolmarm in her crisp flower dress and sun-defying hat, with never a look or lilt or wriggle, the butcher’s unmelting icemaiden daughter veiled for ever from the hungry hug of his eyes.


55)
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

— Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

56)
It was very bad coffee. When the cream mixed with it I realized it was not cream at all, for it turned a greyish color, and the taste was that of boiled rags. This was my last nickel, and it made me angry. I looked around for the girl who had waited on me. She was five or six tables away, serving beer from a tray. Her back was to me, and I saw the tight smoothness of her shoulders under a white smock, the faint trace of muscle in her arms, and the black hair so thick and glossy, falling to her shoulders.


57)
I wanna find me a woman who’ll hold my big toe till I have to go
I wanna find a blue swirl plastic ocarina
About five miles long
And play with them sweet potatoes all night long


58)
And what did she mean to him? Oh, that was easy! He knew that perfectly well.

A spring evening . . . the air is punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. The expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, disastrous and unpredictable gestures. Oh, how sweet it was to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life! And how he longed to thank life, thank existence itself, face to face, to thank life in person.

[*]


59)
She is Cuban. Her family are prosperous Cubans living in Jersey, across the river in Bergen County. She has black, black hair, glossy but ever so slightly coarse. And she’s big. She’s a big woman. The silk blouse is unbuttoned to the third button, and so you see she has powerful, beautiful breasts. You see the cleavage immediately. And you see she knows it. You see, despite the decorum, the meticulousness, the cautiously soigné style — or because of them — that she’s aware of herself. She comes to the first class with the jacket buttoned over her blouse, yet some five minutes into the session, she has taken it off. When I glance her way again, I see that she’s put it back on. So you understand that she’s aware of her power but that she isn’t sure yet how to use it, what to do with it, how much she even wants it. That body is still new to her, she’s still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he’s packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.


60)
“Why art thou so frightened, stranger?” asked the sweet voice again — a voice which seemed to draw the heart out of me, like the strains of softest music. “Is there that about me that should affright a man? Then surely are men changed from what they used to be!”

61)
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
‘You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry’s dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.’


62)
She had on a white sailor suit, with a blouse that pulled tight over her hips, and white shoes and stockings. I wasn’t the only one that knew about that shape. She knew about it herself, plenty.


63)
A twist of gold was round her hair; a robe
Of samite without price, that more expressed
Than hid her, clung about her lissom limbs . . .


64)
All of a sudden, a very, very beautiful young doll who is about forty percent in and sixty percent out of an evening gown walks right up to us sitting there, and holds out her hand to me, and speaks as follows: ‘Do you remember me?’

Naturally, I do not remember her, but naturally I am not going to admit it.


65)
The sub-interpreter was married to a charming person, not only a Hottentot in figure, but in that respect a Venus among Hottentots. I was perfectly aghast at her development, and made inquiries upon that delicate point as far as I dared among my missionary friends. The result is, that I believe Mrs. Petrus to be the lady who ranks second among all the Hottentots for the beautiful outline that her back affords, Jonker’s wife ranking as the first; the latter, however, was slightly *passée*, while Mrs. Petrus was in full *embonpoint*. I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measure ments of her shape; but there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my foot-rule could be; and I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form, that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her crinoline and stuffing, can do otherwise than humbly imitate. The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring-tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.

66)
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.


67)
A young man, in the dress of an officer, conducted to their steeds two females, who, as it was apparent by their dresses, were prepared to encounter the fatigues of a journey in the woods. One, and she was the more juvenile in her appearance, though both were young, permitted glimpses of her dazzling complexion, fair golden hair, and bright blue eyes, to be caught, as she artlessly suffered the morning air to blow aside the green veil which descended low from her beaver.

The flush which still lingered above the pines in the western sky was not more bright nor delicate than the bloom on her cheek; nor was the opening day more cheering than the animated smile which she bestowed on the youth, as he assisted her into the saddle.


68)
Suddenly my knees gave way beneath me. Under the olive trees, walking with a springing step along the village road, appeared in red, with a black kerchief over her head, the graceful, slender-waisted figure of the widow!

Her sinuous gait was really that of a black panther, and it seemed to me that an acrid scent of musk was distilled in the air. If only I could escape! I felt that when angry this beast would have no mercy and that the only thing to do was to run away. But how? The widow was steadily approaching.

The gravel seemed to be crunching as if an army were marching over it.

She saw me, shook her head, her kerchief slipped down and her hair appeared, black as jet and shining. She cast me a languorous look and smiled. Her eyes had a wild sweetness. Hastily she adjusted her kerchief, as though she were ashamed at having let me see one of woman’s deepest secrets: her hair.

[*]


69)
The old men of the realm held seats above the gates.
Long years had brought their fighting days to a halt
but they were eloquent speakers still, clear as cicadas
settled on treetops, lifting their voices through the forest,
rising softly, falling, dying away... So they waited,
the old chiefs of Troy, as they sat aloft the tower.
And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,
they murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:
“Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
years of agony all for her, for such a woman. . . . ”

[*]


70)
I put down the jar with a gulp and a gasp. Then I turned to look at Rosie. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand.

‘Rosie . . . ’ I said, on my knees, and shaking.

71)
— Tell me then about your wife.

— What wife?

— How beautiful she was, how tender and how true. Tell me with what speed she swung in the air, with what velocity she came off the wicket, whether she was responsive to finger spin, whether you could bowl a shooter with her, or an offbreak with a legbreak action. In other words, did she google?


72)
Her eyes, that he had thought to be a dark brown or black, were a deep violet. Sometimes they caught the dim light of a lamp in the room and glittered moistly; he could turn his head one way and another, and the eyes beneath his gaze would change color as he moved, so that it seemed, even in repose, they were never still. Her flesh, that had at a distance seemed so cool and pale, had beneath it a warm ruddy undertone like light flowing beneath a milky translucence. And like the translucent flesh, the calm and poise and reserve which he had thought were herself, masked a warmth and playfulness and humor whose intensity was made possible by the appearance that disguised them.


73)
“Nearly four years of being in the same room with you, night and day, and I still can’t stop my sweat breaking out when I see you doing — something as ordinary as leaning over an ironing board.”


74)
Her loveliness was like that of many landscapes, which require to be often seen to be fully enjoyed. There was a depth of dark clear brightness in her eyes which was lost upon a quick observer, a character about her mouth which only showed itself to those with whom she familiarly conversed, a glorious form of head the perfect symmetry of which required the eye of an artist for its appreciation. She had none of that dazzling brilliancy, of that voluptuous Rubens beauty, of that pearly whiteness, and those vermilion tints which immediately entranced with the power of a basilisk men who came within reach of Madeline Neroni. It was all but impossible to resist the signora, but no one was called upon for any resistance towards Eleanor. You might begin to talk to her as though she were your sister, and it would not be till your head was on your pillow that the truth and intensity of her beauty would flash upon you, that the sweetness of her voice would come upon your ear. A sudden half-hour with the Neroni was like falling into a pit, an evening spent with Eleanor like an unexpected ramble in some quiet fields of asphodel.


75)
*Au fond, ça m’est bien égal*. All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and —

“That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”

76)
I bumped into June when I was running along the long corridor into the Treasurer’s. Unthinkingly, I put my hands out to her waist and kissed her soft cheek with its lovely golden down. I didn’t kiss her but all women; I know they’re stupid and unaccountable, ruled by the moon one and all, poor bitches, but there’s a physical goodness about them as sacred as milk – there’s no such thing as a bad woman, because their soft complexities are what give us life.


77)
He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.

“The point about love,” he said, his consciousness quickly adjusting itself, “is that we hate the word because we have vulgarized it. It ought to be proscribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea.”


78)
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands


79)
To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

[*]


80)
When I came to myself again, my hands were full of young grass and mould, and a little girl kneeling at my side was rubbing my forehead tenderly with a dock-leaf and a handkerchief.

“Oh, I am so glad,” she whispered softly, as I opened my eyes and looked at her; “now you will try to be better, won’t you?”

I had never heard so sweet a sound as came from between her bright red lips, while there she knelt and gazed at me; neither had I ever seen anything so beautiful as the large dark eyes intent upon me, full of pity and wonder. And then, my nature being slow, and perhaps, for that matter, heavy, I wandered with my hazy eyes down the black shower of her hair, as to my jaded gaze it seemed; and where it fell on the turf, among it (like an early star) was the first primrose of the season. And since that day I think of her, through all the rough storms of my life, when I see an early primrose.

81)
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?


82)
As he arose, slowly, holding his head, blowing out alternate Nostrils, her Voice first reach’d him. “Were’t Night-time, Sir, I’d say you were out Star-Gazing.” She put upon her ‘r’ the same vigorous Edge as his Father on a difficult day,— withal, “Star-Gazing” in those parts was a young man’s term for masturbating. He might have said something then to regret forever, but her looks had him stupefied. If she was not, like, Susannah, a Classick English Rose, neither was she any rugged Blossom of the Heath. He found himself staring at the shape of her mouth, her Lips slightly apart, in an Inquiry that just fail’d to be a Smile,— like a Gate-Keeper about to have a Word with him. What shadow’d Gates lay at her Back? What mystick Residence?


83)
The extreme beauty of the countenance, that shone forth in loveliness that mocked the vain attempts of dress to augment it, was peculiarly and purely Grecian; there were the large, dark, melting eyes, the finely formed nose, the coral lips, and pearly teeth, that belonged to her race and country.

[*]


84)
Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all round her. “Is it possible I can go over there on the ice, go up to her?” he thought. The place where she stood seemed to him a holy shrine, unapproachable, and there was one moment when he was almost retreating, so overwhelmed was he with terror. He had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind himself that people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he too might come there to skate. He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.

[*]


85)
Then at last, moving slowly, as if walking in a dream, a woman in a robe of threaded silver came gliding from the hall. Her smooth long hair was as red as fire and soft as the ruddy sheen on dragon’s gold. Her face was gentle, mysteriously calm. The night became more still.

“I offer you my sister,” the young king said. “Let her name from now on be Wealtheow, or holy servant of common good.”

I leered in the rattling darkness of my tree. The name was ridiculous. “Pompous, pompous ass!” I hissed. But she was beautiful and she surrendered herself with the dignity of a sacrificial virgin. My chest was full of pain, my eyes smarted, and I was afraid — O monstrous trick against reason — I was afraid I was about to sob. I wanted to smash things, bring down the night with my howl of rage. But I kept still. She was beautiful, as innocent as dawn on winter hills. She tore me apart as once the Shaper’s song had done. As if for my benefit, as if in vicious scorn of me, children came from the meadhall and ran down to her, weeping, to snatch at her hands and dress.

“Stop it!” I whispered. “Stupid!”

86)
And what about favors you haven’t earned?
The blonde who’s passing the window now
Without so much as a glance in your direction
Might be trying to focus her mind on her performance
So you, or someone like you, will be pleased to watch
As she crosses the square in her leather snow boots
And tunic of red velvet, fur-trimmed.


87)
By merely walking down the aisle between them she would transform the very wooden desks and benches themslves into a grove of Venus and fetch every male in the room, from the children just entering puberty to the grown men of nineteen and twenty, one of whom was already a husband and father, who could turn ten acres of land between sunup and sundown, springing into embattled rivalry, importunate each for precedence in immolation.


88)
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.


89)
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.


90)
I never really made it with her (I never laid her), and I’m sorry. After Tom and I left the company together, I never went back, and I never saw or spoke to her again. I tried. I’m sorry. I miss her. I love her. I want her back. I remember her clearly now when I try to remember everything important that ever happened to me. I think of her often as I sit at my desk in my office and have no work for the company I want to do. And I think of her often in the evenings, too, when I sit at home with my wife and my children and the maid and the nurse and have nothing better I want to do there, either, biting my nails addictively like a starving hunchback as I slump in a chair in my living room or study and wish for something novel to occur that will keep me awake until bedtime. I liked the fact that she was short and slightly plump (and wherever my hands fell, there was something full to hold and feel). I remember how clear and smooth and bright her skin was; her dimples deepened when she laughed. She laughed and smiled a lot. I miss that gaiety. Now I would know what to do with her. I want another chance. Then I remember who I am; I remember she would still be four years older than I am now, short, overweight, and dumpy, probably, and perhaps something of a talkative bore, which is not the girl I’m yearning for at all. (That person isn’t here anymore.) Then I remember she’s dead.

91)
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies . . .


92)
Above all else, even beyond the musky treasures of your white body, this body so close to me and unattainable, above all else: what is your mystery? This is not a question I can ask you because I can hardly frame it to myself. But as freedom of the will is to be experienced like the taste of potatoes, as I once saw in and round your face what I cannot draw and can hardly remember — as I am unable to make a picture of you that remotely resembles the breathing Beatrice; for mercy’s sake admit me to the secret. I have capitulated to you. I go with the tide. Even if you do not know what you are at least admit me.


93)
If all the words bestowed on her could feed
A single instant’s laudatory phrase,
Still that would be too weak for what I need.

The loveliness I saw would not just daze
The sight of men, but had such worth, I deem,
As only He who made it can appraise.

I yield before a passage so extreme,
Defeated more than any who’s resigned
His labours at a barrier in his theme;

For like the sun that strikes our frail eyes blind,
So does her sweet smile now, through memory’s taste,
Deprive me of the functions of my mind.

From that first day on earth I saw her face,
Until this present vision, so acute,
Continuous can my thread of song be traced:

But now I must abandon my pursuit,
In verses, of her splendour; just as each
Creative artist, past his bounds, is mute.

[*]


94)
Gorgeous ripples of pear shape her skin to her cheek-bones, and long sad eyelids, and Virgin Mary resignation, and peachy coffee complexion and eyes of astonishing mystery with nothing-but-earth-depth expressionless half disdain and half mournful lamentation of pain.


95)
He wanted to implode his features, to crush air from his mouth, in a way and to a degree that might be set against the mess of feelings she aroused in him: indignation, grief, resentment, peevishness, spite, and sterile anger, all the allotropes of pain. The girl was doubly guilty, first of looking like that, secondly of appearing in front of him looking like that. Run-of-the-mill queens of love — Italian film-actresses, millionaires’ wives, girls on calendars — he could put up with; more than that, he positively liked looking at them. But this sort of thing he’d as soon not look at at all. He remembered seeing in a book once that some man who claimed to have love well weighed up — someone like Plato or Rilke — had said that it was an emotion quite different in kind, not just degree, from ordinary sexual feelings. Was it love, then, that he felt for girls like this one? No emotion he’d experienced or could imagine came anything like so close, to his way of thinking; but apart from the dubious support of Plato or Rilke he had all the research on the subject against him there. Well, what was it if it wasn’t love?

96)
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?

[*]


97)
She moved not like a mortal, but as though
She bore an angel’s form; her words had then
A sound that simple human voices lack;
A heavenly spirit, a living sun
Was what I saw; now, if it is not so,
The wound’s not healed because the bow grows slack.

[*]


98)
The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost; her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one who has known many things that the years bring.


99)
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them


100)
I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE YOU TO SOMEONE

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say: “Well, she looks just like Jane Fonda except that she’s got red hair and her mouth is different and of course she’s not a movie star.”

I couldn’t say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma, Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or ’42: somewhere in there. I think I was seven or eight or six. It was a movie about rural electrification and a perfect 1930s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.

The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances, like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio.

Then they built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.
There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.
Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.

The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.
It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt or hearing him on the radio.

“ . . . The President of the United States . . . ”

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio.

That’s how you look to me.

>2)
I'm guessing Spade is Sam Spade from Dashiell Hammer. Maltese Falcon?
>5)
This reads extremely like a noir work so I will guess Raymond Chandler. I think Long Goodbye if it is

>>25395973
>27)
Atrium of Time is from Book of the New Sun I believe

>52)
Green martians and completely naked lady that's definitely a Barsoom John Carter book probably the first one

>55)
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
The girl that leads him to a life of art instead of church
>69)
Helen of Troy obviously
Homer's Iliad is the probable guess unless this is a trick
>81)
And this is Faustus by Marlowe seeing Helen of Troy

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>>25396035

>2)
>I'm guessing Spade is Sam Spade from Dashiell Hammer. Maltese Falcon?
Correct.

>5)
>This reads extremely like a noir work
Right.
>so I will guess Raymond Chandler. I think Long Goodbye if it is
Nope. Not Philip Marlowe's tone. There are two or three other hard-boiled authors in there. This is someone who was very famous at the time but almost unknown now.

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>>25396041

>27)
>Atrium of Time is from Book of the New Sun I believe
Wolfe, right. It's Severian's first meeting with Thecla in Shadow of the Torturer.

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>>25396053

>52)
>Green martians and completely naked lady that's definitely a Barsoom John Carter book probably the first one
Correct. A Princess Of Mars. Dejah herself, captured but not humbled. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a gift for cover artists.

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>>25396064
First reply with more than one correct answer, so the cute anime girls get animated.

>55)
>Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
>The girl that leads him to a life of art instead of church
Right.

>69)
>Helen of Troy obviously
>Homer's Iliad is the probable guess unless this is a trick
No trick, Iliad it is, Book 3, Fagles translation. Homer sensibly doesn't try to describe Helen directly, just describes the reaction of people looking at her.

>81)
>And this is Faustus by Marlowe seeing Helen of Troy
Right.

>>25395950
25 feels like cormac mccarthy.
43 is rebecca in ivanhoe i think
52 edgar rice burroughs barsoom pretty sure
60 is ayesha from she? haggard was a mush who loved woman despite all the masculine adventure his books are more famous for
80 is lorna doone by blackmore you seem to quote it a lot quizanon
85 is grendel by gardner
91 is byron obviously

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>>25396151
7/7 here, more or less:

>25 feels like cormac mccarthy.
Right, but which one?

>43 is rebecca in ivanhoe i think
Correct. Walter Scott. Rumours are this character is Jewish so maybe /lit/ will disapprove but a babe is a babe.

>52 edgar rice burroughs barsoom pretty sure
Correct, although someone else already got it.

>60 is ayesha from she?
Right.
>haggard was a mush who loved woman despite all the masculine adventure his books are more famous for
Holly (the narrator of She) is a stern scholar who claims to have renounced women and thinks he is impervious to female charms but then after about five minutes with Ayesha he falls to his knees dribbling and she laughs and says ‘I thought you would hold out just a bit longer’. I wonder if he's supposed to be something of a self-insert?

>80 is lorna doone by blackmore
Right.
>you seem to quote it a lot quizanon
Didn't think it was all that often. It's not one of my "gonna post this until you like it" staples like e.g. Under Milk Wood. (On a side note I wonder what single work I've quoted the most? Probably gonna be something like Divine Comedy or Anatomy of Melancholy, where it's the one big thing an author is known for.)

>85 is grendel by gardner
Right. Definitely on the obscure side but I've used it a few times.

>91 is byron obviously
Correct.

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>>25396174
>Right, but which one?
his border trilogy idk i just recognised his writing
>I wonder if he's supposed to be something of a self-insert?
probably. the woman he had fallenin love with ended up marrying another man then getting divorced and returning to him penniless and he paid for her keep the rest of his life despite haggard already being married to a woman he didnt love. see picrel
>Didn't think it was all that often. It's not one of my "gonna post this until you like it" staples like e.g. Under Milk Wood. (On a side note I wonder what single work I've quoted the most? Probably gonna be something like Divine Comedy or Anatomy of Melancholy, where it's the one big thing an author is known for.)
i like lorna doone. its good.

66. Chandler?
75. Nabokov, Lolita
78.cummings
93. Dante (the Commedia - Paradiso? - rather than the Vita Nuova)

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3) Dulcinea from Don Quixote
11) The Sun Also Rises
31) No idea where this is from, but the character must be performing one of Wagner's valkyries, right?
83) Haydee from the Count of Monte Cristo?
84) Kitty from Anna Karenina

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>>25396179
>Right, but which one?
>his border trilogy idk i just recognised his writing
Good enough. It's The Crossing.

>I wonder if he's supposed to be something of a self-insert?
>probably. the woman he had fallenin love with ended up marrying another man then getting divorced and returning to him penniless and he paid for her keep the rest of his life despite haggard already being married to a woman he didnt love. see picrel
Didn't know any of this. Poor HRH. He sounds like a fine fellow. Bit like Walter Scott who got trapped in some dodgy business dealings and more or less killed himself trying to pay off a bunch of debts he inherited.

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>>25396187
Yeah, all good here:

>66. Chandler?
Of course. Farewell, My Lovely.

>75. Nabokov, Lolita
Also of course. I thought this would be among the first to go.

>78.cummings
Right. He didn't really do titles so I guess people just give up and call it "somewhere I have never travelled" from the first line. It's #57 from ViVa.

>93. Dante (the Commedia - Paradiso? - rather than the Vita Nuova)
Right. Canto 30. Beatrice starts off wonderful and then just keeps getting better so by this point Dante is like Lovecraft: "I can't possibly describe it, it was just too amazing".

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>>25396199
That's a duck with a purpose. All good here, more or less:

>3) Dulcinea from Don Quixote
Of course what the actual woman looks like we never find out, but it's probably not all that great.

>11) The Sun Also Rises
Right. ‘Brett’ a help obviously.

>31) No idea where this is from, but the character must be performing one of Wagner's valkyries, right?
Well, not exactly performing. She *is* one of Wagner's Valkyries. A not-altogether-serious nudge-nudge-wink-wink reference.

>83) Haydee from the Count of Monte Cristo?
Right. One of the few Greek heroines in a non-Greek book I guess.

>84) Kitty from Anna Karenina
Of course. Levin terrified he might blow it and quite right too. Kitty is the best.

>>25395994
>57)
This isn't Bob Dylan is it?

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>>25397503

>57)
>This isn't Bob Dylan is it?
Nope, sorry. Right genre though.

Bump.

I think we need some hints OP

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>>25401068
>hints

I made one slip which hopefully wasn't too misleading: #10 was originally written in English. The author was not born in an Anglophone country and I thought he wrote in his native tongue.

Talking of translations: 6 & 21 are in the same language.

Short stories: 1, 7, 16, 20, 38, 48, 64, 100

Stage plays: 29, 49, 54, 71, 73 (Omitting the speaker names made some of these tricky.)

Nobel Prize-winning authors: 18, 24, 46, 58, 71, 87, 89, 92 (Several others *ought* to have won. Some had dozens of nominations.)

>>25401457
>Stage plays
Well Shakespeare is still there so he is probably one of these.
He never won the Nobel Prize so no 71
Gonna take a guess. Got a 25% chance
I don't think 73 or 54 have that verse characteristic of him plus ironing boards and Sinbad weren't something fitting him
I'm going to guess 49 is Shakespeare just from the way it sounds
And randomly shot in the dark Romeo and Juliet

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>>25401462

>Stage plays
>Well Shakespeare is still there so he is probably one of these.
Probably.

>He never won the Nobel Prize so no 71
One of the Committee's more glaring oversights.

>I don't think 73 or 54 have that verse characteristic of him plus ironing boards and Sinbad weren't something fitting him
He isn't big on ironing-boards.

>I'm going to guess 49 is Shakespeare just from the way it sounds
>And randomly shot in the dark Romeo and Juliet
Sensible logic plus a bit of luck perhaps. Romeo's first glimpse of J. at the ball:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear —
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

>39
The Silken Tent by Robert Frost, one of my favourite love poems.
>98
Galadriel from Tolkien's LOTR.

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>>25401526

>39
>The Silken Tent by Robert Frost, one of my favourite love poems.
Correct.

>98
>Galadriel from Tolkien's LOTR.
It is LOTR. Not Galadriel, though:

In the middle of the table, against the woven cloths upon the wall, there was a chair under a canopy, and there sat a lady fair to look upon, and so like was she in form of womanhood to Elrond that Frodo guessed that she was one of his close kindred. Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost; her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one who has known many things that the years bring. Above her brow her head was covered with a cap of silver lace netted with small gems, glittering white; but her soft grey raiment had no ornament save a girdle of leaves wrought in silver.

So it was that Frodo saw her whom few mortals had yet seen; Arwen, daughter of Elrond, in whom it was said that the likeness of Lúthien had come on earth again; and she was called Undómiel, for she was the Evenstar of her people.


But a reasonable mistake since G. is described in similar style:

. . . Very tall they were, and the Lady no less tall than the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold, and the hair of the Lord Celeborn was of silver long and bright; but no sign of age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the wells of deep memory.

>>25401457
is that the complete list of nobel-winning author quotations? Unless I'm mistaken, Marquez and Pasternak (and maybe Beckett) should be in there but of the listed quotations only 58 is marked [*].

Also guessing that 10 is Stephen Vizinczey.

>>25402573
also 58 mentions "Russia" so it would be Pasternak I assume

4 - Heaney?
9 - Wordsworth
12 - is this Malcolm de Chazal? not familiar with him but this seems like the gist of Sens-Plastique from what I read
18 - Yeats, Politics. A cute poem but it doesn't hold a candle to the truly great late Yeats stuff.
22 - Milton, Paradise Lost
57 - if not Bob Dylan I guess Captain Beefheart?
61 - Berryman?
97 - Petrarch by process of elimination

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>>25402573
>is that the complete list of nobel-winning author quotations?
It was supposed to be, but . . .

>Unless I'm mistaken, Marquez and Pasternak (and maybe Beckett) should be in there but of the listed quotations only 58 is marked [*].
. . . yes, I missed one. #79 should be in there too.

Beckett might not be marked [*] since a) he wrote some stuff in English and b) some of the stuff he wrote in French he translated into English himself. I don't usually mark that as translated since it is the work of the named author.

>Also guessing that 10 is Stephen Vizinczey.
Right. In Praise Of Older Women.

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>>25402576

>also 58 mentions "Russia" so it would be Pasternak I assume
Right. Zhivago thinking about Lara.

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>>25402645
Mostly good here:

>4 - Heaney?
Nope. SH wasn't famous for having a thing with an American, was he? . . .

>9 - Wordsworth
Correct.

>12 - is this Malcolm de Chazal? not familiar with him but this seems like the gist of Sens-Plastique from what I read
Sens-Plastique is indeed a book about sex masquerading as a book about art. But it's in prose; this isn't it.

>18 - Yeats, Politics. A cute poem but it doesn't hold a candle to the truly great late Yeats stuff.
Correct.

>22 - Milton, Paradise Lost
Of course. Eve herself.

>57 - if not Bob Dylan I guess Captain Beefheart?
Correct. Trout Mask Replica.

>61 - Berryman?
Right. Dream Songs #4. One of the two reasonably well-known ones (the other being ‘Life, Friends, Is Boring’). Plus the persona ‘Henry’ is a hint.

>97 - Petrarch by process of elimination
Correct. Sonnet #90. (#90 of 4000 or however many it is.)

okay then, the remaining nobel winners:
24 - only two poets left so this is Bob Dylan
46 - Beckett(?)
71 - a stageplay, so Harold Pinter
79 - translated, so Marquez
87 - very obviously Faulkner
89 - likewise this must be Heaney (it reads like english Neruda to me honestly)
92 - Golding is left over.

6 - 'Annabelle' from Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles
12 - the last foreign poet(?) is Zbigniew Herbert
21 - by elimination this is de Chazal?
68 - Kazantzakis, 'olive tree' so I'm gonna guess it's the greek writer haha
96 - Song of Solomon

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>>25403974
>okay then, the remaining nobel winners:
Maybe the hints were too hinty since logic and common sense got all these right:

>24 - only two poets left so this is Bob Dylan
I expected someone to recognize this but possibly his star is fading. It's ‘Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’.

>46 - Beckett(?)
‘Murphy’ (written in English originally). Surely the most lascivious ‘etc’ in the canon.

>71 - a stageplay, so Harold Pinter
‘No Man’s Land’. Pretty hard to ID unless you happen to have seen/read it. Most of his stuff sounds the same.

>79 - translated, so Marquez
It's Fermina Daza in ‘Love In The TIme Of Cholera'.

>87 - very obviously Faulkner
Eula the uber-sexpot in the Snopes trilogy. It's The Hamlet (the first one).

>89 - likewise this must be Heaney (it reads like english Neruda to me honestly)
Yeah it's a piece called "Act Of Union". Again hard to know it unless you know it. I remember seeing once a claim that that Heaney accounted for 2/3rds of all poetry sales in the UK, or something. Seemed like a lot, but maybe it's possible. That figure was perhaps from the late 1990s, just after he won the Nobel. That normally gives people a bit of a boost.

>92 - Golding is left over.
Right. ‘Free Fall’. The narrator (an angst-ridden artist) lusts hopelessly after a girl called Beatrice. She seems, to him, supernaturally calm and self-possessed. But after he finally gets her he finds there's really nothing to her. Her serenity is the result of having practically no inner life. He gets bored of her and dumps her and she ends up in a lunatic asylum.

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>>25404002
Again all good:

>6 - 'Annabelle' from Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles
Right.

>12 - the last foreign poet(?) is Zbigniew Herbert
‘A Rosy Ear’ being the title.

>21 - by elimination this is de Chazal?
Right. ‘Sense-Plastique’ is all like this. Some interesting observations but nothing amazing. Maybe it’s better in French.

>68 - Kazantzakis, 'olive tree' so I'm gonna guess it's the greek writer haha
Zorba the Greek. The widow that finally pulls the narrator out of his shell somewhat.

>96 - Song of Solomon
Of course.

>>25395966
>19)
Is this A Tale of Two Cities? The French baby girl that gets smuggled to England and then grows up. I forget her name.

>>25395977
>34)
The name Wendy points to Peter Pan by Barrie.

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>>25404994

>19)
>Is this A Tale of Two Cities?
It is.

>The French baby girl that gets smuggled to England and then grows up. I forget her name.
Lucy Manette. Her forehead makes a reappearance in the closing monologue:

“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place — then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement — and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

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>>25404997

>34)
>The name Wendy points to Peter Pan by Barrie.
Right. The lady in question being of course her mother, Mrs Darling:


The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door.