Filth Book Quotes

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There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!
Hermann Hesse
Until a few days ago, humans had been little more than legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It was like stepping into the pages of a book -- a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos -- and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seemed to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place was a story about her.
Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1))
Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.
Grady Hendrix (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires)
The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton (Blind Faith)
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.
Octavia E. Butler (Kindred)
This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T
Mary Roach (Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War)
All books can be indecent books Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, is in The mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I could tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man...
Tom Lehrer
In his book Defying Hitler, written in British exile in 1939, Sebastian Haffner recalled the “icy fright” that had been his first reaction to the news that Hitler had been named chancellor: “For a moment I almost physically sensed the odour of blood and filth surrounding this man Hitler. It was a bit like being approached by a threatening and disgusting predator—it felt like a dirty paw with sharp claws in my face.” But
Volker Ullrich (Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939)
Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.—and ofttimes also the throne on filth.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra A book for all and none)
Reader — supposing this book has readers some day — I am not clever and I don't possess the vivid style, the living power, that is needed to describe this immense feeling of self-respect — no, of rehabilitation, or even a new life. This figurative baptism, this bath of cleanliness, this raising of me above filth I had sunk in, this way of bringing me overnight face to face with true responsibility, quite simply changed my whole being. I had been a convict, a man who could hear his chains even when he was free and who always felt that someone was watching over him; I had been all the things that had urged me to become a marked, evil man, dangerous at all times, superficially docile yet terribly dangerous when he broke out: but all this had vanished — disappeared as though by magic. Thank you Mr. Bowen, barrister in His Majesty's courts of law, thank you for having made another man of me in so short a time!
Henri Charrière (Papillon)
The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.
Émile Zola (Thérèse Raquin)
Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains. All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another, all walk the streets as though the ground did not recoil, all stretch their necks to bite the air, as though the breath had not withdrawn. The seed bursts without a blessing, and the harvest is gathered as if it were food.
Leonard Cohen (Book of Mercy)
Reader - supposing this book has readers one day - I am not clever and I don't possess the vivid style, the living power, that is needed to describe this immense feeling of self-respect - no, of rehabilitation, or even of a new life. This figurative baptism, this bath of cleanliness, this raising of me above the filth I had sunk in, this way of bringing me overnight face to face with true responsibility, quite simply changed my whole being. I had been a convict, a man who could hear his chains even when he was free and who always felt that someone was watching over him; I had been all the things I had seen, experienced, undergone, suffered; all the things that had urged me to become a marked, evil man, dangerous at times, superficially docile yet terribly dangerous when he broke out: but all this had vanished - disappeared as if by magic.
Henri Charrière (Papillon)
When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it distinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one’s personal fate bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us through all eternity? So what can stop one from effecting the transition? What can help us to resist the intolerable temptation? What can prevent us from yielding to the burning desire for merging in God? We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
First and foremost, we want a good clean fight." He adress only yhe Fuhrer now. "Unless, of course, Herr Hitler, you begin to lose. Should this occur, I will be quite willing to turn a blind eye to any unconscionable tactics you might employ to grind this piece of Jewish stench and filth into the canvas.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
What will become of us in twenty years’ time?” we asked ourselves one evening. Thirty years have passed now. Raymond was guillotined: “Anarchist gangster” (so the newspapers). I came across Jean again in Brussels, a worker and a trade-union organizer, still a fighter for liberty after ten years in jail. Luce has died of tuberculosis, naturally. For my part, I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a Press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet.
Victor Serge (Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Sightline Books))
Some of the events described in this book may well offend the reader's sensitivities. Part of this was Vimalananda's intention. He wanted Western holier-than-thou renunciates to know that "filth and orgies in the graveyard" (as one American once described Aghori) can be as conducive to spiritual advancement as can asanas, pranayama, and other "purer" disciplines.
Robert E. Svoboda
most common people oft he market-place much prefer light literature to improving books. The problem is, that so many romances contain slanderous anecdotes about sovereigns and ministers or cast aspersions upon man’s wives and daughters so that they are packed with sex and violence. Even worse are those writers of the breeze-and-moonlight school, who corrupt the young with pornography and filth. As for books of the beauty-and-talented-scholar type, a thousand are written to a single pattern and none escapes bordering on indecency. They are filled with allusions to handsome, talented young men and beautiful, refined girls in history; but in order to insert a couple of his own love poems, the author invents stereotyped heroes and heroines with the inevitable low character to make trouble between them like a clown in a play, and makes even the slave girls talk pedantic nonsense. So all these novels are full of contradictions and absurdly unnatural.
Cao Xueqin (The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days)
I grew up listening to my mother scoff at all the T.V shows and books that I watched or read. She told me how it was all 'rubbish' and 'garbage'. But the thing is, I think somehow, watching along the show I also grew up. I know everyone says that, like when Good Luck Charlie ended everyone was upset and was like 'I grew up now its gone!' Or 'Aww. My childhood gone' But its not like that with me. I actually grow and learn more things about myself. And some of the shows or books I watched/read, motivated me. They were always there. So if that is the definition of 'rubbish' and 'garbage' than please. Cover me in filth.
Trisscar
You want my blood?” the man growled, cracking his knuckles and staring pointedly at her sword. “How do you propose to get that? I prefer most of my bodily fluids to remain inside my body.” He paused. “Well, with a few notable exceptions.
Serena Silverlake (Filthy Fetch Quest (Fantastical Filth Book 1))
[Ulysses] appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine… I have no stomach for Ulysses… James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity intended for humour.
Aramis (The Sporting Times)
So far as we know, the gray-mustached working class approved these executions. So far as we know, from the blazing Komsomols right up to the Party leaders and the legendary army commanders, the entire vanguard waxed unanimous in approving these executions. Famous revolutionaries, theoreticians, and prophets, seven years before their own inglorious destruction, welcomed the roar of the crowd, not guessing then that their own time stood on the threshold, that soon their own names would be dragged down in that roar of "Scum!" "Filth!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV)
God’s grace, he told himself firmly, is big enough to cover the blackest sins. It’s strong enough to lift the heaviest load of guilt, to blow the dirt of shame from the darkest corner and scatter it to the four winds. It’s good and bright enough to shine into a man’s heart and clean out all the filth of the past forever and ever.
Jamie Langston Turner (No Dark Valley (Derby Book 5))
What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered—literally covered—by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah—she laughed—underneath there’s blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books.
Elena Ferrante (The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels, #4))
Oh Allah, distance me from my sins just as You have distanced the east from the west. Oh Allah, purify me of my sins as a white robe is purified of filth. Oh Allah, cleanse me of my sins with snow, water, and ice.”10 Oh Allah, I lovingly await Your invitation to come visit You, both in this life and the next. I place my hope in Your mercy and place my trust in Your perfect timing. In Your generous names I pray, Ameen.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam (Studying Qur'an & Hadith Book 2))
Who" said Candide, "is that fat pig who was telling me so many bad things about the play at which I wept so much and about the actors who gave me such pleasure?" "He is a living disease," replied the abbé, "who makes his makes his living saying bad things about all plays and all books; he hates anyone who succeeds, as eunuchs hate those who enjoy sex; he is one of those serpents of literature who feed on filth and venom; he is a foliferous pamphleteer...
Voltaire (Candide)
There are more important things than cleaning,” Patricia said. Grace stopped, holding the last two saucers in her hand, and turned on Patricia, eyes blazing. “Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.
Grady Hendrix (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires)
Ignoring me, she looked up at the pigeons sitting on the windowsills, which this year were so caked with droppings that they looked quite disgusting. The pigeons were a big problem at Wolfsegg; year in, year out, they sat on the buildings in their hundreds and ruined them with their droppings. I have always detested pigeons. Looking up at the pigeons on the windowsills, I told Caecilia that I had a good mind to poison them, as these filthy creatures were ruining the buildings, and moreover there was hardly anything I found as unpleasant as their cooing. Even as a child I had hated the cooing of pigeons. The pigeon problem had been with us for centuries and never been solved; it had been discussed at length and the pigeons had constantly been cursed, but no solution had been found. [i]I've always hated pigeons[/i], I told Caecilia, and started to count them. On one windowsill there were thirteen sitting close together in their own filth. The maids ought at least to clean the droppings off the windowsills, I told Caecilia, amazed that they had not been removed before the wedding. Everything else had been cleaned, but not the windowsills. This had not struck me a week earlier. Caecilia did not respond to my remarks about the pigeons. The gardeners had let some tramps spend the night in the Children's Villa, she said after a long pause, during which I began to wonder whether I had given Gambetti the right books, whether it would not have been a good idea to give him Fontane's [i]Effi Briest[/i] as well.
Thomas Bernhard (Extinction)
Before writing books and puzzles, Lewis directed small plays in Oxford to entertain the poor, skinny kids with tattered clothes. He did it because there was not enough money to buy them food. In all history, art has been food of the poor, Alice. Remember that." The Pillar seems lost for a moment. I wonder what memory he is staring into. "Carroll called his intentions 'saving the children.' He wanted to save a child's childhood. He wanted to save their memories from being stained by the filth of his era.
Cameron Jace (Figment (Insanity, #2))
It’s true that the hospitals have mostly disappeared,” wrote Alisa Roth in her 2018 book Insane. “But none of the rest of it has gone away, not the cruelty, the filth, the bad food, or the brutality. Nor, most importantly, has the large population of people with mental illness who are kept largely out of sight, their poor treatment invisible to most ordinary Americans. The only real difference between Kesey’s time and our own is that the mistreatment of people with mental illness now happens in jails and prisons.
Susannah Cahalan (The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness)
Katie stood alone... 'They think this is so good,' he thought. 'They think it's good- the tree they got for nothing and their father playing up to them and the singing and the way the neighbors are happy. They think they're mighty lucky that they're living and it's Christmas again. They can't see that we live on a dirty street in a dirty house among people who aren't much good. Johnny and the children can't see how pitiful it is that our neighbors have to make happiness out of this filth and dirt. My children must get out of this. They must come to more than Johnnny or me or all thse people around us. But how is this to come about? Reading a page from those books every day and saving pennies in the tin-can bank isn't enough. Money! Would that make it better for them? Yes, it would make it easy. But no, the money wouldn't be enough. McGarrity owns the saloon standing on the corner and he has a lot of money. His wife wears diamond earrings. But her children are not as good and smart as my children. They are mean and greedy towards others...Ah no, it isn't the money alone... That means there must be something bigger than money. Miss Jackson teaches... and she has no money. She works for charity. She lives in a little room there on the top floor. She only has the one dress but she keeps it clean and pressed. Her eyes look straight into yours when you talk to her... She understands about things. She can live in the middle of a dirty neighborhood and be fine and clean like an actress in a play; someone you can look at but is too fine to touch... So what is this difference between her and this Miss Jackson who has no money?... Education! That was it!...Education would pull them out of the grime and dirt. Proof? Miss Jackson was educated, the McGarrity wasn't. Ah! That's what Mary Rommely, her mother, had been telling her all those years. Only her mother did not have the one clear word: education!... 'Francie is smart...She's a learner and she'll be somebody someday. But when she gets educated, she will grow away from me. Why, she's growing away from me now. She does not love me the way the boy loves me. I feel her turn away from me now. She does not understand me. All she understands is that I don't understand her. Maybe when she gets education, she will be ashamed of me- the way I talk. but she will have too much character to show it. Instead she will try to make me different. She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I'll know she's above me. She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she'll get to know too much for her own happiness. She'll find out that I don't love her as much as I love the boy. I cannot help that this is so. But she won't understand that. Somethimes I think she knows that now. Already she is growing away from me; she will fight to get away soon. Changing over to that far-away school was the first step in her getting away from me. But Neeley will never leave me, that is why I love him best. He will cling to me and understand me... There is music in him. He got that from his father. He has gone further on the piano than Francie or me. Yes, his father has the music in him but it does him no good. It is ruining him... With the boy, it will be different. He'll be educated. I must think out ways. We'll not have Johnnny with us long. Dear God, I loved him so much once- and sometimes I still do. But he's worthless...worthless. And God forgive me for ever finding out.' Thus Katie figured out everything in the moments it took them to climb the stairs. People looking up at her- at her smooth pretty vivacious face- had no way of knowing about the painfully articulated resolves formulating hin her mind.
Betty Smith
I am Jack of Shadows!” he cried out. “Lord of Shadow Guard! I am Shadowjack, the thief who walks in silence and in shadows! I was beheaded in Igles and rose again from the Dung Pits of Glyve. I drank the blood of a vampire and ate a stone. I am the breaker of the Compact. I am he who forged a name in the Red Book of Ells. I am the prisoner in the jewel. I duped the Lord of High Dudgeon once, and I will return for vengeance upon him. I am the enemy of my enemies. Come take me, filth, if you love the Lord of Bats or despise me, for I have named myself Jack of Shadows!
Roger Zelazny
Your eyes I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn’t come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror. If only we’d been living in a city back then, I heard my mother say several times during my childhood. If only an ambulance could have taken me to hospital. If only they’d put her in an incubator, that tiny rice cake of a baby. They were a new thing then, incubators. If only you hadn’t stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead, I who would then never have been born. If it had been granted to you to go firmly forwards, with your own eyes and your own body, your back to the dark mirror.
Han Kang (The White Book)
I stood here in this kitchen elaborating and embellishing this fantasy for some time instead of taking responsibility for what was happening around me because in truth what really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and proper alignment, everything gathering towards some point of chaos beyond which it would be impossible to restore the place to its proper order and yet I stood looking at it, locked into a silent battle with the house itself and all the things which were slowly vacating their proper place, furniture and dishes and cutlery all over the place, curtains hanging awry and chairs and tables strewn about while books and papers slid across the floor, everything slowly shifting through the house as if they had a meeting to keep somewhere else, possibly in some higher realm where all this chaos would resolve into a refined harmony which had no need of my hand or intervention
Mike McCormack (Solar Bones)
A Favorite start to a book [sorry it's long!]: "In yesterday’s Sunday Times, a report from Francistown in Botswana. Sometime last week, in the middle of the night, a car, a white American model, drove up to a house in a residential area. Men wearing balaclavas jumped out, kicked down the front door, and began shooting. When they had done with shooting they set fire to the house and drove off. From the embers the neighbors dragged seven charred bodies: two men, three women, two children. Th killers appeared to be black, but one of the neighbors heard them speaking Afrikaans among themselves. And was convinced they were whites in blackface. The dead were South Africans, refugees who had moved into the house mere weeks ago. Approached for comment, the SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, through a spokesman, calls the report ‘unverified’. Inquiries will be undertaken, he says, to determine whether the deceased were indeed SA citizens. As for the military, an unnamed source denies that the SA Defence Force had anything to do with the matter. The killings are probably an internal ANC matter, he suggests, reflecting ‘ongoing tensions between factions. So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks? How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit. ‘I see the Defense Force is up to its old tricks again,’ he remarks to his father. ‘In Botswana this time.’ But his father is too wary to rise to the bait. When his father picks up the newspaper, he cares to skip straight to the sports pages, missing out the politics—the politics and the killings. His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording over them. ‘They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone,’ he presses on nonetheless. ‘Executed them .Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page.’ His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on one hand, thugs who slaughter defenceless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of anger and despair—any better?" Summertime, Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee
Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (The Cathedral)
Luca reached up with his free hand again. Cass felt certain he was going to angle her mouth toward his. Her eyelids started to flutter closed, but then stopped when she felt a point of pressure against her throat. She realized her cloak had fallen open, and that her lily pendant was exposed. Luca was touching it. “I’m so glad you’re wearing it,” he whispered, his voice growing hoarse. “It’ll be something for you to remember me by.” Cass swallowed down a lump in her throat. She touched her lips to the corner of his jaw, exhaling hard against his skin. “Stop it this instant. I will not give up on you, Luca da Peraga.” Luca turned his mouth so his lips barely brushed against hers, so quickly her mouth formed an O of surprise. Her legs wavered and her body threatened to crumple to the floor. She didn’t know if it was the unbearable heat or her uncomfortable position. Or the kiss. She closed her eyes for a second, holding fast to Luca’s hand until her bones went steady again. He chuckled, an actual laugh. “Now, no matter what happens, I’ll have that to remember you by.” Cass leaned forward and felt the metal bars of the grate digging into her skin. She didn’t care. Suddenly she wanted to be as close as she could to Luca. Luca, who now wanted her to forget his death and find someone else with whom she could be happy. Cass had never known such selflessness before. She pressed her mouth hard against his, ignoring his sweat and the stubble of his beard digging into her skin. His whole body tensed in response. For one sweet moment, the filth and the stench and the grimness of the situation dissipated. All Cass felt was herself and Luca, connected. When they broke apart, she struggled to catch her breath. “Now stop talking of remembrances and tell me where to find this book.” Luca touched his free hand to his lips. His face was flushed and his eyes were bright.
Fiona Paul (Belladonna (Secrets of the Eternal Rose, #2))
We will not because we cannot, and we cannot because we are new creatures who are no longer able to live without the light of God’s presence or to endure the darkness and filth of this age.
Paul David Washer (The Gospel Call and True Conversion (Recovering the Gospel Book 2))
For me, possession is an absurd lake — very large, very dark and rather shallow. It only seems deep because it’s full of filth and lies.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition)
The landing stage stood on its high crooked stilts with only one person watching the boat disappear round the bend of the river—a girl of twelve called Ada, the wet-nurse’s eldest child. As
Jane Gardam (Old Filth (Old Filth Trilogy Book 1))
Playing Super Mario Bros. 2 again, in the two-bedroom apartment I share with my wife, is to re-learn the productivity of cussing. Playing any game, for that matter, bends my larynx into the saltiest shapes imaginable. With time comes an understanding that the game on your screen is nothing compared to life’s true challenges. Still, with each fall down a pit or graze of a fireball-spitting plant, my mild-mannered speech pattern gives way to filth. Super Mario Bros. 2 is not even known as a difficult game. But to a player of limited and rusty skills, i.e., your author, it pushes back.
Jon Irwin (Super Mario Bros. 2 (Boss Fight Books Book 6))
The 'Naga' is an Aryan symbol (e.g., in Hinduism: Manasa, in Buddhism: Mucalinda) that is used for protection and etymologically means 'Savior' and yet also 'Filth, Impurity' in the pure Semitic tongue. It is the very same symbol used by the Jews in their Menorah while replacing the serpent symbolism (to protect themselves from the Semites) with fire after being influenced by and intermixed with Zoroastrians. To the Semites, the seven-headed snake was -contrary to the Aryans (i.e., Indians, Jews, Persians ..etc)- slain by Ninurta, patron god of Lagash who was for hunting and war. This reverse symbolism marks the difference in culture between Semitic and Aryan identities, and gives us an indication for the foreign Jewish culture to the Semitic lands. It is yet even more astounding to observe that Perseus slaughtered Medusa (whose hair was of serpents) using a sickle, which is a tool whose name were derived in the Semitic tongue from the same root of 'Naga'. We can even see traces of animosity towards this Aryan culture in the New Testament in the book of Revelation 12:3-4 where a seven headed serpent/dragon is trying to devour a new born baby.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
It was like stepping into the pages of a book—a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos—and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.
Anonymous
Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride’s cornflakes.
Jane Gardam (The Man in the Wooden Hat (Old Filth Trilogy Book 2))
Human perception often fails, but the eye of God pierces to the marrow. A human being sees what is on the surface, but God looks upon the heart. In the kingdom of eternal blessedness an everlasting brightness shines upon all things and there perfect sanctity, having obtained every delight, exults in the sons of the kingdom. Nothing without order happens there; nothing polluted enters there; nothing sordid and contrary to honesty is found there. Whatever sin the filth of the flesh has committed is burned away by a cleansing fire and is made clean by many kinds of purgation according to the decision of the eternal judge. And just as a vessel, scrubbed clean of rust and carefully polished all over, is placed in a treasury, so too the soul, cleansed from the contagion of every sin, enters paradise, and there, fortified with every happiness, it rejoices without fear or concern.
Scott G. Bruce (The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (Penguin Classics))
Well… since you got me some chips, I brought you a book for you to read to me.” “Where’d you find this?” “Oh, you know, just lying on my bookshelf at home.” He flipped through the pages and chuckled. “You have porn books just lying around?” “Excuse me!” I giggled. “It’s not a porn book! There is definitely some romance in there.” “Buried under pages of filth.” I smirked and hmphed at him. “I would like you to read it. I’m having some trouble understanding some of it. And I mean, you are the Literature professor. I’m sure you can find some deep meaning in it.” He cocked a brow. “You have a hard time understanding a chapter titled ‘Fucking 101’?” He continued to flip through the book. “What about ‘Cock Riding?’ ‘Squirting?’ Oh, and my personal favourite…” He smirked. “ ‘Throat Fucking.’ “ He gazed over at me. “This shouldn’t be hard for you to understand, Sakura. You showed me how well you can do this last one today.” “Well maybe I just wanna hear you read it.” “You read it to me,” he said, handing me the book.
Emilia Rose (Detention (Bad Boys of Redwood Academy, #4))
Edward Feathers QC, residing in the
Jane Gardam (The Man In The Wooden Hat (Old Filth Book 2))
You’re selfish. Spoiled. And you agitate every fiber of my being.” I thought he said he wanted to have a conversation, not read me for filth? What the hell? Before my lips could form a pout, he continued. “But you’re mine, Kharma. Don’t ever fucking forget that. Unless you want me to show up like I did today. Which I’m fine with. Do you understand me?
Shon (KHARMA (New Hope Shorts Book 1))
But it will not frighten me, because there is no place too dark for Love’s light to shine, no place of filth without a spot where Love can come in and clean.
Madeleine L'Engle (Sold into Egypt: Journeys into Human Being (The Genesis Trilogy Book 3))
The male student flung up his hands in exasperation. “For the last time, Marie-Delphine, I never said women didn’t like all porn,” obviously attempting to clarify some earlier statement he’d made. “I’m saying that they don’t like this kind of stuff. It’s so... degrading and demeaning. I can’t believe that someone who fights so hard for equal representation in the wizarding world isn’t able to see that.” “I see it,” the dark-skinned woman shot back, “and I happen to think it's goddess-damned hot. Just because a woman likes a little of the rough shit in the bedroom doesn’t preclude her from being able to harness the primordial forces of creation.
Serena Silverlake (Filthy Fetch Quest (Fantastical Filth Book 1))
As a general rule, the type of work offered by wizards was more trouble than it was worth. When a mage wanted to hire an adventurer for something, it almost always meant things were going to get messy. Alexandra couldn’t count the number of stories she’d heard from other Guild members about wizard quests resulting in the hapless adventurer getting cursed, turned into something unpleasant, or worse still, catching a destiny.
Serena Silverlake (Filthy Fetch Quest (Fantastical Filth Book 1))
We were getting ready to close the store for what we thought might be as long as two months now. I was looking over the day’s reports when Dissatisfaction came into the building. His fingers roamed along the spines of the books, sometimes tracing one, pulling it out to read the first line. Since he’d read The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald, he and I had compiled a list of short perfect novels. Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai These are books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world. The story is unforgettably peopled and nothing is extraneous. Reading one of these books takes only an hour or two but leaves a lifetime imprint. Still, to Dissatisfaction, they are but exquisite appetizers. Now he needs a meal. I knew that he’d read Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and was lukewarm. He called them soap opera books, which I thought was the point. He did like The Days of Abandonment, which was perhaps a short perfect novel. ‘She walked the edge with that one,’ he said. He liked Knausgaard (not a short perfect). He called the writing better than Novocain. My Struggle had numbed his mind but every so often, he told me, he’d felt the crystal pain of the drill. In desperation, I handed over The Known World. He thrust it back in outrage, his soft voice a hiss, Are you kidding me? I have read this one six times. Now what do you have? In the end, I placated him with Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, the latest Amitav Ghosh, NW by Zadie Smith, and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth books in a sturdy Europa boxed set, which he hungrily seized. He’d run his prey to earth and now he would feast. Watching him closely after he paid for the books and took the package into his hands, I saw his pupils dilate the way a diner’s do when food is brought to the table.
Louise Erdrich (The Sentence)
Rock was bone. Dust was flesh. Water was blood. Residues settled in multitudes, becoming layers, and upon those layers yet more, and on and on until a world was made, until all that death could hold up one's feet where one stood, and rise to meet every step one took. A solid bed to lie on. So much for the world. Death holds us up. And then there were the breaths that filled, that made the air, the heaving assertions measuring the passing of time, like notches marking the arc of a life, of every life. How many of those breaths were last ones? The final expellation of a beast, an insect, a plant, a human with film covering his or her fading eyes? And so how, how could one draw such air into the lungs? Knowing how filled with death it was, how saturated it was with failure and surrender? Such air choked him, burned down his throat, tasting of the bitterest acid. Dissolving and devouring, until he was naught but... residue. They were so young, his companions. There was no way they could understand the filth walked on, walked in, walked through. And took into themselves, only to fling some of it back out again, now flavoured by their own sordid additions. And when they slept, each night, they were as empty things. While Heboric fought on against the knowledge that the world did not breathe, not any more. No, now, the world drowned. And I drown with it. Here in this cursed wasteland. In the sand and heat and dust. I am drowning. Every night. Drowning.
Steven Erikson (The Bonehunters (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #6))
the
Serena Silverlake (Filthy Fetch Quest (Fantastical Filth Book 1))
I am yours, Jonathan. I've always been yours. You never lost me, I whisper, and a few moments later, I take him inside my body again and let him cleanse me of all my past mistakes. All the dirtiness and filth of my past life. I let him love me the way he wants, and I let myself soak in the intimate moments.
Selena Moore (Lessons In Sin: The Complete Collection: Books 1 to 4)
The catfish is a very filthy fish. He loves filth and is the pig of the water. Some people write in, complaining about the fish that swim on their sides, but these fish can be eaten.
Elijah Muhammad (How To Eat To Live - Book 1)
as urban theorist Mike Davis shows in his book Planet of Slums, more than half the world’s population today lives in shantytowns and favelas, amid filth and squalor, crime, violence, and corruption. Is this because of unfair sharing of wealth, exodus from the countryside, economic exploitation, geographical or political factors, even plain bad luck
Piero San Giorgio (Survive -- The Economic Collapse)
I had been trying to serve my family, eradicate filth from our home, but nothing I did was ever enough. Nothing I did could make my parents praise me, make my brother notice my sacrifices, or even make God save me from “sorrow and fear,” as advertised in the holy book.
Ava Homa (Daughters of Smoke and Fire)
It was like stepping into the pages of a book - a book alive with colour and fragrance, filth and chaos - and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.
Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1))
each side of the saddle, all in wickerwork but
Jane Gardam (Last Friends (Old Filth Book 3))
Oh.’ ‘Veneering. The retired judge. Friend, no,
Jane Gardam (Last Friends (Old Filth Book 3))