Romantic Prose Quotes

My heart is burning a hole in my chest and every time you speak to me, it keeps sinking, and I'm left with nothing but ashes. I wish she were talking to me, because the more she speaks to me, the more my heart flutters like a rising phoenix. -Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz

What do you mean, a goddess?” Alec questioned irritably. “She’s staggeringly beautiful, wonderful, a vision of …” He petered out when he saw Alec looking at him strangely. Father Joe stroked his beard in thought, nervously eyeing Alec and then casting his eyes to the fireplace. Alec was beginning to sense Father Joe was regretting coming to his flat. He was also thinking that he regretted having anything to do with the vicar. He was quite mad … possibly.

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

Maybe we are stars apart from each other, that there's an invisible line connecting us. I'd like to think we are together in one constellation

Madness is loving the unsolvable puzzle of your soul and replacing the lost pieces with my own.

you came in slowly like the fog and consumed me.

It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will's children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews- Cecy's blue eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie's two girls- and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white- haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry's had once been. The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent- he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he's retired that had been very well respected- his poetry had always been awful, though that never stopped him from reciting it. Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire. Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them- when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought- and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie. With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, "Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back," thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well- and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand. They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic "holidays" to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passerby by shouting "I can see the blood on the cobblestones!" in French.

Do You Believe Do you believe that I have loved you since the dawn of time? Do you believe that we were destined to be intertwined?...

Chains chains that hold me to the ground chains that keep me solidly bound chains that tether my heart to you chains that only one truth...

Do You Believe ...on this road of life on this day I take you now husband and wife...

i swallowed the syllables of your name and i was full.

depression is stupid and not a thing that makes me a better writer. one time i went a whole year without writing and i stayed in bed and drank. fuck your bukowskisms. i want sunlight and love and running down some street i’ve never been on where it’s warm and cool at the same time and i’m smiling. i want nothing to ever be bad again- and i don’t mean that i want a life free of conflict, i mean that i want a life free of meaningless conflict. not being able to will oneself to take a shower or leave the house is meaningless. there is nothing to be gained, no lesson to be learned from that kind of life. my heart is stale, my prose is stale. give me fire if you want to hurt me. give me something i can taste. there’s nothing romantic or mysterious about where i am. there’s nothing here worth holding onto.

I ache not from need - but from my heart's gluttony of you.

He appreciated all beautiful things. As she stood before him poised, scrutinizing every inch of his face, liable to strike him, he thought she was the most incredible thing he had seen in his life. She didn't step away from fear, she walked up to it.

What bizarre things does not one find in a great city when one knows how to walk about and how to look! Life swarms with innocent monsters. Oh Lord my God, Thou Creator, Thou Master, Thou who hast made law and liberty, Thou the Sovereign who dost allow, Thou the Judge who dost pardon, Thou who art full of Motives and of Causes, Thou who hast (it may be) placed within my soul the love of horror in order to turn my hear to Thee, like the cure which follows the knife; Oh Lord, have pity, have pity upon the mad men and women that we are! Oh Creator, is it possible that monsters should exist in the eyes of Him alone who knoweth why they exist, how they have made themselves, and how they would have made themselves, and could not?

Ode to the Chamber ...linger here amidst the chamber in which we embrace our love talk to me of sonnets and call me turtledove...

Silver and gold pale into insignificance if you flatter me with blue nights, romance me with pink lips and woo me with purple prose...

Each moment with you is a verse in the poetry of my heart.

. . . I suppose one starts out, as a child, being romantic and dreaming of adventure. Poetic. Then reality comes along, and with it, a whole lot of prose.

Imaginary evil is romantic, varied; real evil is dreary, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

My words, I write them It's easier than saying My romanticized pain Is less painful when written I love you, I do I hope this reaches you.

When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.

I have tried to tell him in a dozen different ways that I am only six inches tall. I've told him I am as tall as his heart, that he could hold all of me in his hand, that I am shorter than I appear. Every time, he's acted as though I'm saying something romantic or poetic.

John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton’s reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century. Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot’s belief that “of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry.” Milton’s radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations—particularly the Romantic movement—the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as “an acrimonious and surly republican” must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time. Source: Wikipedia

Here’s the thing about James Baldwin’s prose: As noted earlier, from the start, he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, among English-language writers, dared put so much demand on the language. To watch them create a sentence is often like watching a high-wire act. Death-defying sentences. Lush, romantic sentences. Sentences that dared to swallow the entire world.

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel. Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.

Greta's cedar hope chest Is full of pamphlets Glass shelves of romantic vignettes A journal laced with sedimentary prose Norma gathers and collects vintage photoplays Hair combs valentines Lillian allows the animals to scratch And the leather crack And the mail collect in the box as coatings peel Agnes veiled cathedral dweller Smiles with benevolent pain But it's Katrina's fair Tuesday morning As she with caution unlatches the flat door She alone cascades to the basement Careful not to spoil her Calico printed pinafore Composite traits and mannerists All others dissipate Marguerite vigilant She dwells upon frigid casements Sarah's thoughts in high velocity Accusations always pierce and pass Clara abandons her passions for distastes A Miss Lenora P. Sinclair Early for coffee in the pool "I'm resituating all your words" Capital Space Colon Paragraph Sylvia keeps beasts in jars labeled by Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species But it's Katrina's fair Tuesday morning As she with caution unlatches the flat door She alone cascades to the basement Careful not to spoil her Calico printed pinafore Composite traits and mannerists All others dissipate Down the way a silk design This face is mine Tis I, Katrina! Katrina, I.

It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful. They must learn to take short cuts, skimming through the columns of a newspaper, flicking over the pages of a book or magazine, deciding at each new paragraph or page whether to read it either attentively or cursorily, or whether to let it go unread. There is a running commentary in the mind. For example, in reading a Life of Napoleon: ‘page 9 … yes, he is still talking about Napoleon’s childhood and the romantic scenery of Corsica … something about James Boswell and Corsican independence … tradition of banditry … now back to the family origins again … wait a minute … no … his mother … more about her … yes … French Revolution … page 24, more about the French Revolution … still more … page 31, not interested … ah … Chapter 2, now he’s at the military school … I can begin here … but oughtn’t to waste time over this early part … in the artillery, was he? … but when do we get to the Italian campaign?’ And even when the reader does get to the Italian compaign and settles down comfortably to the story, he seldom reads a sentence through, word by word. Usually, he takes it in either with a single comprehensive glance as he would a stream or a field of cows that he was passing in the train, or with a series of glances, four or five words to a glance. And unless he has some special reason for studying the narrative closely, or is in an unusually industrious mood, he will not trouble about any tactical and geographical niceties of the campaign that are not presented with lively emphasis and perfect clarity. And, more serious still from the author’s point of view, he will not stop when the eye is checked by some obscurity or fancifulness of language, but will leave the point unresolved and pass on. If there are many such obstructions he will skim over them until his eye alights on a clear passage again.

منتظراً، مثلكِ، وعداً من خلف البحرِ ومنهمراً مثل الأمطارِ على بيروتَ، وأقنعُ نفسي ألا ضير بقفزٍ من سطح الغيم إلى بئر الحب.. وأكتبُ: في موت القطراتِ حياةْ كالموجِ أميلُ يساراً جهةَ القلبِ، أفكرُ أين سأصبح بعد كتابين من الآن، أصوّرُ نفسي حتى لا أتصوّرُ نفسي من غير يديك وأحلمُ بالآتْ... ضوءُ نهارٍ آخرَ فوق الشاطئ ماتْ تنكسرُ على قدم المقهى أحلامُ البحرِ وأمواجُ العاشرِ من آذار... كما تنكسر على شفتي الكلماتْ في آخرِ سطرٍ في دفتر هذي الليلةِ أكتبُ: كفّاكِ سفينةُ نوحٍ... صدركِ: ذهبُ الله الأبيضُ.. قلبكِ: كبريتٌ يشتعلُ جمالاً وطموحْ شفتاكِ: عناقيدٌ تحلمُ أن تُعتصرَ نبيذاَ أبدياً... وتُعتّق في خابيةِ الروحْ هل قلتُ يداكِ سفينةُ نوحٍ.. نسيتُ التوضيح: حياتي نوحْ...

She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. This is the kind of sentence I go mad for. I would like to be able to write such sentences, without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them without embarrassment. If I could only do these two simple things, I feel, I would be able to pass my allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet. She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a cuckoo? It does make a difference. We do not need more literalists of the imagination. They cannot read a body like a gazelle’s without thinking of intestinal parasites, zoos and smells. She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal, I read. Reluctantly I put down the book, thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. He’s about to crush her in his arms, pressing his hot, devouring, hard, demanding mouth to hers as her breasts squish out the top of her dress, but I can’t concentrate. Metaphor leads me by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before me. Porcupines, weasels, warthogs and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy and sly. Agony, to see the romantic frisson quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck to an over-ripe peach, and not to be able to swallow, or wallow. Which one? I murmur to the unresponding air. Which one?

Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, S0S-this, S0S-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age (but also the age of Rimbaud, Jarry and the Situationists). A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history. These romantic, worldly young people, imperious and sentimental, are refinding the poetic prose of the heart and, at the same time, the path of business. For they are the contemporaries of the new entrepreneurs and they are themselves wonderful media animals. Transcendental, P.R. idealism. With an eye for money, changing fashions, high-powered careers - all things scorned by the hard generations. A soft immorality, a low-grade sensuality. A soft ambition too: that of a generation which has already been successful in everything, which has everything going for it, which practises solidarity with ease, which no longer bears the stigmata of the curse of class. They are the European Yuppies.

Put yourself in the way of grace,' says a friend of ours, who is a monk, and a bishop; and he smiles his floating and shining smile. And truly, can there be a subject of more interest to each of us than whether or not grace exists, and the soul? And, consequent upon the existence of the soul, a whole landscape of incorruptible forces, perhaps even a source, an almost palpably suggested second universe? A world that is incomprehensible through reason? To believe in the soul---to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view---imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul---in mine, and yours, and the blue-jay's, and the pilot whale's. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely. The wild waste spaces of the sea, and the pale dunes with one hawk hanging in the wind, they are for me the formal spaces that, in a liturgy, are taken up by prayer, song, sermon, silence, homily, scripture, the architecture of the church itself. And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable. Now winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age---events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on. Somewhere the words I will write down next year, and the next, are drifting into the wind, out of the ornate pods of the weeds of the Provincelands. Once I went into the woods to find an almost unfindable bird, a blue grosbeak. And I found it: a rough, deep blue, almost black, with heavy beak; it was plucking one by one the humped, pale green caterpillars from the leaves of a thick green tree. Then it vanished into the shadows of the leaves and, in the same moment, from the crown of the tree flew a western bluebird---little aqua thrush of the mountains, hundreds of miles from its home. It is a moment hard to top---but, I can. Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?

But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

She was that lass I loved to admire when she plucked roses in her Charlotte novels she beamed like sunflower, when she laughed at romantic lines, I loved her little sequin nuggets those fine details about her, those indefinite little prose. Her smell made me wonder, Do books have frankincense? I loved to stare at her favourite book by

[His novels are] aggressively three-dimensional... showing the poet as well as the draughtsman... It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions. He is always exact . . . [Titus Groan] remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoiac denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and control never falters. It is, if you like, a rich wine of fancy chilled by the intellect to just the right temperature. There is no really close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant.

Then the next day, Christmas, Kim wrote Trump a much longer letter describing their Singapore meeting in almost romantic prose. “It has been 200 days since the historic DPRK-US summit in Singapore this past June, and the year is now almost coming to an end. Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day. As I mentioned at that time, I feel very honored to have established an excellent relationship with a person such as Your Excellency

A maidenhead, the virgin's trouble Is well-compare-d to a bubble on a navigable river Soon 'tis touched t'is gone forever

Was that—did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive—two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown.

Notes of sandalwood, spice, vanilla, and incense expanded the nineteenth-century European perfumer’s palette, as did the aroma chemicals in their laboratories. While the colonial project was underway—and the prices of raw materials were driven down by the endless capacity to exploit human labor and the creation of new synthetic materials—Parisian perfume houses became the locus of Western olfactory culture. Perfume became a mode of sensory imaging of the Other and the fragrant material of the Orient. Most Western writing on perfume focuses on its capacity for transcendence or escape. Allures of luxury and the exotic nature of the materials described in purple, perfumed prose. This is what first drew me in, language that is lyrical, historic, romantic, and scientific, at once. There is inventive signature in the way independent perfumers describe their creations. Yet I often find the opulent, canonized, big-brand Western perfumes powdery as the dusts of conquest.

الأدراج: قصائد المدن نحو معانيها العالية… على أيّ درب أواعدُ عينيكِ... والأمنيات ثكالى وكلّ الدروبِ بلا آخرِ... تعبنا نفتّش عن حلمٍ واحدٍ للبقاء.. فلمْ تلتفت نجمةٌ في الحنين إلى غربةِ العابرِ نُسينا وحيدين حتى تقاسَمنا الوجدُ والطارئون فما همَّ من باع عهد الضياع ومن يشتري وصافحني سيف هذا الرحيل.. وقد كنت غمداً أصيلاً فلم أخسر العنفوانَ ولم تخسري

ما من مكان سكنته إلا وسكنني.. ‏ أشعر أني مدينة ...

في حضنها كن ندى.. كن غيمةً... مطرا‬ واغمض يديك على نيرانها لترى لن تفهم الحب، حاول إن وقعت به أن تفهم الفأس لا أن تفهم الشجرا... ولا تفكّر كثيراً، دع غداً لغدٍ كن عاشقاً، أجمل الأغصان ما انكسرا خف من بقائكما لا من رحيلكما لن تحبس الريح مهما تحبس الوترا لا ورد يملك عطراً، وهو يسكنه والليل مهما سرى لن يملك القمرا دعها تحبك... دعها أن تحب... غداً يبقى من العمر... حبّ كان... وانتثرا...

كلّ سهمٍ في أضلعي وفؤادي جاء ممّن أحبّهم يا بلادي..

سيستغرق الجرح وقتاً ليكتشف الليل حزن القمرْ… هنا الأرض أضيق من رغبتي بالبكاء، وهذي السماء،على الرغم من كل بهجتها في المساء… ورغم اتساع المدى واخضرار الشجرْ… عروقيَ خيطان طائرةً في بلادي، وقلبي حجرْ… دعيني أصدّق عينيك يا حلوتي، كلّ من كان خان، دعيني أصدق أنّ يديك اهتدائي الأخير إلى لغتي الواعدةْ… دعيني أفسر جوع العصافير وهي تحوم على سورة المائدةْ! دعيني أفكر بي، وبنا، وبمن قال إن الهويات نصلٌ بأحلامنا الهامدةْ… لماذا تظل البلاد التي عذبتنا طويلاً ندوباً بأرواحنا الباردةْ؟ وهل نحن نرحل ما دام تبقى البيوت ثقوباً بأجسادنا الشاردةْ! لقد قطّعتنا البلاد إلى حطب من رحيلٍ، وقد أحرقتنا اشتياقاً، لماذا تحنّ الغصون إلى الريح والشجرة الجاحدة؟ ولماذا على غرقٍ أبيض حين أكتب أسكب كل القصائد في دمعة واحدةْ؟

The smiles he gave me were like lush paintings or lines of romantic prose. What a shame it was that he never saw any of the smiles I gave him. They were like daggers.

In this choice of trivial, ‘unpoetic’ motifs the same democratic spirit is expressed as in the choice of the human types of Courbet, Millet and Daumier— with the sole difference that the landscape painters seem to say: nature is beautiful at all times and in all places, no ‘ideal’ motifs are necessary to do justice to its beauty, whereas the figure painters want to prove that man is ugly and pitiable no matter whether he is oppressing others or being oppressed himself. But, in spite of its sincerity and simplicity, the naturalistic landscape soon becomes just as conventional as the romantic had been. The romantics painted the poetry of the sacred grove, the naturalists paint the prose of rural life—the clearing with the grazing cattle, the river with the ferry, the field with the hayrick.

I need an outfit posthaste. I have a date tonight with a subject of potential romantic intrigue.

That the novel comments on society is on the whole true. It is also easy to see why prose literature in general and the novel in particular are most suited to ‘commitment’ (engagement), the transforming of the appeal to ‘freedom’ which is made by all art into a more specific kind of social recommendation. What is surprising, particularly after the introduction to Sartre’s thought afforded by L’Etre et

No matter what romantic prose is chiseled into a marble headstone, true love doesn’t exist. It’s nothing but hope in a different form. A concept for the poor and the powerless to latch onto when there’s nothing else.

I will love you when you think you deserve it. And I will love you even more when you think that you don’t.

Every doubt is answered by your intuition.

You relied on my body. You gave it purpose. For you, I will always love it.

The silence between us, around us, rivaled the end of time. The shrubs may have wilted, the river may have evaporated away, every hydrogen and oxygen atom sucked into space. Everything in existence drifting farther and farther away, endlessly and quietly fading. Then, a pebble slipped into the river, reprimanding the water for staring and reminding it that it had a job to do. With some regret, the river moved on but kept thinking about our stories as it sloshed and trickles back to life. Soon the fuscus, prompted by the river's resumption of its duties, began to wave back and forth once again, shaking off the droplets the river splashed on its stalks. The trees around us, taking note of their part in the story, twitched their noir leaves as the wind spurred them on, and a rustling like bells filled my ears. The clouds, always the last to hear about anything, understood that they too had to move on. So, they scooched along and let the sun have a turn. We didn't say anything. Didn't move. We simply lay on the brown grass and the black soil as we stared up at the sky, watching the clouds billow past the daffodil sun, our hands, still nested together, keeping us tethered to our reality.