#25

#67

“Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated – dying –
On those forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!” (Dickinson, 1997: 3).

DICKINSON, Emily (1997). Everyman's Poetry. London: Orion Publishing Group.

#23

“The ruthless recording eye made Updike unpopular with some women readers, especially back in the salad days of Theory, when talk of the “male gaze” was the fashion. Piet notes in Foxy's nakedness “the goosebumped roughness of her buttocks, the gray unpleasentness of her armpits....” But in Updike as in life, bodies are rarely perfect, unlike in the movies; this is fictional realism and goosebumps do not stand in the way of the lover's transcendent pleasure. While she fellates him “lazily,” he combs her lovely hair and reflects on her “coral cunt, coral into burgundy, with its pansy-shaped M, or W, of fur”; then it comes to him that mouths are noble. “They move in the brain's court. We set our genitals mating down below like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry”” (McEwan, 2009: 4).

MCEWAN, Ian (2009). “On John Updike” in The New York Review Of Books, March 12 – 25, Volume LVI, Number 4. New York: The New York Review Of Books.

#22

“Sebastian speaking of his very first novel (unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the father's student
(...)
Sebastian in the summer of 1922 had overworked himself and, suffering from hallucinations, used to see a kind of optical ghost – a black-robed monk moving swiftly towards him from the sky” (id: 55).

#21

“... Many a time have I said to him: Sebastian, be careful, women will adore you. And he would reply with a laugh: Well, I'll adore women too...” (Nabokov, 1995: 19).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (1995). The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight. London: Penguin Books.

#18

“«Se bem a compreendo, explica que a ordem da cidade é incompatível com o prazer insaciável das mulheres.» – «Eu diria antes: o prazer desmesurado das mulheres. Mas o que propões é uma moral de homem. Quanto a mim, penso que todas essas ideias, a medida, a moral, foram inventadas pelos homens para compensarem a limitação do seu prazer. Porque os homens sabem de há muito que o seu prazer nunca poderá ser comparado com o prazer que nós experimentamos, que se trata de um prazer de outra ordem»” (id: 797).

#17

"E compreendi então, mas talvez tenha sido mais tarde, ao sair deste sonho, que batia certo assim, que é a lei de todo o ser vivo, cada organismo procura apenas viver e reproduzir-se, sem malícias, os bacilos de Koch que tinham corroído os pulmões de Pergolesi e de Purcell, de Kafka e de Tchekov não alimentavam contra eles qualquer animosidade, não queriam mal aos seus hospedeiros, mas tratava-se da lei da sua sobrevivência e do seu desenvolvimento, do mesmo modo que nós combatemos esses bacilos com medicamentos que inventamos todos os dias, sem ódio, em vista da nossa sobrevivência, e a nossa vida vida inteira sobre o assassínio de outras criaturas que também quereriam viver" (id: 734).

#16

“Somewhere over in Germany, in a town beside a lake, every evening a blazing swan would fly upon into the air, and after it had finished burning, it would fall down into the surface of the lake, the locals were horrified, so they organised some patrols and caught a young man, who had just lured another swan with a bread roll, he poured a bottle of petrol over it, and lit it, delighting himself with the sight of this blazing swan soaring up into the night... and when thay caught him, he was a young man, who said in his defence, that he was inspired by Salvador Dali, a painting of a burning giraffe had disturbed him so much at night that it made the room hurt, where he dreamt about this blazing giraffe and Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method, he'd wanted to pour petrol over a giraffe at the zoo to see its mane catch fire, but he couldn't reach up that high, so he'd lured over a trusting swan, and when it soared up blazing into the sky, he saw it rise to the zenith before it fell, he saw Salvador Dali's burning giraffe... and the world stopped hurting, and he didn't know how that image would strike me, like the surface of the pond which the once lovely swan hit in its cooling descent...” (Hrabal, 1998: 12-13)

HRABAL, Bohumil (1998). Total Fears Letters To Dubenka. Translation by James Naughton. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press.