In my ninth grade english class, I was given an assignment: for every book I read each year, I should find individual excerpts that from each one that I considered beautiful, profound, ironic, or otherwise meaningful, then combine them into a collage. The idea for this assignment came from the book "Blood Horses" in which the same assignment is given. The idea of such a project initially struck me as odd, yet slowly but surely that year I made my first beautiful language collage, and I found it to be extremely meaningful. It helps that the assignment coincided with a generally turbulent and formulative point in my life: amoung many other things, when I first began to seriously read again. I found the exercise so helpful that I decided to continue it each year. Originally it was to be a pen-and-paper project (as the first one was) however I don't have that kind of time anymore! Not only that, but I no longer have the original paper (it must have carelessly been tossed), a loss by which I am extremely saddened. It wont happen again. In any case, I really recommend maintaining such a collage, it taught me to be more cognisant of what I read, and to appreciate beautiful writing.
Without further ado then, here is my beautiful language collage for 2017. If this list seems plagued by mandatory high school literature, that's because it is. Still I try to take what I can from it. Compared to the year before, it's not quite as nice as I would hope (I read a bit less), but still, I think there's a good representation of literature here.
Beautiful Language 2017
“I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.”
-F Scott. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.”
-F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.”
-Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, The Right To Privacy
“The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, — not the material of my every-day existence — but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.”
-Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice
I met a traveller from an antique land,-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realising it, confronted with the darkest thought that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human being are made.
-Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
I could not understand—and I use this cruel expression intentionally-what impulse drove her to this desire for contamination. In this world of ours there should be a nonresistance that is full of shyness and gentleness; but this girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies gathering on someone who is taking a nap. Yet the drawn-out kiss and the feel of the girl's soft chin awakened my feeling of lust. This was what I was supposed to have been dreaming about for so long, but the feeling itself was thin and shallow. My lust did not seem to advance directly, but to run round a circuitous track: The cloudy white sky, the rustling of the bamboo grove, the strenuous efforts of the ladybird as it crawled up the leaf of an ins—all these things remained as they had been before, scattered and without order.
-Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Who could imagine this boy's flesh and spirit, which had been made only for brightness and which was only suitable to brightness, lying buried in a grave? He had not carried the slightest mark of being destined for a premature death, he had been constitutionally free of all uneasiness and grief and had born no element that even vaguely resembled death. Perhaps it was precisely because of this that he had died so suddenly. Perhaps it had been impossible to save Tsurukawa from death just because he was composed of only the pure ingredients of life and had the frailty of a pure-blooded animal. In this case it would seem that I, on the contrary, was fated to live to a cursed old age.
-Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
The waves surged forward in an almost continuous mass, hardly letting one see the smooth, gray gulfs that lay between one wave and the next. Piled up over the open sea, the great cumuli of clouds revealed a heaviness and, at the same time, a delicacy. For that heavy, undefined accumulation of cloud had for its edging a line as light and cold as that of the most delicate feather, and in its center it enveloped a faint blue sky of whose actual existence one could not be sure. Behind the zinc-colored waters rose the purple-black mountains of the cape. Everything was imbued with agitation and immobility, with a dark, ever-moving force, with the coagulated feeling of metal.
-Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.
-Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
I have never seen such a strange factory. In it all the techniques of modern science and management, together with the exact and rational thinking of many superior brains, were dedicated to a single end—Death. Producing the Zero-model combat plane used by the suicide squadrons, this great factory resembled a secret cult that operated thunderously—groaning, shrieking, roaring. I did not see how such a colossal organization could exist without some religious grandiloquence. And it did in fact possess religious grandeur, even to the way the priestly directors fattened their own stomachs.
-Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask
My sister died. I derived a superficial peace-of-mind from the discovery that even I could shed tears.
-Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask
Noboru had withstood the ordeal from beginning to end. Now his half-dazed brain envisioned the warmth of the scattered viscera and the pools of blood in the gutted belly finding wholeness and perfection in the rapture of the dead kitten’s large languid soul. The liver, limp beside the corpse, became a soft peninsula, the squashed heart a little sun, the reeled-out bowels a toll, and the blood in the belly the tepid waters of a tropical sea. Death had transfigured the kitten into a perfect, autonomous world.
-Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
His purity was as brittle as a new moon. His innocence had sent an intricate net of feelers snaking toward the world, but when would they be snapped? When would the world lose its vastness and lace him in a strait jacket? That day, he knew, was not far away, and even now he could feel a lunatic courage welling within him...."
-Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
"Here's your tea," Noboru offered from behind him, thrusting a dark-brown plastic cup near Ryuji's cheek. Absently, Ryuji took it. He noticed Noburu's hand trembling slightly, probably from the cold.
Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as everyone knows, is bitter stuff.
-Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light.
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever—Here, give me some tobacco.''...
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“The harmony of soul and body,—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.”
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution.”
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw everything a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of sentimentality. He lied and never knew that he lied, and when it was pointed out to him said that lies were beautiful. He was an idealist.”
-W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
I don’t know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the Eternity they have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.
-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God Himself. Never.”
-Elie Wiesel, Night