Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.”

J. G. Ballard - Crash

Traté de recobrar el aliento; Catherine me observaba. Le tomé la mano izquierda y la apreté contra mi esternón. Para la mente sofisticada de Catherine yo estaba transformándome en una especie de casete emocional, ocupando un sitio entre todas esas escenas de dolor y violencia que ilustraban los márgenes de nuestras vidas: noticiarios de televisión que mostraban guerras y manifestaciones estudiantiles, catástrofes naturales y brutalidades policiales que mirábamos distraídamente en el aparato en color de nuestro dormitorio, mientras nos masturbábamos el uno al otro. Esta violencia experimentada a través de interposiciones de imágenes se había convertido en parte íntima de nuestra vida sexual.

Julian Barnes - Inglaterra, Inglaterra

Quizá fuese realmente un reino pacífico, un nuevo tipo de Estado, un cianotipo del futuro. Si el Banco Mundial y el FMI así lo creían, ¿por qué desmentir tu propia publicidad? Los lectores de The Times, tanto electrónicos como retros, descubrían noticias sobre la Isla inmaculadamente buenas, noticias mixtas sobre el mundo en general y noticias incesantemente negativas sobre la Vieja Inglaterra.

Christina Rossetti - En el estudio de un artista (traducción propia)

Hay un rostro que mira desde todos sus lienzos

Idéntica figura que se sienta o camina

La encontramos suelta detrás de las cortinas

Ese espejo nos da de vuelta toda su gracia

Una reina vestida de ópalo o de rubí

Sin nombre engalanada del verde del estío

Un ángel, una santa; cada lienzo transmite

Análogo motivo, nada más, nada menos

Él se alimenta noche y día del rostro de ella

Y ella vuelve sus ojos de bondad verdadera

Alegres cual la luz y hermosos como la luna

Ni pálida de esperas ni por pena apagada

No cual es; como fue cuando radiaba esperanza

No cual es; como llena los sueños del artista.   

William Shakespeare - The Life and Death of King Richard III

RICHMOND:

"Inter their bodies as becomes their births:
Proclaim a pardon to the soldiers fled
That in submission will return to us:
And then, as we have ta'en the sacrament,
We will unite the white rose and the red:
Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frown'd upon their enmity!
What traitor hears me, and says not amen?
England hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself;
The brother blindly shed the brother's blood,
The father rashly slaughter'd his own son,
The son, compell'd, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division,
O, now, let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so. (...)"

John Milton - Paradise Lost

“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost Archangel, this the seat
That we must change for heav'n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so since he
Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right. Farthest from him is best Whom reason hath equaled force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell happy fields
Where joy forever dwells. Hail horrors Hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time
The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
What matter where if I be still the same
And what I should be--All but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater. Here at least
We shall be free. Th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy will not drive us hence.
Here we may reign supreme, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell.
Better to reign in hell than serve in Heav'n.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th'associates and co-partners of our loss
Lie thus astonished on th' oblivious pool.
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy mansion? Or, once more,
With rallying arms, to try what may be yet
Regained in heav'n or what more lost in hell!”

John Fowles - The Magus

"What do you read?" He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook.

"Oh… novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism."

"I have not a single novel here."

"No?"

"The novel is no longer an art form."

I grinned.

"Why do you smile?"

"It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn't know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that."

"Like what?"

"'Do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?' No serious answer was expected."

"I see. It was not serious."

"Not at all." I looked at the notebook. "Are my measurements interesting?"

"No." He dismissed that. "Well-I am serious. The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy." He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. "I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since." I remembered my own small destroying and thought, grand gestures are splendid-if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. "Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?"

“Even if it had been syphilis—why could you not return to this girl you love?”

 “Really—it's too complicated.”

 “Then it is usual. Not unusual.”

W H Auden - Los señores del límite

El poeta es alguien, según dice Mallarmé, que "de plusiers vocables refait un mot total", y la más poética de las disciplinas escolásticas es sin duda la filología, el estudio del lenguaje abstraído de sus usos, de modo que las palabras se convierten, como si dijéramos, en pequeños poemas líricos sobre sí mismos.

Arthur Symons - The Symbolist Movement in Literature

I think I understand, though I cannot  claim his own authority for my supposition, the way in which Mallarme wrote verse, and the reason why it became more and more abstruse, more and more unintelligible. Remember his principle: that to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create.

Symbolism, implicit in all literature from the beginning, as it is implicit in the very words we use, comes to us now, at last quite conscious of itself, offering us the only escape from our many imprisonments. We find a new, an older, sense in the so worn-out forms of things; the world, which we can no longer believe in as the satisfying material object it was to our grandparents, becomes transfigured with a new light; words, which long usage had darkened almost out of recognition, take fresh lustre. And it is on the lines of that spiritualising of the word, that perfecting of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence in the eternal correspondences between the visible and the invisible universe, which Mallarme taught, and too intermittently practised, that literature must now move, if it is in any sense to move forward.

W H Auden - The Shield of Achilles

"(...) That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
 Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept"

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

"She knew that he was thinking, you are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful. Will you not tell me just for once that you love me? He was thinking that, for he was roused, what with minta and his book, and its being the end of the day and their having quarrelled about going to the lighthouse. But she could not do it; she could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, nothing on earth can equal this happiness).
'Yes, you were right.It's going to be wet tomorrow'. She had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.”

"So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance; whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr Ramsey changed as he sailed farther and farther across the bay."    

 

Ted Hughes - Daffodils

"Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
'A custom of the house'."

(...)