Blogul lui English page -- Arhiva Septembrie 2014 (12)

I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.” 

― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 



When John Harmon—who has been left a fortune if he will marry the girl his miserly father chose for him—is found floating dead in the Thames, he sets in motion a story…

"From Four Saints in Three Acts" by Gertrude Stein



Pigeons on the grass alas.

Pigeons on the grass alas.

Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass. Pigeons

large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the

grass.

If they were not pigeons what were they.

If…

"The sea never changes and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery."

--from "Typhoon" by Joseph Conrad



Joseph Conrad’s long experience as a working seaman enriched and deepened his literary gifts, making him the most brilliant and convincing writer of seafaring’s greatest age. In the three sea stories collected here, he makes deft use of the maritime…

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a…

"Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice."

--from THE TRIAL by Franz…

What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way — human beings…

“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.” 

― Ovid, Metamorphoses 



Ovid’s famous mock epic—a treasury of myth and magic that is one of the greatest literary works of classical antiquity—is rendered into fluidly poetic English by world-renowned translator Allen Mandelbaum. Roman poet …

"He thought of the poem which says that 'real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams,' and he longed for even so dim a substance as the dream-life of those nights."

― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji



In the early eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote what many consider to be the…

MIKLOS BANNFY

THE TRANSILVANIAN TRILOGY 2 VOLUMES including volumes…

"A light here required a shadow there."

--To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf



Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality. Observed…

"How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be

When there's no help in truth!"

--from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles



The legends surrounding Oedipus of Thebes and his ill-fated offspring provide the subject matter for Sophocles’ three greatest plays, which together represent Greek drama at the pinnacle of its achievement. Oedipus the King, the most…