Last excerpt from Mémoires d'Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar:

"Little soul, tender and inconstant soul, companion of my body, of which you were a guest, you will go down to those places pale, hard and naked, where you must renounce the games of yore. For a moment, let us contemplate together the familiar places, the objects that we will surely never see again... Let us strive to enter death with open eyes..." (p. 251)

There are several excerpts from the author in her notebook on this book which I - as a reader, would like to publish here, but I realize that it is better to leave these beautiful passages of our dearest Yourcenar to the delight of you, if interested, future readers of this great literary work.

As a token of curiosity, I will leave here in this note a critique of the author on the erudism of culture, written in a fo...

Excerpts from the film Comet, directed by Sam Esmail;

Dedicated to Dell and Kimberly.

"Kimberly, I used to find it really annoying you said 'so' all the time. Bugged the shit out of me. And I... I love it. I love it, now. After we have sex and you shrug your shoulders and you say 'I'm here all week!', - love that. I love that a single strand of your hair can fall so perfectly to the side and you don't even know. I love the little blue veins behind your eyes. I love your eyes. Knowing you goes down as easily the best thing that's ever happened to me. Easily. If I were a restaurant, you'd be my special, but nobody could order you, 'cause I'd just want you to be mine, just all mine. Not in, like, a biblical slavery-owning sense or a pimp-prostitute dynamic of 'you be mine, bitch', but... but just in that... you're my love. You're my love. But my favorite t...

Tribute to Shadow of the Wind, C. R. Zafón — excerpts:

"- no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, whatever we learn and forget -, we will return." (p. 14)

"- someone once said that the moment we stop to think about whether we like someone, we no longer like that person forever." (p. 170)

"- probably because a stranger sees us as we are, not as he wants to believe we are." (p. 171)

"- I was terribly sorry when I heard that Julián had died - he said quietly. - In spite of everything that happened later, and having distanced ourselves over time, we were good friends: Miquel, Aldaya, Julián and me. Even Fumero. I always thought we were going to be inseparable, but life should know anything we do not know. I've never had friends like those again, and I do not think I have them again. I ...

Excerpts from The Angel's Game, C. R. Zafón:

[...] Natural talent is like the strength of an athlete. Someone can be born with more or less ability, but no one is an athlete simply because he was born tall, strong or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the mastery of the craft and the technique. Innate intelligence is simply ammunition. To get to do something with it, it is necessary to turn your mind into a precision weapon. [...]

— Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And the life of every artist is a war, big or small, starting with the struggle against one's limitations. To reach anywhere you want to reach, you first need ambition, then talent, knowledge, and finally opportunity. [...] (p. 182)

Excerpts from The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath:

"[...] The night before I had seen a play whose heroine was possessed by a demon, and when he spoke through her the voice was so deep and cavernous that it was impossible to know whether it was a man or a woman. Well, Hilda's voice sounded like the voice of that demon."

"She stared at her reflection in the glittering shop window, as if she had to make sure, at every moment, that she still existed. The silence between us was so deep that I thought it must be my fault."

"So I said: - Is not this Rosenberg story awful?"

"The Rosenbergs would be electrocuted that night."

"- Yeah! - said Hilda, and I finally thought I had found something human in that heart of stone. It was only when we stopped to wait for the others, in the tumultuo...

Excerpt from La Sombra Del Viento, C. R. Zafón:

When I stepped out into the street, it seemed to me that the blackness was dragging me along the pavement, spreading through the heel of my shoe. I pressed my pace and did not slow down until I reached the apartment on Santa Ana Street. Upon entering the house, I found my father sheltering in his armchair, with a book open on his lap. It was a photo album. When he saw me, he stood up with a look of relief that took a huge weight off his back.

— I was already worried — he said. — How was the funeral?

I shrugged, and my father nodded gravely, dismissing the matter.

— I made something for dinner. If you want, I can warm up and...

— I'm not hungry, thank you. I ate around.

He looked me in the eyes and nodded again...

The Letter from Penélope Aldaya to Júlian Carax (p. 139): — Shadow of the Wind, C. R. Zafón:

"This morning I learned from Jorge that you really left Barcelona and went in search of your dreams. I always feared that these dreams would never let you be mine, or anyone else's. I would have liked to see you one last time, to look into your eyes and tell you things I can not tell in a letter to. Nothing went as we planned. I know you too well and know that you will not write to me, that you will not even send me your direction, that you will want to be someone else. I know you will hate me for not showing up as I promised. That you think I have failed you. That I did not have the courage. So many times I imagined you, alone in that train, convinced that I had betrayed you. Many times I tried to find you through Miquel, but he told me that you no longer wanted to kn...

Excerpts from Nuria Monfort: Memory of the Disappeared. (1933-1955) — Shadow of the Wind, C. R. Zafón:

"A year after we met, Miquel Moliner confessed that he had fallen in love with me. I did not want to hurt him, but I did not want to deceive him too. It was impossible to fool Miquel. I told him that I valued him a lot, that he had become my best friend, but that I was not in love with him. Miquel said he already knew it."

"— You are in love with Julián, though you do not know yet." (p. 347)

---//---

"It could not be him. According to my calculations, Julián would have been 32 years old, and that man seemed much older. His hair was already a little gray and an expression of sadness or weariness. He was excessively pale and thin, or maybe it was just the fog and my weariness of the trip. I had learned to imagine a teenage ...

Excerpts from Dracula, Bram Stoker:

"Then, without letting go of her husband's hand, Mina got up and spoke. Oh, who would have been able to give an idea of this scene: the very meekest and most beautiful woman, in all the radiant beauty of her youth and enthusiasm; with the red scar on her forehead, of which she was full of conscience and which made us grind our teeth for the remembrance of when and how it had been made; loving kindness in contrast to our dark hatred; tender faith in contrast to our fears and doubts; and we, knowing that, symbolically, she, with all her goodness, purity and faith, was excluded from God." (p. 493)

"How can I - as anyone could - relate that strange scene, its solemnity, its desolation, its sadness, its horror and yet its sweetness? Even a skeptic, who sees nothing but a semblance of bitter truth in any sacred or emotional thing, would have ...

Excerpts from The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, pt.1

"Through the dusty windows I saw Staffordshire ceramic dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystals, dull silver, antique chairs and canapes upholstered with old and faded brocades, an elaborate faience cage, miniature marble obelisks on a marble-topped table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos."

"Suddenly she sat down, wrapped her arms around me and kissed me; all the blood ran from my head, a long descent, as if I was falling off a cliff." "I... - I was terrified." Stunned, reflexively, I put my hand over my mouth to dry the kiss - only it wasn't soaked or unpleasant and I could feel a trace of it glowing on the back of my hand." "I don't want you to go." "I don't to go." "Do you remember seeing me?" "When?" "Before." "No." "I remember you, I said." Somehow my hand found its w...

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Excerpts from Mémoires d'Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar (part 1):

"Purposely, I never looked to sleep those whom I loved: they rested from me, I know; I also know that they escaped from me. Every man is ashamed of his sleep-altered face. How many times, when I got up too early to read or study, I put my kneaded cushions and crumpled sheets in order, almost obscene evidence of our encounters with nothing, evidence that every night we ceased to exist." (p. 28)

"It was in Latin that I administered the empire; my epitaph will be carved in Latin on the wall of my mausoleum on the banks of the Tiber, but in Greek I shall have lived and thought." (p. 42)

"This obsession of a frustrated life immobilized my thinking at a fixed point like an abscess. My eagerness for power is the same as for love, which prevents the lover from eating, sleeping, thinking and e...

Excerpts from Mémoires d'Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar (part 2):

"Plotina no longer existed. During the previous season in the city, I saw for the last time that woman with a somewhat tired smile, whom the official nomenclature gave the title of my mother and that was much more: she was my only friend. This time, I found nothing but a small urn deposited under the Column of Trajan. I personally attended the ceremonies of her apotheosis. Contrary to imperial usage, I mourned for a period of nine days. But death changed little in this intimacy that years ago dispensed the presence: a spirit, a thought to which mine had joined." (p. 147)

"Antinous, lying on the bottom of the boat, rested his head on my knees and pretended to sleep to isolate himself from that conversation that did not include him. My hand slid into the back of his head, un...

Excerpts from The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde:

"At these times I feel, Harry, that I have given my whole soul to someone who treats it like a flower to be put on his coat, a little decoration to please his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day." (p. 19).

"What you've told me comes to be a romance, an artistic romance, so to speak, and the worst thing in a romance of any kind is that it ends our romanticism." (p. 20)

"Because to influence someone is to give them their own soul. One does not think of his natural thoughts, nor does he burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not true. His sins, if there are sins, are borrowed. He becomes the echo of another's music, plays a role that was not written for him. The goal of life is self-development. Let us fulfill our nature wit...

Excerpts from The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, pt.2

"But depression was not the right word. This was a plunge that contained sadness and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick and soaked nausea against all humanity and all human endeavor since the beginning of time. The suffering repugnance of the biological order. Old age, disease, death. No one escaped. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruits about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and throwing new fodder into the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer in this way as if it were something redeeming, or good, or even morally admirable: dragging more innocent creatures to the game you lose in one way or another. Squirming babies and complacent drugged moms dragging their feet. Oh, isn't he cute? Ohhh ... Children screaming and slipping on the playground with ...