More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Forsyth
Read between
July 31 - August 15, 2020
we means you and I and that us means you and me.
“The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
“He works his work; I mine.”
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
veridical paradox, one that only appears impossible, but is in fact quite simple.
“Labour Isn’t Working.”
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities”
“I must be cruel only to be kind”
long war against reality.
well executed paradox stirs the soul and mixes language and philosophy in a way that no other figure does.
“The Sound of Silence,”
freedom. He is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
The only reason that T. S. Eliot insisted on the middle initial was that he was painfully aware of what his name would have been without it, backwards.
“One for all and all for one.”
“I’ve been too fucking busy, and vice versa.”
“By day the frolic, and the dance by night,” which sounds rather agreeable, not just because a schedule of 24-hour dancing and frolicking is a good schedule, but because the sentence runs time activity: activity time.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan .
Catachresis is rather difficult to define, but it’s essentially when a sentence is so startlingly wrong that it’s right.
Litotes is affirming something by denying its opposite.
“the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,”
diamond clear.
It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology, it’s that he did know about metaphor.
Metaphor is when two things are connected because they are similar, metonymy is when two things are connected because they are really physically connected.
The extreme form of metonymy is synecdoche, where you become one of your body parts.
all hands on deck as
top brains
What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Ten years of elaborate Greek mythology in three clear images: a face, a flotilla, and turrets set ablaze.
Nobody ever stops to think about a disabled toilet,
“I lit a rather pleased cigarette”
he wore great bright creaking boots;
Adynaton is just Greek for “impossible,”
in rhetoric adynaton is just a long way round of saying “this is the case.”
may the crayfish whistle on the mountainside”
It’s perfectly natural, prolepsis.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Congeries is Latin for a heap, and in rhetoric it applies to any piling up of adjectives or nouns in a list.
Anaphora (an-AFF-or-a) is starting each sentence with the same words. It’s the king of rhetorical figures.
With anaphora people always remember the opening words, but they usually forget the rest.
we shall fight, and we shall probably lose. The anaphora allowed him to push one, while slipping the other in unnoticed.
