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“The mighty sturgeon has his pool; The stork upon the dam makes his habitation. Fish in scaly armour, Birds in serried plumes, find protection. In my distress I question that inscrutable expanse: O bowels of earth! O boundless sky! Will ye not hearken to my cry? Above, the twinkling Milky Way; The air cold, Slanting moonlight, The water-clock sunk past midnight. My restless heart grieves still;”
― The Story of the Stone: The Debt of Tears
― The Story of the Stone: The Debt of Tears
“Material life, of course, presents itself to us in the anecdotal form of thousands and thousands of assorted facts. Can we call these events? No: to do so would be to inflate their importance, to grant them a significance they never had. That the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian ate with his fingers from the dishes at a banquet (as we can see from a drawing) is an everyday detail, not an event. So is the story about the bandit Cartouche, on the point of execution, preferring a glass of wine to the coffee he was offered. This is the dust of history, microhistory in the same sense that Georges Gurvitch talks about micro-sociology: little facts which do, it is true, by indefinite repetition, add up to form linked chains. Each of them represents the thousands of others that have crossed the silent depths of time and endured.”
― Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol 2: The Wheels of Commerce
― Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol 2: The Wheels of Commerce
“When grief for fiction’s idle words More real than human life appears, Reflect that life itself’s a dream And do not mock the reader’s tears.”
― The Story of the Stone: The Dreamer Wakes
― The Story of the Stone: The Dreamer Wakes
“people undertake some new task not because of a challenge, but because of the assumed absence of a challenge because the task looks easy…and then, once they are stuck with it, they have willy-nilly to overcome the unsuspected difficulties—and sometimes they even succeed.”
― Development Projects Observed
― Development Projects Observed
“before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signs
they enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an image
as much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave”
― The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
they enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an image
as much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave”
― The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
William T Vollmann Central
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This corner of goodreads shall serve the needs of rainbow readers of Mr Vollmann's indulgent body of work. We welcome the veteran and the fresh flesh ...more
Goodreads Librarians Group
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Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
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