Ovid

Now stands my task accomplished, such a work
As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword
Nor the devouring ages can destroy.
Let, when it will, that day, that has no claim
But to my mortal body, end the span
Of my uncertain years. Yet I'll be borne,
The finer part of me, above the stars,
Immortal, and my name shall never die.
Wherever through the lands beneath her sway
The might of Rome extends, my words shall be
Upon the lips of men. If truth at all
Is stablished by poetic prophecy,
My fame shall live to all eternity.

-Metamorphoses (trans. A. D. Melville)

Kundera

"I have no objection to my books being immortal. I wrote them in such a way that nobody could delete a single word. To resist every kind of adversity. But I myself, as a human being, as Ernest Hemingway, I don't give a damn about immortality!"

"I understand you very well, Ernest. But you should have been more careful while you were still alive. Now it's too late."

"More careful? Are you referring to my boastfulness? I admit that when I was young I loved to blow my own trumpet. I loved to show off in front of people. I enjoyed the anecdotes that were told about me. But beleive me, I wasn't such a monster as to do it on account of immortality! When I realized one day that this was the point of it all, I panicked. From that time on I must have told people a thousand times to leave my life alone. But the more I pleaded the worse it got. I moved to Cuba to get out of their sight. When I won the Nobel Prize I refused to go to Stockholm. Believe me, I didn't give a damn about immortality, and now I'll tell you something else: when I realized one day that it was holding me in its clutches, it terrified me more than death itself. A man can take his own life. But he cannot take his own immortality.

-Immortality

Vonnegut

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

My father died many years ago now - of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

-Slaughterhouse Five

Sherwood Anderson

Ebenezer Cowley, the man who stood in the store listening to the eager patter of words that fell from the lips of the traveling man, was tall and lean and looked unwashed. On his scrawny neck was a large wen partially covered by a grey beard. He wore a long Prince Albert coat. The coat had been purchased to serve as a wedding garment. Before he became a merchant Ebenezer was a farmer and after his marriage he wore the Prince Albert coat to church on Sundays and on Saturday afternoons when he came into town to trade. When he sold the farm to become a merchant he wore the coat constantly. It had become brown with age and was covered with grease spots, but in it Ebenezer always felt dressed up and ready for the day in town.

As a merchant Ebenezer was not happily placed in life and he had not been happily placed as a farmer. Still he existed. His family, consisting of a daughter named Mabel and the son, lived with him in rooms above the store and it did not cost them much to live. His troubles were not financial. His unhappiness as a merchant lay in the fact that when a traveling man with wares to be sold came in at the front door he was afraid. Behind the counter he stood shaking his head. He was afraid, first that he would stubbornly refuse to buy and thus lose the opportunity to sell again; second that he would not be stubborn enough and would in a moment of weakness buy what could not be sold.

In the store on the morning when Elmer Cowley saw George Willard standing and apparently listening at the back door of the Eagle printshop, a situation had arisen that always stirred the son’s wrath. The traveling man talked and Ebenezer listened, his whole figure expressing uncertainty. “You see how quickly it is done,” said the traveling man, who had for sale a small flat metal substitute for collar buttons. With one hand he quickly unfastened a collar from his shirt and then fastened it on again. He assumed a flattering wheedling tone. “I tell you what, men have come to the end of all this fooling with collar buttons and you are the man to make money out of the change that is coming. I am offering you the exclusive agency for this town. Take twenty dozen of these fasteners and I’ll not visit any other store. I’ll leave the field to you."

The traveling man leaned over the counter and tapped with his finger on Ebenezer’s breast. “It’s an opportunity and I want you to take it,” he urged. “A friend of mine told me about you. ‘See that man Cowley,’ he said. ‘He’s a live one.’”

"Queer" - Winesburg, Ohio

Faulkner

Behind him the white man was shouting, "My horse! Fetch my horse!" and he thought for an instant of cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, strained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying "Pap! Pap!," running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, "Father! Father!"

-Barn Burning

Classical Scholarship

"We are told, unreliably, that a cult to Aphrodite Kallipygos grew up at Syracuse after two peasant sisters began bickering as to which of them possessed the fairer behind, and eventually asked a passer-by to adjudicate (the passer-by not only fell violently in love with one of the girls, but despatched his younger brother along to inspect the other: double nuptials ensued); and we are told that hetairai might stage, among themselves, bottom competitions (philoneikia hyper tes pyges), though admittedly, the source for this is a late writer called Alciphron, who composed imaginary letters. The bottom competition is described, perhaps with an input of male fantasy, in the fourteenth of his Epistolai Hetairikai, or 'Letters of Courtesans'. What is significant about the account is not so much what determines a lovely bottom (there is talk of buttocks 'quivering like jelly', and marvelous rippling motions, and so on), but that Aphrodite is invoked as patroness, and this is explicitly Aphrodite's world..."

(This piece comes from an article on Greek art whose title and author I have unfortunately not been able to find. The passage is so absurd, though, that I figured it was worth sharing anyways.)

Kesey

"Yes, Disturbed Ward for ol' Red McMurphy, I;m afraid. YOu know what I think, observing him these few days?"

"Schizophrenic reaction?" Alvin asks.

Pipe shakes his head.

"Latent Homosexual with Reaction Formation?" the third one says.
Pipe shakes his head again and shuts his eyes. "No," he says and smiles round the room, "Negative Oedipal."

They all congratulate him.

"Yes, I think there is a lot pointing to it," he says. "But whatever the final diagnosis is, we must keep one thing in mind: we're not dealing with an ordinary man."

"You - are very, very wrong, Mr. Gideon."

It's the Big Nurse.

Everybody's head jerks toward her - mine too, but I check myself and pass the motion off like I'm trying to scrub a peck I just discovered on the wall above my head. Everybody's confused all to hell for sure now. They figured they were proposing just what she'd want, just what she was planning to propose in the meeting herself. I thought so too. I've seen her send men half the size of McMurphy up to Disturbed for no more reason than there was a chance they might spit on somebody; now she's got this bull of a man who's bucked her and everybody else on the staff, a guy she all but said was on his way off the ward earlier this afternoon, and she says no.

"No. I don't agree. Not at all."

-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Hemingway

"How can you say such things, Frances?" Cohn interrupted.

"Listen to him. I'm going to England. I'm going to visit friends. Ever visit friends that didn't want you? Oh, they'll have to take me all right. 'How do you do, my dear? Such a long time since we've seen you. And how is your dear mother?' Yes, how is my dear mother? She put all her money into French war bonds. Yes, she did. Probably the only person in the world that did. 'And what about Robert?' or else very careful talking about Robert. 'You must be most careful not to mention him, my dear. Poor Frances has had a most unfortunate experience.' Won't it be fun, Robert? Don't you think it will be fun, Jake?"

She turned to me with that terribly bright smile. It was very satisfactory to her to have an audience for this.

"And where are you going to be, Robert? It's my own fault, all right. Perfectly my own fault. When I made you get rid of your little secretary on the magazine I ought to have known you'd get rid of me the same way. Jake doesn't know about that. Should I tell him?"

"Shut up, Frances, for God's sake."

-The Sun Also Rises

Joyce

Did the process of divestiture continue?

Sensible of a benignant persistent ache in his footsoles he extended his foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots, unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the fore part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised his right foot and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender, took off his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin of the seat of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the lacerated unguinal fragment.

- Ulysses (Ithaca)

Conrad

Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back, a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a 'training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.'

-Lord Jim