Odette Carotte

Reading the Penguin Proust in English, like a glutton

18,861 notes

A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.

Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg  (via thisisendless)

FUCK

(via femmeboyant)

I’m just frozen. Absences of women in history don’t “just happen,” they are made.

(via queereyes-queerminds)

(Source: fuckyeahbeatniks, via oldfilmsflicker)

4 notes

If a man felt that society took too little notice of him, I should not advise him to pay still more calls, to have a still more splendid turn-out, I should tell him to refuse all invitations, to live shut away in his room, to admit no one, and that he would then see people queuing outside his door. Or rather, I should not give him this advice. For this method of achieving social success works only in the same way as the similar method of making oneself loved, that is if one does not adopt it deliberately.
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 342.

Filed under GPOMC proust cork-lined room popularity contest recluse want what you can't have invitation society playing hard to get

1 note

I believe that he will not take a wife; but why then trouble this girl whom he will never marry? Why risk prompting her to refuse matches that she will come to look on with disdain? Why disturb the mind of a person whom he could so easily avoid?

Madame de Sévigné, as quoted in Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 336.

I feel a kinship with the Narrator’s mother and grandmother. They were Tumblr quote-bloggers before there were Tumblr quote-bloggers. 

Filed under Madame de Sévigné proust mother grandmother marriage decision free indecision morals refuse a pleasure gotta be cruel to be kind commitment

3 notes

It was as if Albertine wanted to pick a quarrel with me, as if she knew of the existence, more or less close at hand, of pleasures of which her enclosed life with me was depriving her, and which exercised an influence upon her for as long as they lasted, like those atmospheric disturbances which reach us at our own firesides and act upon our nerves from as far away as the Balearic islands.
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 35-336.

Filed under proust butterfly effect weather mood albertine freedom prisoner balearic islands