#Troilus_2026 Thersites: ...not proved worthy a blackberry 🤭 (V.4.10)

I had to dig deep in my bookshelves, but I'm ready @christina500.bsky.social

#Troilus_2026 Troilus: For the love of all the gods, Let's leave the hermit pity with our mothers, And when we have our armours buckled on, The venom'd vengeance ride upon our swords, Spur them to ruthful work, rein them from ruth. (V.3.52-56)

#Troilus_2026 Troilus: O Cressid! O false Cressid! false, false, false! Let all untruths stand by thy stained name, And they'll seem glorious. (V.2.193-195)

#SundaySarton Plant Dreaming Deep "Problems to do with climate, with snow or drought or high wind, problems to do with growing things, bring one right down to the marrow. They quickly become metaphor in the mind; they are the stuff of poetry."

#Troilus_2026 Thersites: (to Petroclus) Why art thou then exasperate, thou idle immaterial skein of sleave-silk, thou green sarcenet flap for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal's purse, thou? Ah, how the poor world is pestered with such waterflies, diminutives of nature! (V.1.31-35)

#AContinuation Lili is Crying ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I finished this morning and have so many confused thoughts to untangle. "I think Bessette wants her readers to feel confused." - Kate Briggs

#SundaySarton "Experience is the fuel; I would live my life burning it up as I go along, so that at the end nothing is left unused, so that every piece of it has been consumed in the work."

#Troilus_2026 Agamemnon: What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion; But in this extant moment, faith and troth, Strain'd purely from all hollow bias-drawing, Bids thee, with most divine integrity, From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome.

#AContinuation Lili is Crying - Hélène Bessette - You were wrong, says Lili, I left him there. With only his eyes, which are the colour of fear. This season's colour! It suits everyone. A new shade. It just gets better and better. (102)

#AContinuation Lili is Crying - Hélène Bessette So Lili is wrong to torture her heart over the verb 'to choose'. Life takes care of the choosing. It's life that decides. (99) ... The choice takes care of itself. The choice doesn't need us. (101)

#SundaySarton "Poetry, like chamber music, thrives best on a few listeners, but those one or two are essential. The poem does not live until it has been heard."

#Troilus_2026 Aeneas: In the extremity of great and little, Valour and pride excel themselves in Hector; The one almost as infinite as all, The other blank as nothing. Weigh him well, And that which looks like pride is courtesy. (IV.5.94-98)

#NYRBWomen26 Instead of a Letter "...the difference between anticipation and reality could only be to the advantage of reality, simply because it was reality."

#SundaySarton Plant Dreaming Deep

For alone here, I must first give up the world and all its dear, tantalizing human questions, first close myself away, and then, and only then, open to that other tide, the inner life, the life of solitude, which rises very slowly until, like the anemone, I am open to receive whatever it may bring.

#Troilus_2026 Doimedes: when I am hence I'll answer to my lust: and know you, lord, I'll nothing do on charge: to her own worth She shall be prized; but that you say 'be't so,' I'll speak it in my spirit and honour, 'no.' (IV.4.144-148)

#NYRBWomen26 Instead of a Letter - Diana Athill "In the 'thirties anyone who had had her shell cracked for her and was not a moron could hardly read the papers without veering to the left."

#NYRBWome26 "So often have I proved that this form of self-indulgence (procrastination) ends by making my life less agreeable rather than more so that my inability to control it almost frightens me; but that I should ever get the better of it now seems, alas, most unlikely." Me too, Diana, me too.

#SundaySarton Louise Brogan - first woman to hold the title of Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_...

#Troilus_2026 Cressida: I will not, uncle: I have forgot my father; I know no touch of consanguinity; No kin no love, no blood, no soul so near me As the sweet Troilus. (IV.2.108-111)

#Troilus_2026 IV,1,31-34 #TheBard_ProblemPlays ANEAS We know each other well. DIOMEDES We do, and long to know each other worse. PARIS This is the most despiteful gentle greeting, The noblest hateful love, that e'er I heard of. Wilhelm Tischbein Seven heads of heroes from Homer's Iliad

#NYRBWomen26 "I believe now that the way a person feels about sex, once he has struggled through adolescence, depends largely on things other than his 'sex education': on, for example, his imagination, his honesty, his capacity for tenderness, and his ability to comprehend the 'reality' of others."

#SundaySarton "One of the facts about solitude is that one becomes as alert as an animal to every change of mood in the skies, and to every sound." 1.

#Troilus_2026 Ulysses: perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery. (III.3.161-164)

#NYRBWomen25 Instead of a Letter - Diana Athill "To be constantly loved and desired by someone whose touch is repulsive to you is a profound outrage. You may be in such a situation by your own fault or folly, but whatever the surface facts, you remain the situation's victim..." 1.

#SundaySarton "This flowing, changing light plays a constant silent fugue, but in those first days I had still to learn how different the music is as the seasons come and go." ... "Inside and out I found myself in a world that kept me in a state of perpetual Mozartian joy."

#Troilus_2026 Ulysses: O heavens, what some men do, While some men leave to do! How some men creep in skittish fortune's hall, Whiles others play the idiots in her eyes!

#SundaySarton “We love the things we love for what they are,” Robert Frost reminds us. And he means, I think, that we love them as they change—he is speaking in the poem of a brook gone dry—as well as for what they once were. 1.

#NYRBWomen26 Instead of a Letter "'Going to look at the bull,' for example, was not a random whim but an accepted pastime. A bull was a spectacle in himself." ... "He was sex as well as violence, and we were in awe of him."

#Troilus_2026 Pandarus: If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world's end after my name; call them all Pandars; (III.2.200-203)

#SundaySarton Plant Dreaming Deep - May Sarton "My friends realized that my whole relation to the place was a little like that of an old maid who suddenly gets married."

#NYRBWomen26 Instead of a Letter - Diana Athill "Yet they despised almost all the rest of the world, excepting people as nearly as possible replicas of themselves, as though their status as English country gentlefolk made them exceptional beings..."

#Troilus_2026 Helen: Let thy song be love: this love will undo us all. O Cupid, Cupid, Cupid! (III.1.105) ... Pandarus: Is this the generation of love? hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot deeds? Why, they are vipers: is love a generation of vipers? (III.1.128-130)

#NYRBWomen26 #DianaAthill "I was about ten years old and had thought of an image for life. I thought it was as if people were confined in a bowl which was floating on a sea. While snug at the bottom of the bowl they lived their lives complacently, but the bowl spun and tossed on the sea..." 1.

#SundaySarton "I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give—a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet."

#Troilus_2026 Ajax: I'll let his humours blood. Agamemnon: He will be the physician that should be the patient. (II.3.221-222)

#Troilus_2026 Thersites: Here is such patchery, such juggling and such knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on the subject! and war and lechery confound all (II.3.70-74) Among the best of S's fools.

#AContinuation Lili is Crying - Hélène Bessette What is this!? Is it a play? A novel? A poem? A score? An anti-psalm? 🤯🤯🤯 "I will prepare a whole evening of red and purple-coloured bliss." (36) "Smiles, hands, laughter." (37) [Fitzcarraldo] 1.

#SundaySarton Plant Dreaming Deep - May Sarton 1) One of the best titles ever. 2) When I tell people what it's about, they're unimpressed. 3) I'm loving memoirs this year (4 so far). 4) This book is very timely and relevant for me...to be continued. 1.

#Troilus_2026 Priam: Paris, you speak Like one besotted on your sweet delights: You have the honey still, but these the gall; So to be valiant is no praise at all. (II.2.150-153)

#Troilus_2026 Ulysses: But, hit or miss, Our project's life this shape of sense assumes: Ajax employ'd plucks down Achilles' plumes. (I.3.195-197)

#Troilus_2026 "Achilles and Patroclus play in their tent at mimicking the kings and generals. Often in Shakespeare, clowns imitate princes. But here the mockery is even more cruel and spares no one. Heroes imitate clowns, and they are clowns." Jan Kott - Shakespeare Our Contemporary 1.

#SundaySarton The door was opened by a kindly old servant in an apron, who received the package, and asked whether I would not like to come up. But one does not batter one’s way in to see the gods, and I hastily withdrew. (Leonard and Virginia Woolf) 1.

#Troilus_2026 Pandarus: Asses, fools, dolts! chaff and bran, chaff and bran! porridge after meat! (I.2.245-246) ... Achilles! a drayman, a porter, a very camel. (I.2.253)

#Troilus_2026 Cressida: Women are angels, wooing: Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing. (I.2.294-295)

#RachelCuskTogether Ahead of a busy week, I read through to the end. I loved these books and entirely enjoyed the challenges they contained. I appreciate everyone for the active discussions and sharing. Thanks especially to @literaturesc.bsky.social for all the organizing!

#SundaySarton Leonard Woolf said, “If you knew Kot well, you understood what a major Hebrew prophet must have been like. If Jeremiah had been born in a ghetto village of the Ukraine in 1882, he would have been Kot.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._S._K...

#Troilus_2026 Cressida: At what was all this laughing? Pandarus: Marry, at the white hair that Helen spied on Troilus' chin. Cressida: An't had been a green hair, I should have laughed too. (I.2.150-153) 1.

#Troilus_2026 "For it is not the buffo tone that is the most amazing, but its sudden break, or rather its fusion with a most bitter philosophy and passionate poetry." Jan Kott – Troilus and Cressida: Amazing and Modern, Shakespeare Our Contemporary