wiltedstrength

Awesome Halls Cough Drop advertisement, which can be seen in New York City's subway trains, as well as elsewhere, I would imagine:

Traditions, traditions, traditions!: Epigone, Lambaste, Surefire, Bottom feeder, Tribade.

1. There had been many an epigone who had imitated Homer and Virgil's style, but did a mediocre job at that. Only a select few, Dante Alighieri among them, had done these Classic writers any justice.

2. The owner of the bakery emerged from his shop while still wearing his apron. His cheeks were flushed with rage and he furiously looked around for the boy who had stolen a loaf of bread from him. He spotted the kid running down the street, and gave chase, with the intent of lambasting the kid with a stick once he caught him.

3. There is no surefire way to go through life unscathed.

4. The weary man rummaged through the garbage cans, extracting crumpled plastic bags and foul smelling leftovers. This bottom feeder, who searched for food left by others, was clearly not in this situation by choice. His face was grimy, and his hands chimney-black.

5. Elinor noticed that an attractive woman has been eying her from the moment she entered the nightclub. Must be a tribade, Elinor thought, but was unsure of how to tell that woman that she was barking up the wrong tree.

Lessons in the woods.

"Never hang all of your happiness on one branch, for that branch may one day break, and all that you depended on will be gone."

"Nature has a stock of useful knowledge, but few are the ears that attend on it."

"My words will itch at your ears until you understand them."

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“The sun above the mountain’s head.”
“(Nature) has a world of ready wealth.
One impulse from a vernal wood,
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can”

-Wordsmith.

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"Consecrating anew the soil..."

A time when "it was still dangerous... for honest men to tell their names."

"In all the broad lands... there is no single spot, however narrow or desolate, where a fugitive... can plant himself and say, 'I am safe.' The whole armory of [the] Law has no shield for you."

"In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth."

"The intervening sands."

Nebelgard - "a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts."

Arundel

Ravenspurgh

"These stones prove armed soldiers."

"You and I have been breasting hills."

"He bristled at the notion of eating uncooked fish."

"Mumble in an obscure language that no one has spoken on earth in 200 years."

"I'm not an early riser."

"...the fugitive pleasure of circumstance."

"He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil [sic] the eternal from the transitory"

"...each age has a deportment, a glance and a smile of its own... every age [has] its own gait... and gesture."

"Everything that is 'material', or in other words an emanation of the 'spiritual', mirrors, and will always mirror, the spiritual reality from which it derives."

"Almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations... [we toil] under the direction of nature and the tyranny of circumstance."

-Quotes taken from Charles Baudelaire's essay, "Modernity."

Resolutions are made to be kept, and yet flexibility is permissible, else a pound of flesh cannot be obtained without the shedding of some blood: Frisky, Adumbrate, Declivity, Keep one's end of the bargain.

1. Tibbald reached out a hand to Morgan and, looking him straight in the eye, said, "If you hold your life at any price, come with me." The wizard glanced over his shoulder at the direction of his pursuers. He studied Tibbald's hazel eyes, unsure of what it is that he read in them, but, time pressing, he grasped the extended hand and allowed the man to haul him up.

Sometime later...

"This is where we part. I've kept my end of the bargain. If you go down this path you shall reach a haven."
2. Elderberry waved a ball attached to a string before the beholder, and Winkie chased it friskily, his purple tongue lolling out.

3. The fleet captains had all gathered in their commander's wardroom. The latter paced back and forth and provided information on the enemy's navy, stating how many ships and what kind of weapons it had. This adumbrated the danger they were in for the rest of the captains.

4. A great wall surrounded the castle, and if that wasn't enough, the castle sat on a hill, with a great declivity descending away from it that made any attack against it an uphill battle.

"אחרי מי יצא מלך ישראל אחרי מי אתה רדף אחרי כלב מת אחרי פרעש אחד"

(Translation: Whom does the king of Israel chase after? After whom? After a dead dog? After a single flea?)

"ויקם דוד אחרי-כן ויצא מן-המערה ויקרא אחרי-שאול לאמר אדני המלך ויבט שאול אחריו ויקד דוד אפים ארצה וישתחו"

(Translation: And David then rose and left the cave and called after Saul. And Saul looked back to David, and David bowed and prostrated himself).

שמואל א', כד

In the second of the two above quotes, David shows King Saul his due respect by bowing before him. Prior to this, Saul had wondered into the cave where David and his men were hiding, and David spared Saul's life, cutting off a piece of his cloth instead.

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Bolingbroke: "Stand all apart,
And show fair duty to his majesty."
He kneels down.


After Bolingbroke has effectively emasculated King Richard II, he still orders his men to show the king his due respect (Shakeaspeare, King Richard II 3.4.185-6).

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These two examples, one from the bible and one from Shakespeare, are instances where an enemy has the king at his mercy, and he shows magnanimity to the king instead of gloating.

On Banishment / Traveling:

"All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.
Teach thy necessisty to reason thus;
There is no virtue like necessity
Think not the King did banish thee,
But thou the king."

"Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie that way thou goest, not whence thou com'st.
Suppose the singing birds musicians,
The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strewed,
The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more
Than a delightful measure or a dance"

"O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus,
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast.
Or wallow naked  in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O no, the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse."

-An echange between John of Gaunt (two first stanzas), and his son, Henry Bolingbroke, the Duke of Hereford (and later King Henry IV; taken from Shakespeare's play, Richard II.

The breath of kings:

"How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings."

"But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.
Shorten my days thou canst with sudden sorrow,
And pluck nighs from me, but not lend a morrow.
Thou canst help time to furrow me with age,
But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage.
Thy word is current with him f or my death,
But dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath."

-Bolingbroke (1st paragraph) and his father, John of Gaunt (2nd), from Richard II.

Human rashness:

"His rash, fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves.
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes.
With eager feeding good doth choke th feeder."

-John of Gaunt, speaking of King Richard's rash actions.

"Why art thou angry?"
 "That such a slave as this should wear a sword, who wears no honesty."

-From Shakespeare's play, King Lear.

"Pygmalion observed how these women lived lives of sordid
indecency, and, dismayed by the numerous defects
of character Nature had given the feminine spirit,
stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion.

During that time he created an ivory statue,
a work of most marvelous art, and gave it a figure,
better than any living woman could boast of,
and promptly conceived a passion for his own creation."

-From Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book X: Pygmalion.

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The following are also from Book X (Pygmalion) of the Metamorphoses:

"...lest I should outrage the living by my survival, or the dead by my dying, drive me from both of these kingdoms, transform me wholly, so that both life and death are denied me."

"Her color, her blood, her spirit all flee together."

"Now it is midnight, when all of creation is silent."

"...sleep dissolves all the cares of the body."

"She wavers, just like a tree that the axe blade has girdled completely, when only the last blow remains to be struck, and the woodsman cannot predict the direction it's going to fall in"

"Unspeakable thoughts."

The following is from book X, the story of Venus and Adonis:

"For lions and bristling boars and other fierce creations look with indifferent eyes and minds upon beauty and youth and other qualities..."

"I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw."

-Gloucester from Shakespeare's King Lear.

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Other quotes from King Lear:

"When we our betters see bearing our [same] woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers suffers most i' the mind...

How light and portable my pain seems now,
When that which makes me bend makes the king bow."

-Edgar.

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"...where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt. Thou'dst shun a bear;
But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea,
Thou'dst meet the bear i' the mouth. When the mind's free,
The body's delicate. The tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there"

"The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious.

-Lear.

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"He's mad that trusts the tameness of a wolf."

-The Fool.

Three marks engraved on the wall because a listener is absent: Reparation, mention in passing, fierce endeavor. 

1. The young man has deeply offended one of his mother's friends, but made a reparation to her by apologizing.

2. Avi from Survivor has mentioned in passing that he has a secret alliance, but this slip of the tongue has shaken the trust of the other members in his current alliance.

3. The young, pimply cashier at the supermarket made fierce endeavors to handle the sudden groundswell of customers that lined up in his station.

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"You may fear too far."
"Safer than trust too far."

-From Shakespeare's play, King Lear.

 "The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work in itself is valuable; we surmount work by work. The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial." 

-From Kobo Abe's novel, The Woman in the Dunes. 

 Five words, the image-sounds of concepts: Pedigree, Mendacious,  Dissimulation, Tautology, Avail onself.

1. The man's pedigree reveals that he belongs to a line of knights and nobles. 

2. Iago from Shakespeare's Othello is a mendacious character that uses deception to convince Othello that his wife has cheated on him.

3. Iago dissimulates his thoughts and intents, instead acting after the manner of people who put up "forms and visages of duty, [keeping] yet their hearts attending on themselves, and, throwing but shows of service on their lords, do well thrive by 'em" (1.1.50-53).

4. Many college students paraphrase quotes in their essays, but sometimes the quotes are so self-explanatory that the paraphrasing becomes a tautology. 

5. Henry availed himself of the wine cabinet, using its contents to help pass the time. 

 "Dissimulation... is the means to preserve those weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature, are denied horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence."

-Friedrich Nietzche in his essay, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.

NY Times article on the display of weapons in Nature: click here.

The Uncanny: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/10/16/science/101509_SCIENCEPIX_10.html

 "O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade Justice to break her sword!"'

"She was as false as water."
"Thou art rash as fire to say that she was false."

"I would not have thee linger in thy pain" (the person then comes to kill someone, and the other protests, "No, no, let me linger! The pain is most bearable").

-Excerpts from Shakespeare's Othello (except for the part in the parenthesis).

Jurik Boarfoot. Say it, "Jurik Boarfoot." It's not the most euphonious name, not the most pleasing to the ear. The "Jurik" is quick and requires the grating of the teeth, and the "Boarfoot" is deeper and demands a smacking of the lips. But then again, nothing about goblins is very pleasing to the senses. Goblins are not pleasant to look at, they are not pleasant to listen to, they are not pleasant to the sense of smell, their skin is rough and unpleasant to the touch, and the testimony of some adventurers who were brazen (or desperate) enough to eat goblin meat said that they are not pleasant to the palette. As a matter of fact, goblins are the only humanoids that do not taste like chicken. 

Sight & Touch - Goblins' skin is rough, riddled with warts and pockmarks, and comes in a variety of green shades, from the famous olive green to a dark, almost brown green. They often have crooked teeth, yellowed from carelessness, with two fangs jotting out of the lower jaw.

Smell - Goblins are notoriously rancid. Walk into a goblin's home, and there is a chance that your nose would become permanently damaged from the initial shock. They have poor hygiene, shower not, and they wear the same rag to cover their loins until it becomes so tattered that only thread remains. 

Hearing - Goblins are as fun to listen to as a croaking toad. When is the last time anyone said to himself, "You know, tonight I'm going down to the swamp and listen to a toad croak!"? It doesn't happen very often. Their voices are hoarse, sometimes of a very high-pitch or a very low-pitch - extremes of unpleasantness. 

Taste - Must I go there? Who would want to eat a goblin after the above descriptions anyway? Remember, you are what you eat. 

 "It is a great price for a small vice."

"Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones."  // "O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear."

"Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend."

"Is this the nature whom passion could not shake, whose solid virtue the shot of accident nor dart of chance could neither graze nor pierce?"

-Snippets from Shakespeare's play, Othello.

 "Precious are the dead that lie there; every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, such passionate faith in their work."

"You may have noticed that the most enthusiastic blood-letters have always been the most civilised of men (Nietzche)."

-Quoted in Colin Wilson's The Outsider.

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Fantasy Fic Corner:

Morgan failed to arouse the slightest enthusiasm in the crowd...

Nebil got into the habit of interrupting priests in the temple. 

 "Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality."

"One must be an ocean to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean." 

"...a day will come when loneliness shall weary you, when your pride shall writhe and your courage gnash its teeth. In that day you shall cry: I am alone. A day will come when you shall see your high things no more, and your low things all too near."

"There are emotions that seek to slay the solitary; if they don't succeed they must perish themselves. Are you able to be a murderer?"

-Quoted in Colin Wilson's book, The Outsider.


Word: Mendacious 

"We found an open passageway instead of a fortress."

It "lay like dead capital - a treasure which they were afraid to touch, the brilliance of which they had allowed to fade."

- Boris Eichenbaum.

"[Put away] your bright swords, for the dew will rust 'em." // "Down with him, thief!"

"We cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot be truly followed."

"The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief."

-From Shakespeare's Othello.

"They have only exchanged one Slavery for another."

-Quoted in Benjamin Franklin's letter, "On the Slave-Trade."