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Richard Papen Quotes

Total quotes: 4
“A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment was unstable and radiant as a dream. ”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Terrible Sweetness, Radiance, Life As A Dream, Dream Like Reality, Dreaming
“One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Breaking Language, Thought Patterns
“It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Definitive Moments, Making Decisions
“The sun came suddenly from behind a rain cloud, flooding the room with glorious light that wavered on the walls like water. Camilla’s face burst into glowing bloom. A terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment—mirror, ceiling, floor—was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don’t know what. And then the cloud passed over the sun again, and the life went out of everything.”
— Richard Papen, The Secret History
Tagged: Definitive Moments, Descriptions of Perfect Love Ecstasy
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