Our amazing scene from the Merchant of Venice:

http://edublogs.tv/play.php?vid=8486

“Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,”

“hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.”

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To read this story, itself, click here: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/066.htm

In this story Chekhov–or either a character Chekhov is having speak in this situation–is talking about the three different times he has been terrified in some shape or form.

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Nation was by far the most compelling novel I’ve read in quite a long time. Pratchett knows just how to keep his readers not only involved in the book, but also reading during meals and when headed to the restroom. Most authors’ books have a breakpoint in which their readers can get up to do these things and come back to the thrill later on, but Pratchett wouldn’t allow such nonsense. I could’ve sworn I’d lost my depth perception for a while afterwards (it was quite the read).

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The future: time’s excuse
to frighten us; too vast
a project, too large a morsel
for the heart’s mouth.

Future, who won’t wait for you?
Everyone is going there.
It suffices you to deepen
the absence that we are.

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“Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,
Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
And without any feet I can go to you;
And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
And if you set this brain of mine afire,
Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.”

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“Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize,
unbearable pain throughout this body’s fabric:
as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee:
the wood that long resisted the advancing flames
which thou kept flaring, I now am nourishinig
and burn in thee.”

“My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury
has turned into a raging hell that is not from here.
Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted
the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,
so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,
while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.”

“Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?
Memories I do not seize and bring inside.
O life! O living! O to be outside!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.”

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“Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,”

“leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs —”

“leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.”

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“Perhaps it’s no more than the fire’s reflection
on some piece of gleaming furniture
that the child remembers so much later
like a revelation.”

“And if in his later life, one day
wounds him like so many others,
it’s because he mistook some risk
or other for a promise.”

“Let’s not forget the music, either,
that soon had hauled him
toward absence complicated
by an overflowing heart….”

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