Showing posts with label Great Expectations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Great Expectations. Show all posts

24 May 2015

Don't cut my throat, sir


Hold your noise! cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror.

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Painting: Jozef Quisthoudt, Belgian (1883-1953); St. Peter's Church in Ypres;   Naïve style


Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique; and the artist appears to have little or no formal training. Above, the middle paragraph is loaded with images but lacks a complete sentence.

19 March 2014

I knew I had a fever

Phases of the Disease: a brick in a giddy place; a steel beam in a whirling engine; my own person

That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time.

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Painting: Amedeo Modigliani, Little Girl in Blue (1918)