Yuan Ge
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yuan-ge.bsky.social
Yuan Ge
@yuan-ge.bsky.social
A commonplace book.
Pinned
Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, 'Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.'
(Percy Shelley to John Gisborne, 18 June 1822)
‘Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house — still I feel the red in my mind.’ (Emily Dickinson)
January 13, 2026 at 10:12 PM
From Maria Edgeworth, Leonora
January 13, 2026 at 1:04 PM
From Calvino, Mr Palomar
December 4, 2025 at 10:06 AM
From Lily Gurton-Wachter, Watchwords
November 13, 2025 at 2:15 PM
From Dante’s Inferno, Canto 31
November 11, 2025 at 10:40 PM
Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, 'Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.'
(Percy Shelley to John Gisborne, 18 June 1822)
November 1, 2025 at 9:41 PM
From Balzac, Eugénie Grandet
October 27, 2025 at 6:35 PM
From Balzac, Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu
October 4, 2025 at 9:25 PM
From Charles Dickens, Hard Times
September 26, 2025 at 6:14 PM
From Maria Edgeworth, Ennui
September 1, 2025 at 6:10 PM
The Collatz conjecture concerns sequences of integers in which each term is obtained from the previous term as follows: if a term is even, the next term is one half of it. If a term is odd, the next term is 3 times the previous term plus 1.
August 31, 2025 at 5:02 PM
From Godwin’s ‘Of History and Romance’
August 23, 2025 at 9:23 PM
From Mary Shelley, Valperga
August 20, 2025 at 5:03 PM
From Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition
August 18, 2025 at 11:53 AM
From Mary Shelley, Valperga
August 16, 2025 at 9:44 PM
‘The first difficulties being conquered, she passed whole days over these dusky manuscripts, reading to the old man, who found double pleasure in the antient poets, as he heard their verses pronounced by his beloved Euthanasia. The effect of this education on her mind was advantageous and memorable;
August 8, 2025 at 12:07 PM
From Tao Lin, ‘My College Diary’, in The Paris Review
August 6, 2025 at 1:20 PM
It was not to be a mere excursion of pleasure: for nothing is, in general, more delusive or insipid. Information and improvement were to constitute the principle features of our expedition; over which we had no doubt the rosy Goddess would diffuse her cheerful lustre:
August 6, 2025 at 12:07 PM
‘it is a maxim with me, that there is no human being with whom it is not worth while to spend a quarter of an hour’.
(From John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ‘The Old Sailor’)
August 6, 2025 at 11:58 AM
‘In its style as well as its genre, The Peripatetic is a collage of commonplaces that works by juxtaposition. As with the cliche gesture and stylized sentimental language of the Hay-maker episode, Thelwall's technique is to take a conventional genre, image, trope, voice, or phrase
August 4, 2025 at 1:13 PM