• ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
    1·
    8 months ago

    “Man, don’t you know? The law ain’t made to help earthy cats like us. Here on our planet, back in the old days - back in the real old days - it was just every man for himself, scrooblin’ and scrat-scroblin’ for the good stuff, the greenest valleys. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like ‘The rest of you, y’all scrats get sand.’ And that’s when they made the laws, you see? Once the strong guys got it how they liked it, they said ‘This is fair now, this is the law.’ Once they were winning, they changed the rules up.” —Jake the Dog, Adventure Time, “Ocarina”

  • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, chapter 10 is pretty rough, particularly this stark line:

    “Slowly but surely, everybody in the house began to starve.”

    I read the book to my daughter a few years back and I’d forgotten quite how bleak things are before all the fun stuff that people remember.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
      0·
      8 months ago

      Roald Dahl did not fuck around. He grew up in one of those psychopathic early-20th-century British boarding schools, and then went to Africa once he graduated, and World War 2 broke out and he fought in Egypt and Greece.

      He wrote children’s literature because kids tend to vibe with how his brain works, but he was not playing games. Read his adult short stories sometime.

      Edit: From his autobiography, from early on in his time in Africa:

      Suddenly, the voice of a man yelling in Swahili exploded into the quiet of the evening … He was yelling from somewhere behind the house. “Simba, bwana! Simba! Simba!”

      Simba is Swahili for lion. All three of us leapt to our feet, and the next moment Mdisho came tearing round the corner of the house yelling at us in Swahili. “Come quick, bwana! Come quick! Come quick! A huge lion is eating the wife of the cook!”

      That sounds pretty funny when you put it on paper back here in England, but to us, standing on a veranda in the middle of East Africa, it was not funny at all.

      Robert Sanford flew into the house and came out again in five seconds flat holding a powerful rifle and ramming a cartridge into the breech. “Get those children indoors!” he shouted to his wife as he ran down off the veranda with me behind him.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
          0·
          8 months ago

          Holy hell, dude… I’m looking over the list now and just reading plot synopses is getting me unsettled.

          Honestly I think the two autobiographical books, “Boy” and “Going Solo” are probably better than the short stories unless you’re in a pretty twisted mood. If you’re in for the darker material, a random selection of short stories I liked:

          • “Mr. Feasey” is a very mild one that still has the Roald Dahl dark energy about it.
          • “Pig” is a deeply unsettling one.
          • “They Shall Not Grow Old” is haunting but quite good.
          • “Man From The South” is a fairly famous one that’s also very dark and unsettling.
          • Pantherina@feddit.de
            0·
            8 months ago

            She was a strict vegetarian and regarded the consumption of animal flesh as not only unhealthy and disgusting, but horribly cruel. She lived upon lovely clean foods like milk, butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, nuts, herbs, and fruit and she rejoiced in the conviction that no living creature would be slaughtered on her account, not even a shrimp. Once, when a brown hen of hers passed away in the prime of life from being eggbound, Aunt Glosspan was so distressed that she nearly gave up egg-eating altogether.

            Lol

            That story is really strange though

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    0·
    8 months ago

    I have no idea how you can remember so many quotes, but everything by Michael Ende is deep. I like Momo a lot, it is about time, happiness, depression, society, capitalism and a lot more.