May 2013
2 posts
4 tags
“How little we make of what we know of anyone, how little we employ it.”
– -Edna O’Brien, Night
4 tags
“So Corde slept a great deal, but not well. The restless ecstasy was what he had.”
– -Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December
April 2013
4 posts
4 tags
“…she had not the faintest notion of the mysteries of harmony…”
– -Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
2 tags
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“There is no reentry from the orbit of transcendence.”
– -Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
4 tags
“That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find...”
– -Renata Adler, Speedboat
March 2013
4 posts
5 tags
“Forbidden are words about flowers. Forbidden is spring. In general, all the good...”
– -Viktor Shklovsky, ZOO, or Letters Not About Love
2 tags
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“In these prayers the child Charlotte routinely asked that “it” turn...”
– -Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
3 tags
“I drank soda water and smoked and fretted, until light began to break and the...”
– -Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
February 2013
4 posts
4 tags
“How idiotic. Childishly idiotic. A moment’s impression. An old weakness. A...”
– -Patrick Süskind, Perfume
2 tags
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“I drifted into the street lit with love and began turning imaginary handsprings.”
– -Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
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“The cat house of a zoo has an ornery smell, an air prowled by sleep, mangy with...”
– -Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
January 2013
5 posts
4 tags
“His job wasn’t temporary and things weren’t going to get any better–not that...”
– -L.J. Davis, A Meaningful Life (with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem)
(If it’s any consolation, LJ Davis’s hero does try to improve his lot in life. Now, whether it comes to anything is something you’ll have to read the book to find out.)
via Sasha and the Silverfish
(via nyrbclassics)
2 tags
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“For all this gaiety of color, the gloom was very deep.”
– -Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December
4 tags
“The great hand opened and shut.”
– -Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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“There is so little and so fucking much. Half a lifetime. Felt, seen, heard, not...”
– -Edna O’Brien, Night
December 2012
3 posts
2 tags
5 tags
“He longed to hint to her that not here lay her vocation; that a woman’s...”
– -E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
3 tags
“Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of...”
– -Don DeLillo, White Noise
November 2012
1 post
4 tags
“You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they...”
– -Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
May 2012
14 posts
2 tags
4 tags
“She could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising...”
– -Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
4 tags
“…because everyone who has no conscience purpose in life instinctively yearns for...”
– -Shchedrin, The Golovlyov Family
4 tags
“…I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed...”
– -Plato, Meno
2 tags
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“Birds hold fast to a branch even when they sleep. People should hold fast to...”
– -Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory
5 tags
“The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.”
– -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a...”
– -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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“There was no one to whom she wanted to talk but she had to have a telephone.”
– -Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
4 tags
“The nakedness of the night is appalling.”
– -Vladimir Nabokov, “Lance” via Nabokov’s Dozen
5 tags
“She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.”
– -Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Flaubert’s really good at that Monday morning humor.
2 tags
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“All the stray bits and pieces of the past, all that is feckless and gray about...”
– -Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
April 2012
10 posts
5 tags
“Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we...”
– -W. B. Yeats, “A Drinking Song”
5 tags
“…and she thought, now it will rain, and it never did, and she thought, now he...”
– -Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
2 tags
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“Seen from the viewpoint of contemplation, it does not matter what disturbs the...”
– -Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action” via The Portable Hannah Arendt
3 tags
“People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”
– -James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
3 tags
“To see a door close and know that the very last person has gone out, that is a...”
– -Edna O’Brien, Night
2 tags
5 tags
“The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt, and a cold...”
– -Patrick Süskind, Perfume
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“We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all...”
– -E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
3 tags
“I slept little and occasionally fainted. To love a woman and the hat she wears,...”
– -Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory
March 2012
19 posts
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“Even the very weather had quite fittingly put itself out: the day was neither...”
– -Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Unintentional ‘Sunday’ theme this week. I’ll take the hint and spend as much time as possible in bed this weekend, doing nothing, hoping for rain.
4 tags
“This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I’ve...”
– -Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
Lately, I’ve been missing afternoons like this. 