August 2011
27 posts
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“The fugitive had no fancy convertible or stylish wet bar. He was from a...”
– -David Sedaris, Naked
Despite his claims to the contrary, Sedaris has style.
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“Like many young men in the South, he became overly subtle and had trouble ruling...”
– -Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
The fear of choosing; the fear of not choosing.
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“I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the...”
– -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The intrinsic value of the thing. Focus on that.
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“She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green only when it...”
– -Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
I’ll settle somewhere in between as our storm looms on the horizon.
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“So impenetrable are the veils which, fortunately for us all, are forever held by...”
– -Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona
Most of us are familiar with wall building…the emotional kind. Ms. Jackson makes them sound like such lovely, positive things!
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“And her joy was nearly like sorrow.”
– -John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I’ve been holding on to this one since high school, because Steinbeck knows just how difficult it is to be a lady.
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“A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic...”
– -Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
Youth!
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“You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded,...”
– -Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
It’s true, creeks are movers and shakers—always off to the next thing. You need to go to a mountain if you’re looking for a bear hug.
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“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others...”
– -Tom O’Brien, The Things They Carried
A fanciful line for a book about the Vietnam War(maybe that’s just the tone of voice I use in my head when I read it…), but a good one.
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“There are so many waysides that one mistakes them sometimes for the real route.”
– -Edna O’Brien, Night
Paths and perspective: get on it!
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“In the evening, arriving from Manhattan, it is somewhat unnerving to see a sky...”
– -Truman Capote, “Brooklyn”
Yes, Truman, that’s why I like Brooklyn so much. Also, now I want it to be autumn.
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“Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual...”
– -Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera is always good for a confident, definitive line. The bookish romantic in me believes this line to be simple, lovely, unexpected, and truthful.
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“The rain was falling steadily, and night was a black gulf. All was intensely...”
– -D. H. Lawrence, “Love Among the Haystacks”
We’ve gotten a lot of rain in the past day or so. A lot of rain.
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“Nature abhors a vacuum. Full speed ahead.”
– -Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory
I think I found my new mantra!
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“Repose, to her, resembled death.”
– -Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love
Repose, to me, resembles luxury. But I get it, Anaïs. I really do.
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“Babette and I tell each other everything… No detail must be left out, not even a...”
– -Don DeLillo, White Noise
This quote has a similar theme as yesterday’s…. the effect of storytelling. While, I identify with needing to separate oneself from the past, my mind also immediately goes to something less related to it. Geoffrey Wolff wrote or said somewhere: “I work by...
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“A short time from now, she will describe these moments of her life to a friend...”
– -Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
Many writers acknowledge the imortality that storytelling can give a person. However, here we are reminded of the waste it can cause.
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“It is awfully east to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at...”
– -Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
It’s interesting how we’re susceptible to different feelings, depending on the time of day. For me, late night can certainly be an anxious time. Late at night and the first couple of hours after I wake up.
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“In New York the air was charged and crackling and shorting out with opinions,...”
– -Joan Didion, The White Album
Oh, to be young in New York City.
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“…in nooks all over the earth sit men who are waiting, scarcely knowing in what...”
– -Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Today’s the day, people! Nietzsche just has a much more foreboding way of saying it.
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“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of...”
– -Willa Cather, My Ántonia
This quote is a favorite of mine and a long-standing goal.
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“Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary....”
– -David Benioff, City of Thieves
The alliteration here makes the line. Word choice helps.
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“Apprehension, disillusion, disorientation, selfishness, lust, irony, envy,...”
– -Edward Hoagland, “Small Silences”
