Laura

“I touched his hand: I could have sworn it was a dead hand. When two people have loved each other, they can't disguise a lack of tenderness in a kiss, and wouldn't I have recognized life if there was any of it left in touching his hand? ... People can love without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door, and he was alive ... and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.”

The end of Chapter 14 and “It's a funny thing about girls. Every time you mention some guy that's strictly a bastard–very mean, or very conceited and all–and when you mention it to the girl, she'll tell you he has an inferiority complex. Maybe he has, but that still doesn't keep him from being a bastard, in my opinion.” and “I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.”

‰ЫПI suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.‰Ыќ

“Sara would read anything you handed her–Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet–at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house–reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania–and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”

“Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.”

“It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.”

“‘Aren't you satisfied it is up with humanity? I am. We're down; we're beat.' I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact–a fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke. I had still held a vague hope; rather, I had kept a life-long habit of mind.”

“At night I lie in bed thinking about Tom Brown and his adventures at Rugby School and all the characters in P.G. Wodehouse. I can dream about the red-lipped landlord's daughter and the highwayman, and the nurses and nuns can do nothing about it. It's lovely to know the world can't interfere with the inside of your head.”

“When you look at pictures of Jesus He's always wandering around ancient Israel in a sheet. It never rains there and you never hear of anyone coughing or getting consumption or anything like that and no one has a job there because all they do is stand around and eat manna and shake their fists and go to crucifixions.”

“It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn't we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed?”

“Language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.”

“I used to think that every time she looked in the glass she must have hoped and pretended. I pretended too. Different things of course. You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone.”

“Words have to be chosen, and then interpreted; but thought-shapes you feel, inside you ....”

“And again there were no words. Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily. My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance – and the difference – between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the world ....”

“And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillnes, and the night were the universe.” (From “The Pit and the Pendulum”)

Started it about a year ago [2001], finally decided I had to return it to the owner, the one who wanted me to read it. I had one mindset when I read the first half, and a completely different mindset when I read the second half. That makes all the difference.

I was personally told by my Writer‰ЫЄs Craft teacher to read this novel “by tomorrow!” I refused to resist, even if the book had been read by Oprah‰ЫЄs freaking book club.

“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”

“Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world – even if what is published is not true.”

An eh-ish book. Interesting ideas, but not glorious or life-changing whatsoever. All it really did was make me want to learn to fly a plane.

“Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again.”

“She viewed everything in life with apprehension, as if every occasion and opportunity were some sort of dreadfully important exam for which she had been too lazy or stupid to prepare properly.”

An autobiography. My obsession with Meat Loaf has reached a peak. A peak.

“One morning in 1974, I answered the phone. ‘Hello?' the voice said. ‘Meatball?'“

“More people in Canada owned Bat Out of Hell than owned snowshoes.”

“If I'd had my way, the hallways of record companies would run with the blood of incompetent executives, promoters would be hanged from lamp posts, and the band would suffer the torments of hell. I AM GOD! YOU ARE FOOLS!”

“He thought of the forty years he had spent here on the homestead – the rude, pioneer days – the house he had built for himself, with its plain furniture, the old-fashioned spinning-wheel on which Anna had spun his trousers, the wooden telephone, and the rude skidway on which he ate his meals.”

“Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.”

“According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.”

1 ‰ЫТ “This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.”
2 ‰ЫТ “The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second, you're an object.‰Ыќ
3 ‰ЫТ “We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, ‘No, that‰ЫЄs not right.' Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.”

“The enormous adrenaline rush that sprang from this particular outburst surged through Irie's body, increased her heart-beat to a gallop and tickled the nerve ends of her unborn child, for Irie was eight weeks pregnant and she knew it.”

“It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting ‘Cathy' and banging your head against a tree.”

“I can't change what's happened to me in my life, or make what's not occured take place. But I can't say I like it, or accept it, or believe it's for the best. I don't and never shall, not even if I'm damned for it.”

“Hard to imagine a world and I not in it. Will everything stop when I do? Stupid old baggage, who do you think you are? Hagar. There's no one like me in this world.”

“They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”