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| 0007282397
| 9780007282395
| 0007282397
| 3.85
| 25,038
| 1944
| 2001
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • She was eternally laying down the law, hectoring the servants, finding fault with ever ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • She was eternally laying down the law, hectoring the servants, finding fault with everything, getting impossible things done by sheer force of vituperation and personality. • You couldn’t be grateful to Henet—she drew attention to her own merits so persistently that it chilled any generous response you might have felt. • And suddenly Renisenb felt stifled, encircled by this persistent and clamorous femininity. Women—noisy, vociferous women! A houseful of women—never quiet, never peaceful—always talking, exclaiming, saying things—not doing them! • Though usually comfortably conscious of his own importance, his mother could always pierce the armour of his self-esteem. • And although he knew well that his own estimate of himself was the true one and his mother’s a maternal idiosyncrasy of no importance—yet her attitude never failed to puncture his happy conceit of himself. • It may be that there must always be growth—and that if one does not grow kinder and wiser and greater, then the growth must be the other way, fostering the evil things. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 30, 2018
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Jul 03, 2018
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Jun 26, 2018
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| 0061120065
| 9780061120060
| 0061120065
| 3.98
| 357,320
| 1937
| May 30, 2006
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book Beautifully Crafted Sentences • “there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book Beautifully Crafted Sentences • “there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” • Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. • It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding • Dey all useter call me Alphabet ’cause so many people had done named me different names. • She bolted upright and peered out of the window and saw Johnny Taylor lacerating her Janie with a kiss • Mind-pictures brought feelings, and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of her heart. • One day Tea Cake met Turner and his son on the street. He was a vanishing-looking kind of a man as if there used to be parts about him that stuck out individually but now he hadn’t a thing about him that wasn’t dwindled and blurred. Just like he had been sand-papered down to a long oval mass • She was a wind on the ocean. She moved men, but the helm determined the port. • Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. • “Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was ’bout y’all turning out so smart after Him makin’ yuh different; and how surprised y’all is goin’ tuh be if you ever find out you don’t know half as much ’bout us as you think you do. It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.” • The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul. No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. On Womanhood • Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. • The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grapefruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day. • There are years that ask questions and years that answer. Janie had had no chance to know things, so she had to ask. Did marriage end the cosmic loneliness of the unmated? Did marriage compel love like the sun the day? • He ain’t kissin’ yo’ mouf when he carry on over yuh lak dat. He’s kissin’ yo’ foot and ’tain’t in uh man tuh kiss foot long. Mouf kissin’ is on uh equal and dat’s natural but when dey got to bow down tuh love, dey soon straightens up. • She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman. • The store itself kept her with a sick headache. The labor of getting things down off of a shelf or out of a barrel was nothing. And so long as people wanted only a can of tomatoes or a pound of rice it was all right. But supposing they went on and said a pound and a half of bacon and a half pound of lard? The whole thing changed from a little walking and stretching to a mathematical dilemma. Or maybe cheese was thirty-seven cents a pound and somebody came and asked for a dime’s worth. She went through many silent rebellions over things like that. Such a waste of life and time. But Joe kept saying that she could do it if she wanted to and he wanted her to use her privileges. That was the rock she was battered against. • "Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me" • It was part of him, so it was all right. She rather found herself angry at imaginary people who might try to criticize. Let the old hypocrites learn to mind their own business, and leave other folks alone. Tea Cake wasn’t doing a bit more harm trying to win hisself a little money than they was always doing with their lying tongues • “You sho loves to tell me whut to do, but Ah can’t tell you nothin’ Ah see!” “Dat’s ’cause you need tellin’,” he rejoined hotly. “It would be pitiful if Ah didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves.” “Ah knows uh few things, and womenfolks thinks sometimes too!” “Aw naw they don’t. They just think they’s thinkin’. When Ah see one thing Ah understands ten. You see ten things and don’t understand one.” • Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. On Love & the Self • It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness. • Then you must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore • “Thank yuh, ma’am, but don’t say you’se ole. You’se uh lil girl baby all de time. God made it so you spent yo’ ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo’ young girl days to spend wid me.” • He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place. • “Ah ain’t grievin’ so why do Ah hafta mourn? Tea Cake love me in blue, so Ah wears it. Jody ain’t never in his life picked out no color for me. De world picked out black and white for mournin’, Joe didn’t. So Ah wasn’t wearin’ it for him. Ah was wearin’ it for de rest of y’all.” • It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful • She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her. • Most of the day she was at the store, but at night she was there in the big house and sometimes it creaked and cried all night under the weight of lonesomeness. Then she’d lie awake in bed asking lonesomeness some questions. The Downtrodden • Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. • People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor • Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t • They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks • Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour. Work all day for money, fight all night for love • It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. • The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down. On Nature • Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. • Havoc was there with her mouth wide open. Back in the Everglades the wind had romped among lakes and trees. In the city it had raged among houses and men • The sun from ambush was threatening the world with red daggers, but the shadows were gray and solid-looking around the barn. • Anybody that didn’t know would have thought that things had blown over, it looked so quiet and peaceful around. But the stillness was the sleep of swords which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference. • So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day. • They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged. • Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon—for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you—and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. Most humans didn’t love one another nohow, and this mislove was so strong that even common blood couldn’t overcome it all the time. Aphorisms • You know if you pass some people and don’t speak tuh suit ’em dey got tuh go way back in yo’ life and see whut you ever done. They know mo’ ’bout yuh than you do yo’ self. An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. • It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different. • “Whut Ah don’t lak ’bout de man is, he talks tuh unlettered folks wid books in his jaws,” Hicks complained. • She got so she received all things with the stolidness of the earth ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 25, 2018
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Jul 06, 2018
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Jun 25, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0375714839
| 9780375714832
| 0375714839
| 4.40
| 188,523
| 2007
| Oct 30, 2007
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 13, 2018
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Apr 26, 2018
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Apr 07, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0374104093
| 9780374104092
| 0374104093
| 3.77
| 246,613
| Feb 04, 2014
| Feb 04, 2014
|
liked it
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★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation i ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you • Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. • As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. • It was entirely in keeping with his personality to become set on something and follow it, regardless of the consequences. To let an impulse become a compulsion, especially if he thought he was contributing to a cause greater than himself. • I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband. • As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again. • That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. • Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. • Cheap motels for vacations by the beach where Mom would cry at the end because we had to go back to the normal strapped-for-cash life, even though we’d never really left it. That sense of impending doom occupying the car. • Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border. • I felt as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision to live in one of them. Now it was just me. • All that time, I discovered later from thrash marks in the grass, I wasn’t frozen at all: I was spasming and twitching in the dirt like a worm, some distant part of me still experiencing the agony, trying to die because of it, even though the brightness wouldn’t let that happen. • The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction … none of these things appealed to me. • The individual details chronicled by the journals might tell stories of heroism or cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions, but ultimately they spoke to a kind of inevitability. • the blue-green light was like nothing I had experienced before. It surged out, blinding and bleeding and thick and layered and absorbing. • A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me. • What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 28, 2018
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Apr 30, 2018
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Mar 17, 2018
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| 4.25
| 131,077
| 1974
| Oct 20, 1994
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A monumental book! A selection of my favourite passages from the book • There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut ★★★★★ (5/5) A monumental book! A selection of my favourite passages from the book • There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. • If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them • To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest. • the water valve did not cut off when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off—a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith in human nature, or of great quantities of hot water • they often used the word “higher” as a synonym for “better” in their writings, where an Anarresti would use “more central.” But what did being higher have to do with being foreign? It was one puzzle among hundreds • Speech is sharing—a cooperative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoizing • If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together • Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the cell, they must try to open the unopenable door • “But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed,” said Bedap • I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? • I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn • You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been • He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back • But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality • I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain • It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on. • The wall. Shevek knew the wall, by now, when he came up against it. The wall was this young man’s charm, courtesy, indifference • He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker • To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return. • Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along • The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile. • They brought fossil oils and petroleum products, certain delicate machine parts and electronic components that Anarresti manufacturing was not geared to supply, and often a new strain of fruit tree or grain for testing. They took back to Urras a full load of mercury, copper, aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold. It was, for them, a very good bargain • In fact, the Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras. • Seven generations of peace had not brought trust • However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture • Though she suggested that the natural limit to the size of a community lay in its dependence on its own immediate region for essential food and power, she intended that all communities be connected by communication and transportation networks, so that goods and ideas would get where they were wanted, and the administration of things might work with speed and ease, and no community should be cut off from change and interchange • from the start the Settlers were aware that that unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance. • Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink • But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function • Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction? • “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” • He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand • “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” • In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him • No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see • To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. The Social Organism • As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order • art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech • We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras • You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! • But we’ve betrayed that hope. We’ve let cooperation become obedience • If your ideas won’t stand public examination, I don’t want them as midnight whispers • There was no strong sexual desire on either side to make the connection last. They had simply reasserted trust • But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic, destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated its expression • That the walls of his hard puritanical conscience were widening out immensely was anything but a comfort. He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to, no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold, getting farther lost. • They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric • And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act • The air above the mountains was like amethyst, hard, clear, profound. • She saw time naïvely as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to. • Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called “love of nature,” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love • It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her • Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate balance of life • Although her existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could be a distraction • The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model • The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death • “That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.” “No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her • The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhilarated him. He reveled in its excess. It was too white, too cold, silent, and indifferent to be called excremental by the sincerest Odonian; to see it as other than an innocent magnificence would be pettiness of soul • She rattled on. He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow • Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it read like Efor talking: “By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard. . . .” It was the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged, unstable present tense. • Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with his personal liking for Shevek only by refusing to admit that Shevek was an anarchist • The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists whose social order functioned without apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality or be wiped out • But Chifoilisk’s warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must learn distrust. He must be silent; he must keep his property to himself; he must keep his bargaining power. • He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods just before his monuments of highest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at his own naïveté • They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever • Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility • chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end • If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly • He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever • Letters went unsealed, not by law, of course, but by convention • On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society. Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State. • Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument. Yet its potentiality had been real, and though deformed had not been lost • Justice is not achieved by force!” • “And power isn’t achieved by passivity.” • You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. • You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution • I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers • the third time they were both half asleep, and circled about the center of infinite pleasure, about each other’s being, like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly. • That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice • Those who build walls are their own prisoners • That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary • With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life • If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy • There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them • Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. ‘The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2018
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Feb 28, 2018
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Feb 01, 2018
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0385689462
| 9780385689465
| 0385689462
| 3.75
| 110,809
| Apr 18, 2014
| Aug 16, 2017
|
it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book Drive My Car ★★★★☆ (4/5) • It wasn’t that they were especially laid back. In reality, the ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book Drive My Car ★★★★☆ (4/5) • It wasn’t that they were especially laid back. In reality, they were probably tense too. Nevertheless, they seemed to be able to separate their tension and who they were in a natural—likely unconscious—way. They could converse and act normally even while focused on the road. As in, that belongs there and this belongs here • Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong. • But the place you return to is always slightly different from the place you left • If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves • at a certain point a lot of things didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Like the demon had left me all of a sudden Yesterday ★★★☆☆ (3/5) • As time passes, memory, inevitably, reconstitutes itself • Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. An Independent Organ ★★★★★ (5/5) • If, for some reason, the ominous dark clouds of impending friction appeared on the horizon, he knew how to skillfully back out of the relationship, careful not to aggravate things, and also careful not to hurt the woman. He did this swiftly and naturally, like a shadow drawn up into the gathering twilight • His friends all insisted that, when all was said and done, having children was a wonderful thing, but he never could buy this sales pitch. They probably just wanted Tokai to shoulder the same burden they dragged around. They selfishly were convinced that everyone else in the world should be obliged to suffer the way they did. • He wasn’t a poor loser, had no inferiority complex or jealousy, no excessive biases or pride, no particular obsessions, wasn’t overly sensitive, had no steadfast political views • ‘Some people are polite, and some are quick. Each one’s a good quality to have, but most of the time quickness trumps politeness.’ • If you took away my career as a plastic surgeon, and the happy environment I’m living in, and threw me out into the world, with no explanation, and with everything stripped away—what in the world would I be? • You can’t control your feelings, and it’s like some outrageous power is manipulating you • As long as it all makes sense, no matter how deep you fall, you should be able to pull yourself together again Scheherazade ★★★★★ (5/5) [image] • Ten years earlier, she might well have been a lively and attractive young woman, perhaps even turned a few heads. At some point, however, the curtain had fallen on that part of her life and it seemed unlikely to rise again • I’m not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. If he could fully grasp that concept, he could deal with whatever lay ahead. He had always been comfortable being by himself. His nerves could cope with the solitude • The other thing that puzzled him was the fact that their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard, if not impossible, to tell where one ended and the other began • She worried that the odor might fade as the days went by, but that didn’t happen. Like an undying memory of singular importance, the smell of his sweat had permeated his shirt for good. • Perhaps he would never see her again. That worried him. The possibility was just too real. Nothing of a personal nature—no vow, no implicit understanding—held them together. Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim Kino ★★★★☆ (4/5) [image] • Among human emotions, nothing was worse than jealousy and pride, and Kino had had a number of awful experiences because of one or the other. It struck him at times that there was something about him that stirred up the dark side in other people • Still, Kino could detect a glint of desire in her eyes, like a faint light deep down a mineshaft • You’re saying that some serious trouble has occurred, not because I did something wrong but because I didn’t do the right thing? • He couldn’t think of anywhere he wanted to go. The world was a vast ocean with no landmarks, Kino a little boat that had lost its chart and its anchor Samsa in Love ★★★☆☆ (3/5) [image] • The pungent fragrance recalled something to him. It did not come directly, however; it arrived in stages. It was a strange feeling, as if he were recollecting the present from the future • If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again Men Without Women ★★★★☆ (4/5) • Then, without a word, as if he were gently placing a fragile piece of artwork on the floor, the man hung up. I stood there, in a white T-shirt and blue boxers, pointlessly clutching the phone. • Conversely, ever since then, M has been everywhere. I see her everywhere I go. She is part of many places, many times, many people • She was always traveling in her own private time zone • You are a pastel-colored Persian carpet, and loneliness is a Bordeaux wine stain that won’t come out. Loneliness is brought over from France, the pain of the wound from the Middle East ...more |
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Jan 17, 2018
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Jan 21, 2018
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Jan 17, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0062391992
| 9780062391995
| 0062391992
| 3.70
| 91,524
| Jul 01, 2009
| Jan 26, 2016
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liked it
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★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Schaefer. I longed to say it out loud. The shape of the word was so pleasant in my hea ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Schaefer. I longed to say it out loud. The shape of the word was so pleasant in my head, I couldn’t wait to breathe it into the air • The true gift she gave me was time, but that she thought of a dozen other niceties made me feel incredibly fond of her • Couples were like sirens, making their own languages and signs, their own worlds • Everything goes. It’s like you get three lives. One with no idea how to live it, one with more power than anyone could imagine, and one with a true sense of self and the ability to pursue anything you want • When there’s no need to sleep, no need to eat, when there’s nothing but empty years lying in wait, the soul becomes restless. • I’d dreamed of Akinli, and it had made me happier. This was how I could keep him, and I would revisit all my thoughts of him, both real and imagined, as long as I was allowed. ...more |
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Jan 12, 2018
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Jan 18, 2018
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Jan 12, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0735213186
| 9780735213180
| 0735213186
| 3.71
| 210,183
| 2018
| Jan 09, 2018
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Character is fate – that’s what he said • Not now, Simon thinks. Not yet. If he speak ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Character is fate – that’s what he said • Not now, Simon thinks. Not yet. If he speaks to them, their voices will reach into the warm, blissful ocean in which he’s been floating and yank him – gasping, dripping wet – onto dry land • In truth, it is not only Simon’s gayness that makes him feel this way. It’s the prophecy, too, something he would very much like to forget but has instead dragged behind him all these years. He hates the woman for giving it to him, and he hates himself for believing her. If the prophecy is a ball, his belief is its chain; it is the voice in his head that says Hurry, says Faster, says Run. • There’s no trick – just a curious combination of strength and strange, inhuman lightness. Simon can’t tell whether it reminds him of a levitation or a hanging • Gertie had her arms around Varya, and she was shuddering. Klara receded, ashamed. The privilege of their mother’s touch, her confidence, was something Varya had earned. • She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory – to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child • the family that created her and the family she created, pulling her in opposite directions • She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations • She was afraid of aberration, which could not be controlled; she preferred the safe consistency of symmetry • She chose pieces that both enhance and obstruct visibility: her couch is leather, for example, dark enough that she can’t see every speck of fuzz or dirt, but smooth enough that – unlike a nubbly, patterned fabric – she can easily skim it for anything egregious before sitting down ...more |
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2
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Feb 27, 2018
not set
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Mar 28, 2018
not set
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Jan 08, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0618004149
| 9780618004140
| 0618004149
| 4.03
| 1,763
| unknown
| Sep 01, 1999
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book Emperor of the Air • Age, it seems, has left my wife alone • The elm was dying. Vera wa ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book Emperor of the Air • Age, it seems, has left my wife alone • The elm was dying. Vera was gone, and I lay in bed thinking of the insects, of their miniature jaws carrying away heartwood • I didn’t think I was a sentimental man, and I don’t weep at plays or movies, but certain moments have always been peculiarly moving for me, and the mention of a century was one The Year of Getting to Know Us • I hadn’t wanted to see the counselor. Anne and I have been married seven years, and sometimes I think the history of marriage can be written like this: People Want Too Much • “You don’t have to get to know me,” he said, “because one day you’re going to grow up and then you’re going to be me.” Lies • When the deodorant commercials come on the set he turns the TV off. That’s the way he is. There’s no second chance with him • The ones who carry knives are the ones who hang out in front. They wouldn’t cut anybody but they might take the sidewall off your tire. They’re the ones who stopped at tenth grade, when the law says the state doesn’t care anymore. They hang out in front, drinking usually, only they almost never actually come in to see the movie Where We Are Now • Too much money makes you lose sight of things • I’d been reading books. Not baseball books. Biographies: Martin Luther King, Gandhi. To play baseball right you have to forget that you’re a person; you’re muscles, bone, the need for sleep and food. So when you stop, you’re saved by someone else’s ideas. This isn’t true just for baseball players. It’s true for anyone who’s failed at what he loves • You can sleep next to a woman, you can know the way she smiles when she’s turned on, you can see in her hands when she wants to talk about something. Then you wake up one day and some signal’s been exchanged—and you don’t know what it is, but you think for the first time, Maybe I don’t know her. Just something. You never know what the signal is. We Are Nighttime Travelers • What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth. What holds you to what you see of me is that grasp alone • when I recall my life my mood turns sour and I am reminded that no man makes truly proper use of his time • Time has made torments of our small differences and tolerance of our passions • And as for conversation—that feast of reason, that flow of the soul—our house is silent as the bone yard. • Francine is at the table, four feet across from my seat, the width of two dropleaves. Our medicine is in cups. There have been three Presidents since I held her in my arms • For me this is futile, but I stand anyway. The page will be blank when I finish. This I know. The dreams I compose are the dreams of others, remembered bits of verse. Songs of greater men than I • A bicycle tire: rimless, thready, worn treadless already and now losing its fatness. A war of attrition • but when I gather my memories they seem to fill no more than an hour. Where has my life gone? • But of all things to do last, poetry is a barren choice. Deciphering other men’s riddles while the world is full of procreation and war. A man should go out swinging an axe. Instead, I shall go out in a coffee shop. • But how can any man leave this world with honor? Despite anything he does, it grows corrupt around him. It fills with locks and sirens • Have I loved my wife? At one time, yes—in rages and torrents. I’ve been covered by the pimples of ecstasy and have rooted in the mud of despair; and I’ve lived for months, for whole years now, as mindless of Francine as a tree of its mosses. • I have never written a word of my own poetry but can recite the verse of others. This is the culmination of a life. Coryphaena hippurus, says the plaque on the dolphin’s tank, words more beautiful than any of my own • I have mean secrets and small dreams, no plans greater than where to buy groceries and what rhymes to read next, and by the time we reach our porch again my foolishness has subsided. My knees and elbows ache. They ache with a mortal ache, tired flesh, the cartilage gone sandy with time Pitch Memory • That day became the meridian of my mother’s life. For a year she wept at red lights and at drawers that didn’t close. She began coaching my sister and me about the viciousness of the world, and she began feeding us a whole new kind of diet American Beauty • she doesn’t know what to do with what she knows • It seemed to me that all of them, she and my mother and Lawrence, had suffered a wound that had somehow skipped over me The Carnival Dog, The Buyer of Diamonds • He let the knowledge collect around him, in notebooks, binders, pads, on napkins and checks, everywhere except in his brain. His room was strewn with notes he never studied. Once in a letter home he said learning medicine was like trying to drink water from a fire hose. • That was why Myron wanted to quit medical school. He hated the demise of the spirit ...more |
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1
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Jan 04, 2018
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Jan 23, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0770437850
| 9780770437855
| 0770437850
| 3.21
| 166,595
| 2009
| Feb 12, 2013
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated. • Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence—especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone. • This was happening to me more often lately: suddenly, pieces of the puzzle were gone—bites out of time, empty moments during which my thoughts must have been elsewhere. • I remember how tiring it could be always to be standing next to someone who towered head and shoulders above you, as though you were literally standing in his shadow, and as though that shadow kept you from getting enough sunlight. • No, it was a very subtle something in her eyes, a shift invisible to the uninitiated, something between mockery and sudden earnest. “Don’t,” the look said. • A waitress topped up Serge’s glass, then mine; Babette’s and Claire’s were still half full. • The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiseled into the war memorials.” • But, except for the mass destruction of human lives, the First World War was mostly boring. It had no zing, after a manner of speaking. • Of course it’s terrible—we’ve all been taught to say that we think it’s terrible. But a world without disasters and violence—be it the violence of nature or that of muscle and blood—would be the truly unbearable thing. • Personality change, that was my biggest fear, that my personality would be affected, that I would become, though more bearable to those around me, lost to myself. • They said it slightly sotto voce, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it: when people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity. • “Is it life threatening?” they asked. They said it slightly sotto voce, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it: when people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity. • It’s my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it’s usually not something you want to give. • It was hereditary. Yes, that was the only word for it. If heredity existed, if anything was hereditary, then it had to be our shared aversion to sweet desserts. • The dilemma I was faced with was one every parent faces sooner or later: you want to defend your child, of course; you stand up for your child, but you mustn’t do it all too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently—you mustn’t drive anyone into a corner. • When faced with lower intelligences, the most effective strategy in my opinion is to tell a barefaced lie: with a lie, you give the pinheads a chance to retreat without losing face. • It’s instinct: That which falls is weak. That which lies on the ground is prey. • A process of habituation seemed to be taking place here as well; if you stayed in one place long enough, you became a face like all the rest. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 02, 2018
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Jun 08, 2018
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Jan 02, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0380973871
| 9780380973873
| 0380973871
| 4.12
| 19,266
| 1955
| Sep 07, 1999
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) Oh what am I doing, you ask? Just reading horror stories then being too scared to get out of bed at night, complaining about having nightma ★★★★★ (5/5) Oh what am I doing, you ask? Just reading horror stories then being too scared to get out of bed at night, complaining about having nightmares the following morning and imagining sounds of doors being rapped on, keys screeching in a lock, sensing the smell of metal & death. A selection of my favourite passages from the book THE OCTOBER COUNTRY . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coalbins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain… The Dwarf • Two customers had passed through an hour before. Those two lonely people were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously as it plummeted down the blazing night, around one emptiness after another. The Next in Line • She did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had identified herself with that tiny fragment parceled like an unripe variety of fruit. Now, in this moment, she was being carried up the hill within compressing darkness, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified, the touch of the father against the coffin material outside; gentle and noiseless and firm inside. • In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize. • They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared. And been frozen that way. • The fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, wall to wall, again, again, like a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream across the corridor to be caught in claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight recoiling, rebounding, reshuttling on down the inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with one last scream from all present! • How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. • Her mouth opened and closed. The shop had a veil over it, in her eyes. Here she was and here were these small baked adobe people to whom she could say nothing and from whom she could get no words she understood, and she was in a town of people who said no words to her and she said no words to them except in blushing confusion and bewilderment. And the town was circled by desert and time, and home was far away, far away in another life. She whirled and fled. • But there was no word and the veins did not rest easy in the wrists and the heart was a bellows forever blowing upon a little coal of fear, forever illumining and making it into a cherry light, again, pulse, and again, an ingrown light which her inner eyes stared upon with unwanting fascination. • "If I had a religion," she said, ignoring him, "I'd have a lever with which to lift myself. But I haven't a lever now and I don't know how to lift myself." The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse • Here lay a typical Garvey silence. Here sat the largest manufacturer and deliverer of silences in the world; name one, he could provide it packaged and tied with throat-clearings and whispers. Embarrassed, pained, calm, serene, indifferent, blessed, golden, or nervous silences; Garvey was in there. • They didn't want opinions on alchemy and symbolism given in a piccolo voice, Garvey's subconscious warned him. They only wanted Garvey's good old-fashioned plain white bread and churned country butter, to be chewed on later at a dim bar, exclaiming how priceless! Skeleton • She had a way of dancing into any room, her body doing all sorts of soft, agreeable things to keep her feet from ever quite touching the nap of a rug. • Mr. Harris stood. His SKELETON held him up! This thing inside, this invader, this horror, was supporting his arms, legs, and head! It was like feeling someone just behind you who shouldn't be there. With every step, he realized how dependent he was on this other Thing. • Well, consider the skeleton; slender, svelte, economical of line and contour. Exquisitely carved oriental ivory! Perfect, thin as a white praying mantis! The Jar • It was getting late. The merry-go-round drowsed down to a lazy mechanical tinkle. • It seemed to Charlie that Tom Carmody was forever installed under porches in shadow, or under trees in shadow, or if in a room, then in the farthest niche shining his eyes out at you from the dark. You never knew what his face was doing, and his eyes were always funning you. And every time they looked at you they laughed a different way. • After a period of proper silence, someone, maybe old Gramps Medknowe from Crick Road, would clear the phlegm from a deep cave somewhere inside himself, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips, maybe, and there'd be a curious tremble in his calloused fingers. This would cue everyone to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. People settled like sows in the warm mud after a rain. • Juke nodded his head now, eyes bright, young, seeing into the past, making it new, shaping it with words, smoothing it with his tongue. • For too many years her hips had been the pendulum by which he reckoned the time of his living. But other men, Tom Carmody, for one, were reckoning time from the same source. The Lake • A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind • Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before. Touched with Fire • With luck, a potential victim might not happen to cross the tracks of a potential murderer for fifty years. Then--one afternoon--fate! These people, these death-prones, touch all the wrong nerves in passing strangers; they brush the murder in all our breasts. The Small Assassin • Then, far away, wailing like some small meteor dying in the vast inky gulf of space, the baby began to cry in his nursery. • "What is more at peace, more dreamfully content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered, than an unborn child? Nothing. It floats in a sleepy, timeless wonder of nourishment and silence. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, rushed out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish world where it is asked to shift for itself, to hunt, to feed from the hunting, to seek after a vanishing love that once was its unquestionable right, to meet confusion instead of inner silence and conservative slumber! And the child resents it! Resents the cold air, the huge spaces, the sudden departure from familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing the child knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered. Jack-in-the-Box • He looked through the cold morning windows with the Jack-in-the-Box in his hands, prying the rusted lid. But no matter how he struggled, the Jack would not jump to the light with a cry, or slap its velvet mittens on the air, or bob in a dozen directions with a wild and painted smile. Crushed under the lid, in its jail, it stayed crammed tight coil on coil. With your ear to the box, you felt pressure beneath, the fear and panic of the trapped toy. • In the hail, on her way downstairs, Mother dropped a champagne bottle. Edwin heard and was cold, for the thought that jumped through his head was, that's how Mother'd sound. If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. The Man Upstairs • Douglas felt a pure white flame of hatred burn inside himself with a steady, unflickering beauty. Now that room was Koberman Land. Once it had been flowery bright when Miss Sadlowe lived there. Now it was stark, bare, cold, clean, everything in its place, alien and brittle. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone • "But John Oatis said quite seriously: 'I'm going to kill you, Mr. Stone.'" "What did you do?" "Do? I sat there, stunned, riven; I heard a terrible slam! the coffin lid in my face! I heard coal down a black chute; dirt on my buried door. They say all your past hurtles by at such times. Nonsense. The future does." • "Writing was always so much mustard and gallweed to me; fidgeting words on paper, experiencing vast depressions of heart and soul. Watching the greedy critics graph me up, chart me down, slice me like sausage, eat me at midnight breakfasts. Work of the worst sort. I was ready to fling the pack. My trigger was set. Boom! There was John Oatis! Look here." • I had been writing about living. Now I wanted to live. Do things instead of tell about things. I ran for the board of education. I won. I ran for alderman. I won. I ran for Mayor. I won! Sheriff! Town librarian! Sewage disposal official. I shook a lot of hands, saw a lot of life, did a lot of things. We've lived every way there is to live, with our eyes and noses and mouths, with our ears and hands. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 17, 2018
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Jun 23, 2018
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Dec 29, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B004J4X30W
| 3.99
| 128,891
| Jan 01, 1973
| Apr 01, 2010
|
really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) Liked A Wrinkle in Time so much that I decided on reading the second installment in this quartet. This one doesn't disappoint the slightest ★★★★☆ (4/5) Liked A Wrinkle in Time so much that I decided on reading the second installment in this quartet. This one doesn't disappoint the slightest. A selection of my favourite passages from the book • Why do people always mistrust people who are different? Am I really that different? • The stranger was dark, dark as night and tall as a tree, and there was something in the repose of his body, the quiet of his voice, which drove away fear. • A cherubim is not a higher order than earthlings, you know, just different. • Unreason has crept up on us so insidiously that we’ve hardly been aware of it. But think of the things going on in our own country which you wouldn’t have believed possible only a few years ago. • It’s the same sound, isn’t it? The strange ‘cry’ of the ailing mitochondria, and the ‘cry’ picked up in those distant galaxies by the new paraboloidoscope—there’s a horrid similarity between them • a world which has become so blunted by dishonor and violence that people casually take it for granted • Namer has to know who people are, and who they are meant to be • If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate • Meg, when people don’t know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named • It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends • Pride has always been the downfall of the Deepening Ones • Distance doesn’t seem to be any more important than size. Or time. As for caring—well, that’s outside the realm of provable fact. • When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center • It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe • You are created matter, Sporos. You are part of the great plan, an indispensable part. You are needed, Sporos; you have your own unique share in the freedom of creation ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 09, 2018
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Jan 15, 2018
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Dec 29, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B004MYFQAY
| 3.54
| 2,948
| 1969
| unknown
|
liked it
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★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • ‘We are all arbitrary children of calamity,’ he said in his academic voice. ‘We have t ★★★☆☆ (3/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • ‘We are all arbitrary children of calamity,’ he said in his academic voice. ‘We have to take the leavings.’ • chaos is the opposite pole of boredom, • When they finally destroy us, if they finally destroy us, they’ll destroy their own means of living so I do not think they will destroy us. I think an equilibrium will be maintained. But the Soldiers would like to destroy them, for Soldiers need to be victorious, and if the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?’ • there was nothing but custom to keep her in the village and nothing she wanted to take away with her; not a single one of all those things she had once possessively marked with her name now seemed to belong to her. She had wanted to rescue him but found she was accepting his offer to rescue her. • She loved nobody in this place but beyond it lay the end of all known things and certain desolation. • after the sun penetrated the branches, the trees acquired flesh from the darkness and, as the sky grew light, she saw nothing that was not green or else covered with flowers. Plants she could not name thrust luscious spires towards her hands; great chestnuts fantastically turreted with greenish bloom arched above her head; the curded white blossom of hawthorn closed every surrounding perspective and a running tangle of little roses went in and out, this way and that way, through the leafy undergrowth. • Tangled in briars, she called out to the young man but he did not hear her for the forest seemed to merge into an element heavier than air, which drowned her voice. • Her head ached with the viridian dazzle of the sunlit forest. • the Barbarians did not segment their existence into hours nor even morning, afternoon and evening but left it raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion. • perhaps chaos is even more boring than order. • In daylight or firelight, she saw him in two dimensions, flat and effectless. • Creation from the void is more difficult than it would seem. • ‘The more choices one has, the larger the world grows.’ • They all sat so perfectly without movement it was as if the night supported itself upon the pillars of their stillness and nobody dared move. • When she glanced at him, he looked as insubstantial as if cut from paper. • ‘If the lion could speak, we would not understand it,’ said Donally. • I could make you so terrifying the bends of the road would straighten out with fright as you rode down. I’ll make you a politician and you could become the King of all the Yahoos and all the Professors, too; they need a myth as passionately as anyone else, they need a hero. • Since he reconstructed the world solely in terms of imagery, she found it hard to understand him. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 30, 2018
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May 03, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0373510101
| 9780373510108
| 0373510101
| 3.78
| 4,089
| Oct 1982
| May 01, 1992
|
did not like it
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★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) I’ve always steered clear of mushy, tawdry romantic novels with no take away, (especially the ones with scantily clad heroines on the cover ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) I’ve always steered clear of mushy, tawdry romantic novels with no take away, (especially the ones with scantily clad heroines on the cover embracing a shirtless and toned hunk - most cringe worthy). But 2018 is all about pushing my self-imposed reading boundaries so I begin this year by reading “Island of Flowers” by Nora Roberts who is famous for writing romance novels. Let’s see if this novel succeeds in removing my bias. Update One word: Schmaltzy I stand corrected. This was NOT a good read. I couldn't even envisage Hawaii in my mind's eye. The motivations of characters were all askew especially of the heroine Laine Simmons. Would not recommend, nor embark on another journey with Nora Roberts. A selection of my favorite passages from the book • The ripe land with cliffs and beaches which she had seen as the plane descended brought no sense of homecoming • Threading through her doubts was the shimmering strand of fear that rejection waited for her at the end of her journey • With no knowledge of seduction, she became a temptress by her very innocence • Parts of Paris are beautiful, mellowed and gentled with age. Other parts are elegant or dignified. She is like a woman who has been often told she is enchanting. But the beauty here is more primitive. The island is ageless and innocent at the same time • Laine thought the slamming of her door the loneliest sound she had ever heard. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0525425764
| 9780525425762
| 0525425764
| 4.00
| 15,156
| Jan 01, 2012
| May 15, 2012
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did not like it
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★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) This is my first read by Grisham. It feels a tad bit juvenile. I’m not as enthralled as I expected to be, seeing that John Grisham is one o ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) This is my first read by Grisham. It feels a tad bit juvenile. I’m not as enthralled as I expected to be, seeing that John Grisham is one of the most decorated thriller writers. Perhaps the Boone series is aimed towards middle school students. I wonder if the series follows Theodore Boone into adulthood, as a professional lawyer. I didn’t anticipate the conclusion as much as I did with The Cuckoo's Calling or any book by Agatha Christie which is primarily where this book falters. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 20, 2018
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Jan 24, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0802122620
| 9780802122629
| 0802122620
| 3.56
| 2,935
| 1964
| Jun 17, 2014
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it was ok
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★★☆☆☆ (2/5) I had high hopes for reading my first Patricia Highsmith, but this story seems tedious and boring. I can’t seem to root for any characte ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) I had high hopes for reading my first Patricia Highsmith, but this story seems tedious and boring. I can’t seem to root for any character, and am least interested in their fates. Halfway through, the pacing and storyline changed, or rather, drifted away from the grasp of author. How will she ever make all the stray ends meet? The cat and mouse chase has exhausted itself within the first few pages of the second half. Ah! But a convenient ending. In retrospect, the story owes most of its mystery to the labyrinthine Greece, the snaking waterways, the ancient ruins. The characters are easily disposed off when desirable - characteristic of a weak thriller. A selection of my favourite passages from the book • There was an air of melancholy about him, melancholy turned outward rather than inward, as if he brooded not on his own problems but the world’s. • But don’t be bitter, if you can help it. You once told me you understood the uselessness of hatred and resentment. I hope it’s true now more than ever, • So much had happened in the ten years since. Now he was supposed to be a mature man. He remembered Proust’s remark, that people do not grow emotionally. It was a rather frightening thought. • Of all man’s capacities, Rydal was thinking as he rode on the airlines bus towards the airport, memory was the most eerie, pleasant, painful, no doubt at times the most deceptive. • She’d finally refused. Thus did dreary life repeat what had already taken place in his imagination, and not surprise him at all. • It was a dull town, Chania, but Rydal rather liked dull towns, because they forced one to look at things—for want of anything else to do—that one might not otherwise notice. • A psychological purge by some sort of re-enactment that I don’t even understand yet is going on in me—and I am sure it is all for the good. • It was anger, contempt, and the kind of hostility that looked as if it could burst forth in some unpremeditated action. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 08, 2018
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Jun 12, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0812995341
| 9780812995343
| 0812995341
| 3.75
| 160,591
| Jan 01, 2017
| Feb 14, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow,” Saunders writes of Lincoln, “toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored u
“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow,” Saunders writes of Lincoln, “toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.” ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favourite passages from the book • The terror and consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever loved a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will. • He was softly sobbing, his sadness aggravated by his mounting frustration at being lost. • He was his father over again both in magnetic personality and in all his gifts and tastes. • He was the child in whom Lincoln had invested his fondest hopes; a small mirror of himself, as it were, to whom he could speak frankly, openly, and confidingly. • From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable. • I shall never forget those solemn moments—genius and greatness weeping over love’s lost idol. • and the terrible storm without seemed almost in unison with the storm of grief within. • He did not seem to see me, but only endeavored to possess me; • What seems like abundance is in fact scarcity. • Strange that the gentleman had come here in the first place; stranger still that he lingered. • When one owns four homes and has fifteen full-time gardeners perfecting one’s seven gardens and eight man-made streams, one will, of necessity, spend a great deal of time racing between homes and from garden to garden, and so it is perhaps not surprising if, one afternoon, rushing to check on the progress of a dinner one’s cook is preparing for the board of one’s favorite charity, one finds oneself compelled to take a little rest, briefly dropping to one knee, then both knees, then pitching forward on to one’s face and, unable to rise, proceeding here for a more prolonged rest, only to find it not restful at all, since, while ostensibly resting, one finds oneself continually fretting about one’s carriages, gardens, furniture, homes, et al., all of which (one hopes) patiently await one’s return, not having (Heaven forfend) fallen into the hands of some (reckless, careless, undeserving) Other. • driven mad by the certainty that some sort of satisfaction must be near at hand. • He must either be in a happy place, or some null place by now. • Because I loved him so and am in the habit of loving him and that love must take the form of fussing and worry and doing. Only there is nothing left to do. • His headstrong nature, a virtue in that previous place, imperils him here, where the natural law, harsh and arbitrary, brooks no rebellion, and must be scrupulously obeyed. • Some blows fall too heavy upon those too fragile. • I was dead. I felt the urge to go. I went. • have been here since and have, as instructed, refrained from speaking of any of this, to anyone. What would be the point? For any of us here, it is too late for any alteration of course. All is done. We are shades, immaterial, and since that judgment pertains to what we did (or did not do) in that previous (material) realm, correction is now forever beyond our means. • The saddest eyes of any human being that I have ever seen. In “Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness,” by Joshua Wolf Shenk, account of John Widmer. • He never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty. • But even when you are a solitary older lady it is no treat to be dumb. Always at a party or so on you are left to sit by the fire, smiling as if happy, knowing none desire to speak with you. - Miss Tamara Doolittle • Strange, though: it is the memory of those moments that bothers me most. The thought, specifically, that other men enjoyed whole lifetimes comprised of such moments. • He was attempting to formulate a goodbye, in some sort of positive spirit, not wishing to enact that final departure in gloom, in case it might be felt, somehow, by the lad (even as he told himself that the lad was now past all feeling); but all within him was sadness, guilt, and regret, and he could find little else. • How hard, in order to save the country, to sustain a man who is incompetent. • Well, what of it. No one who has ever done anything worth doing has gone uncriticized. • Those of us who knew the Lincoln children personally, and saw them running around the White House like a pair of wild savages, will attest to the fact that this was a household in a state of perpetual bedlam, where indiscriminate permission was confused with filial love. • If the party did not hasten the boy’s end it must certainly have exacerbated his suffering. • He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. Only I did not think it would be so soon. Or that he would precede us. Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for a solidity, and now must pay. I am. • We were as we were! the bass lisper barked. How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment. By Fate, by Destiny, said the Vermonter. By the fact that time runs in only one direction, and we are borne along by it, influenced precisely as we are, to do just the things that we do, the bass lisper said. And then are cruelly punished for it, said the woman. • To be grouped with these, accepting one’s sins so passively, even proudly, with no trace of repentance? I could not bear it; must I, even now, be beyond all hope? (Perhaps, I thought, this is faith: to believe our God ever receptive to the smallest good intention.) - The Reverend Everly Thomas • At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. • He was leaving here broken, awed, humbled, diminished. - Roger Bevins • Reduced, ruined, remade. - Roger Bevins • Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 12, 2018
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Jun 19, 2018
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Oct 17, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140097058
| 9780140097054
| 0140097058
| 3.91
| 14,511
| 1987
| May 02, 1988
|
it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) What an absolutely incredible and engrossing book. Can’t tear myself away from it. Can’t seem to put it down at all. The world building is ★★★★★ (5/5) What an absolutely incredible and engrossing book. Can’t tear myself away from it. Can’t seem to put it down at all. The world building is exquisite. The epistolary style - remarkable! A selection of my favourite passages from the book • When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn’t waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it. • I put one foot in front of the other, and then the other foot in front of the first, and then hope I can do it again. Nothing more than that. • By wanting less, you are content with less, and the less you need, the better off you are. That is what the city does to you. It turns your thoughts inside out. It makes you want to live, and at the same time it tries to take your life away from you. There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don’t. And if you do, you can’t be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don’t, you never will again. • Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. • No matter how many times, it must always be the first time. • it’s just that where the past is concerned, the truth tends to get obscured rather quickly. • There are two principal factions in this sect—the Dogs and the Snakes. The first contend that crawling on hands and knees shows adequate contrition, whereas the second hold that nothing short of moving on one’s belly is good enough. • And yet, very strangely, at the limit of all this chaos, everything begins to fuse again. • Without knowledge, one can neither hope nor despair. • One never knows what loyalties will surface at the critical moment, what conflicts can be churned up when you least expect them. • That is how it works in the city. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense. • A thing vanishes, and if you wait too long before thinking about it, no amount of struggle can ever wrench it back. Memory is not an act of will, after all. It is something that happens in spite of oneself, and when too much is changing all the time, the brain is bound to falter, things are bound to slip through • If I see them now, it is only in short, random clusters, isolated images removed from any context, bursts of light and shadow. • What is better—to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? • We became dear friends, and I owe Boris a debt for his compassion, for the devious and persistent attack he launched on the strongholds of my sadness. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 05, 2018
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May 08, 2018
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Apr 19, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0439244196
| 9780439244190
| 0439244196
| 4.00
| 1,243,823
| Aug 20, 1998
| Sep 02, 2000
|
it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A tremendously exciting and adventurous book. I absolutely loved how all knots were tied in the end, leaving no loose plot strands. The st ★★★★★ (5/5) A tremendously exciting and adventurous book. I absolutely loved how all knots were tied in the end, leaving no loose plot strands. The story felt remarkably original, visual and imaginative. The narrative was multi-layered, presenting a kaleidoscopic vision on social conformity, the conquest of fate, perseverance and survival against all odds. History is meshed with magical surrealism to bring this fantasy children’s fiction to life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 13, 2018
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Jun 14, 2018
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Mar 24, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1476738017
| 9781476738017
| 4.38
| 1,079,602
| Aug 27, 2012
| Jul 15, 2014
|
it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) Book Warning: induces misty-eyes, bemused laughter and a newfound adoration for life. A selection of my favourite passages from the book • ★★★★★ (5/5) Book Warning: induces misty-eyes, bemused laughter and a newfound adoration for life. A selection of my favourite passages from the book • If it said twenty-four hours on the sign, that’s how long you were allowed to stay. What would it be like if everyone just parked wherever they liked? It would be chaos. There’d be cars bloody everywhere. • if men like Ove didn’t take the initiative there’d be anarchy. • People have no respect for decent, honest functionality anymore, they’re happy as long as everything looks neat and dandy on the computer. But Ove does things the way they’re supposed to be done. • Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain. • Opened his garage with a key. He had a remote control for the door, but had never understood the point of it. An honest person could just as well open the door manually. • He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had. • He was never at the heart of things and never on the outside. He was the sort of person who was just there. • She believed in destiny. That all the roads you walk in life, in one way or another, “lead to what has been predetermined for you.” • And that laughter of hers, which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast. • Nowadays people changed their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous. • This was a world where one became outdated before one’s time was up. An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly anymore. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity. • How can one fail to manufacture rope, for Christ’s sake? How can you get rope wrong? • A job well done is a reward in its own right, • A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man. • You go to the hospital to die, Ove knows that. It’s enough that the state wants to be paid for everything you do while you’re alive. When it also wants to be paid for the parking when you go to die, Ove thinks that’s about far enough. • But now when Ove actually wants to use that damned plastic card, it doesn’t work, of course. Or there are a lot of extra fees when he uses it in the shops. Which only goes to prove that Ove was right all along. And he’s going to say as much to his wife as soon as he sees her, she had better be quite clear about that. • And she wept. An ancient, inconsolable despair that screamed and tore and shredded them both as countless hours passed. • Ove obviously doesn’t trust medicine, has always been convinced its only real effects are psychological and, as a result, it only works on people with feeble brains. • As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again. • But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead. • Maybe it’s the insight that a simple battle won is nothing in the greater scheme of things. A boxed-in Škoda makes no difference. They always come back. • Before then he has had time to wave his rifle at them, making Adrian scream like an air raid warning. • “The great thing about scrutinizing bureaucracy when you’re a journalist, you see, is that the first people to break the laws of bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves.” • It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time. • Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone. • Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound. • One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 18, 2018
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Apr 28, 2018
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Mar 08, 2017
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.85
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really liked it
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Jul 03, 2018
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Jun 26, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.98
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it was amazing
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Jul 06, 2018
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Jun 25, 2018
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|||||
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| 4.40
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really liked it
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Apr 26, 2018
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Apr 07, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.77
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liked it
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Apr 30, 2018
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Mar 17, 2018
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|||||
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| 4.25
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it was amazing
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Feb 28, 2018
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Feb 01, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.75
|
it was amazing
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Jan 21, 2018
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Jan 17, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.70
|
liked it
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Jan 18, 2018
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Jan 12, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.71
|
really liked it
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Mar 28, 2018
not set
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Jan 08, 2018
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|||||
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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Jan 23, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.21
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it was amazing
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Jun 08, 2018
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Jan 02, 2018
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|||||
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Jun 23, 2018
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Dec 29, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.99
|
really liked it
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Jan 15, 2018
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Dec 29, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.54
|
liked it
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May 03, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.78
|
did not like it
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Jan 04, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.00
|
did not like it
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Jan 24, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.56
|
it was ok
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Jun 12, 2018
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Dec 16, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.75
|
it was amazing
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Jun 19, 2018
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Oct 17, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.91
|
it was amazing
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May 08, 2018
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Apr 19, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.00
|
it was amazing
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Jun 14, 2018
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Mar 24, 2017
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|||||
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| 4.38
|
it was amazing
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Apr 28, 2018
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Mar 08, 2017
|
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