Vonia > Books: all-time-favorites‎ (151)

"Love is like Life, merely longer
Love is like Death, during the Grave
Love is the Fellow of the Resurrection
Scooping up the Dust and chanting "Live"!

"Suddenly a young person wakes up and finds the universe tilting and grasping in front of him. Infinity. So many things are happening for the first time. What young people don’t realize is that so much is happening for the last time, as well. The world is both opening and closing at once.
The first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, the play of light in the trees on a particular fall day, the endless flood of strength in our biceps and thighs. We have the illusion that all of this will happen again and again. In a way, this falseness of youth is even more painful than the branching channels ahead. For the young are very much aware of the moment of the first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, and so on. They are keenly aware. Their terrible miscalculation is thinking that these moments will repeat in the infinity of time, that their bodies and minds will hold."

"Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?"

"The difference between kissing and licking is not a small thing. It is the difference between leisurely romance and fierce passion, between cold and hot, between stone and blood, between mind and body. Is it not true that we kiss with our minds but we lick with our bodies? We kiss grandparents, children, familiar spouses. Kissing can be polite, a peck on the cheek, even a full kiss on the mouth, even the French kiss. But licking his never polite. Licking is ill mannered, licking is total surrender to sex, total surrender to body. Licking is the return to primality.

"For inspiration [to draw the Gronzy tourist brochure], I studied pamphlets from the torture bureaus of other urban hellscapes, Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. I learned to be lavish... Upon seeing the empty space when apartment block wants to, I wrote, ' wide, unobstructed skies!' I watched as a pack of dogs chased a man, and wrote 'unexpected encounters with natural wildlife!'... Even before I reached the first checkpoint, I had scribbled 'first rate security!'"

"The trick is to make the Americans feel he must convince you of his identity, rather than the other way around. Tom Hanks's fans are maybe ten times more likely to fall for this than the average American." 


 "Because there is something wrong with them?" 


"I would not go that far. I would say that those who like his acting are unfamiliar with human nature."

"A basic literary precept of the day was a need to inspire a sense of wonderment in the reader, and Cervantes achieves this by displacing recognizable character types into unexpected contexts and frequently dismantling generic conventions to create new combinations with which to surprise and challenge the reader. This he transports a noble gentleman to a gypsy camp in one story, presents one of his heroines​ as the 'illustrious' kitchen maid. He creates​ an essential tension between the 'ideal' and the 'real', the 'literary' and the 'everyday', the plausible and the unlikely... He speaks of 'producing fantasy with perfect naturalness'; in his "Exemplary Stories" he is more concerned to surprise his readers and stretch their imaginations by persuading them to suspend their disbelief than to recreate a realistic picture of his society." 

I liked holding one of them in an aqueous bread on the tip of my finger and admiring it's Saarinenesque upcurve, and when I fold it in half and rub its surface against itself to break up the protein deposits, I often remembered the satisfaction of making almost a Teflon fry pans. But though as a hobby they were rewarding, though I was as excited in opening the centrifugal spin cleaning machine I ordered for them as I would have been if I had bought an automatic bread Baker or a new kind of sexual utensil, they interfered with my appreciation of the world. I could see things to them, but I was not pleased to look at things. The bandwidth of my optical processors was being flooded with "there is an intruder on your eyeball" messages, so that a lot was simply not able to get through... At first, I thought it was worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world. I really was more handsome without glasses... The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman who I think had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her. She hurried to the sex because the extreme intimacy, to her way of thinking, of appearing before me in her glasses was only possible after the last extreme intimacy of fucking me... I recognized The crucial importance of hinges to my pleasure in life. When I open my glasses in the morning before taking a shower and going to work, I am like an excited tourist who has risen from a hotel bed on the first day of a vacation: I have blown open a set of double French doors leading out onto a sunlit balcony with a view of the entire whatever- shipping corridor, bay, valley, parking lot. (How can people not like views over motel parking lots in the early morning? The new subtler car colors, the blue greens and warmer greys, and the sense that all those individuals are leveled in the democracy of sleep... make for one of the more inspiring visions that life can offer before nine o'clock.)

I do not think that loneliness is necessarily a bad condition. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with a passing, dampens irony and cynicism.

Four middle class Nigerian brothers, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and Benjamin, decide to go fishing in a river. They do this without their mother’s knowledge, carefully hiding away their fishing kit when they come home. Their career lasts six weeks before they are discovered by a neighbour, who tells their mother. One day at the river they meet the local oddball, Abulu, who has the power of prophecy, and who predicts that Ikenna, the eldest, will be killed by one of his brothers; by a “fisherman”. It is from this simple, almost mythological conceit that Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel grows, gaining complexity and power as it rises to its heartbreaking climax.

Like most classic African novels in the Achebe-Ngugi tradition, The Fishermen mixes the traditional English novel form with the oral storytelling tradition, dramatising the conflict between the traditional and the modern. But The Fishermen is also grounded in the Aristotelian concept of tragedy, which mostly goes: a good and noble-minded man shows hubris and is brought down by the gods for it. Here, the hubris is shown by the fishermen’s father, Mr Agwu, who aims to be better than his neighbours by siring six offspring and saying: “My children will be great men … They will be lawyers, doctors, engineers …” And with that hubris, the family’s struggle against fate begins. But as in all good tragedies, after the prophecies and the omens, it is character and logic and moral choices that drive the story to its conclusion.

Begging to recall to your highness, that I am Francesco del Cossa, who made those three fields towards the antechamber entirely by my self: so if you, your Highness really don’t want to give me more than 10 bolognini [pennies] per square foot, I’d be losing 40 or 50 ducats…..I’ve got a name these days, and this payment leaves me on a par with the saddest apprentice in Ferrara…and I’ve studied, I study all the time, and I’ve used gold and good colours at my own expense…and done the whole thing in fresco, which is really advanced work…