Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.
The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.
Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold.
There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions... The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.
Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This.
One’s country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water.
Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was – already an American, in other words.
The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.
I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long.
If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny.
Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.
From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I’m dipping into principal, spending it all.
It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire.
When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.
From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.
Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?
Corpul ii era ca o tulpina, sustinand laleaua creierului sau.
What was it about crazy people that made you want to shun them? The futility of reasoning with them, certainly, but also something else, something like a fear of contagion.