| Catch-22, Joseph Heller |
[May. 26th, 2012|12:04 pm] |
Yossarian decided to change the subject. 'Now you're changing the subject,' he pointed out diplomatically. 'I'll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for.'
'Be thankful you've got me,' she insisted.
'I am, honey. But I'm also goddam good and miserable that I can't have Dori Duz again, too. Or the hundreds of other girls and women I'll see and want in my short lifetime and won't be able to go to bed with even once.'
'Be thankful you're healthy.'
'Be bitter you're not going to stay that way.'
'Be glad you're even alive.'
'Be furious you're going to die.'
'Things could be much worse,' she cried.
'They could be one hell of a lot better,' he answered heatedly.
'You're naming only one thing,' she protested. 'You said you could name two.'
'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about -- a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'
( more ) |
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| The Things that Surround Us |
[May. 26th, 2012|03:53 pm] |
[...]
When you asked me if I was an island, I told you that I was not. When you asked me to join you in the drawing room, I told you that I could not, that I was in fact an island and I couldn't join anyone anywhere.
Saddened, you revealed to me that you were not the two things that jut outward into the sea as I had assumed, but the little bit of gray sea between them.
Then I told you I was the entire Arctic Ocean sometimes.
Zachary Schomburg, from The Man Suit |
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| Ladder of Years - Anne Tyler |
[May. 26th, 2012|01:35 am] |
She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always know that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell- in which case, who was 'she'? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.
"When my first wife was dying," he told Delia one afternoon, "I used to sit by her bed and I though, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she'd been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she'd been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can't tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people I saw in the street looked so... temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn't they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems. All those years when I was a child longing for it to be 'my turn,' it hadn't ever occured to me that my turn would be over by and by..."
-Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler |
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| My Sister's Keeper – Jodi Picoult |
[May. 24th, 2012|02:10 pm] |
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. |
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| Andrew Kaufman, All My Friends are Superheroes |
[May. 23rd, 2012|05:54 am] |
'I don't remember a single monster before I met you,' he'd told the Amphibian. 'Now they seem to be all over the place.'
'You mean there wasn't anything you were afraid of?' the Amphibian had asked him.
'Lots.'
'What did they look like?'
It was a funny question.
'They didn't look like anything. They were ideas,' Tom told him. 'Like not being able to pay rent, or being lonely.'
'That's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard,' the Amphibian replied. |
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| The Sword in the Stone (T.H. White) |
[May. 23rd, 2012|12:11 am] |
"Here, in the luminous hollow of a tree stump that had been blasted by lightning and whittled clean by the winds of knowledge, they alighted ont he outstretched hands of the goddess. Athene was invisible, or at least the Wart never remembered having seen her afterwards. At the time he did not notice that she was invisible -- it only struck him when he woke up next morning -- because he was aware of her without seeing her. He was aware that her unthinkable beauty was neither that of age nor of youth. That her eyes were the only things you thought of looking at, and that to be here was terrible, whereas to be with her was the only joy. If you can understand this, she was in herself so unhappy that words only melt in such temperatures, but towards other people she was the spirit of invincible mercy and protection. She lived, of course, beyond sorrow and solitude, and, if you follow me, the suffering which had brought her there had left her with a kind of supernatural good manners.
She was a conquerer.
Archimedes kissed her tenderly. He was not overawed by her, but saluted her almost with pity, as if he were a man of the world visiting his sister, a nun who did not understand how to get on in his world, or perhaps a prosperous banker who had always tried to be reasonably decent, meeting the man whose destiny it was to be nailed up and left to die of sunstroke, agony and exhaustion, in order to save the prosperous bankers.
Even Archimedes did not understand her.
She knew this. |
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| Women in Higher Education, Faculty of the University of Bologna, 1377 |
[May. 22nd, 2012|11:18 am] |
"And whereas woman is the foundation of sin, the weapon of the devil, the cause of man's banishment from Paradise, and whereas, for these reasons, all association with her is to be diligently avoided, therefore do we interdict and expressly forbid that anyone presume to introduce in the said college any women whatsoever, however honourable she be. And if anyone should perpetrate such an act, he shall be severely punished."
- Faculty of the University of Bologna, 1377 |
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| Reading |
[May. 19th, 2012|01:45 pm] |
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. The man who who never reads lives only one."
-A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
I do not consider the Game of Thrones series great literature by any means, but I loved this quote! |
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| Brillaint |
[May. 19th, 2012|05:32 am] |
♥ If I had a daughter, I would tell her what a funny thing love is, how it never looks the way you think it’s going to, how no matter how old you get, it is love that keeps surprising you. How in the songs sometimes it involves beaches and champagne and chocolate-covered roses, but in real life it is just a prematurely balding man standing in a drought-dried field telling you that he loves you, and that you should do whatever on earth you want.
But I don’t have a daughter. I have dogs instead, and they know more about love than anything.
♥ She cries and cries every day now. Howard is doing his best, but he’s not a natural caretaker. Rose is trying in her way too, and it warms my heart to see her do it so badly, a hedonist in Joan of Arc’s clothes. My human is trying to keep me here, with hundreds of photos, with thousands of words. I know the worrying doesn’t do my tumors any good, but what she is feeling now is my responsibility. I convinced her to give me her heart, lock stock and barrel, in a way that she had never given it before, and she gave it. That is a good thing. It is, perhaps, the only thing, but now her heart will have to break. I pray my future niece will have inherited some of my qualities, will demonstrate them even in puppyhood, I whisper her name in my human’s ear at night, whether to ease her mind or mine I cannot say.
♥ Dante is still with me, sort of up and to my left. I’ll never hear that big tail thwacking again, never feel his big grey chest roll toward me in sleep, but what I have instead is everything he taught me, like how without loss, life isn’t worth a hill of bean. And without love, life is nothing more than a series of losses.
When I’ve lost people in the past, my mom or Jackson, Jonathan or Esther Robinson, or even people who didn’t die but just left, it was different. Because once they were gone it felt like there was nothing left of me, or maybe there was, but I didn’t know it. I thought that if the people I loved disappeared I would disappear too, and now I see that’s why Dante was always looking and looking at me, so I’d know that I really do exist, and could keep on existing after he was gone.
~~Sight Hound by Pam Houston. |
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| Delirium By Lauren Oliver |
[May. 15th, 2012|11:59 am] |
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"You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there's something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of. But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the pa...st will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone. Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do---the only thing---is run."
"I'm struck with a sense of time passing so quickly, rushing forward. One day I'll wake up and my whole life will be behind me, and it will seem to have gone as quickly as a dream."
"I know that life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point---the only point---is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go."
“The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with and pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I came around the bend, the sun – curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway – lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the colour bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark."
"I love you. Remember. They cannot take it." |
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