| Sounder. |
[May. 30th, 2012|03:18 am] |
♥ His mother fed him and said, “Child, child, you must not go into the woods again. Sounder might come home again. But you must learn to lose, child. The Lord teaches the old to lose. The young don’t know how to learn it. Some people is born to keep. Some is born to lose. We was born to lose, I reckon. But Sounder might come back.”
♥ “He just crawled up under the house and died,” she said.
The boy was glad. He had learned to read his book with the torn cover better now. He had read in it: “Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead.” He had asked the teacher what it meant, and the teacher had said that if a flower blooms once, it goes on blooming somewhere forever. It blooms on for whoever has seen it blooming. It was not quite clear to the boy then, but it was now.
Years later, walking the earth as a man, it would all sweep back over him, again and again, like an echo on the wind.
The pine trees would look forever on a lantern burning out of oil but not going out. A harvest moon would cast shadows forever of a man walking upright, his dog bouncing after him. And the quiet of the night would fill and echo again with the deep voice of Sounder, the great coon dog.
~~Sounder by William H. Armstrong. |
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| The Diary of Anais Nin |
[May. 28th, 2012|08:25 am] |
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing. |
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| 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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