Share a line or passage from your current book...

So I'm reading The History of Love which is a beautiful book full of little lines and passages that makes a person sigh and then run on over to the computer to type them in to share them so others will enjoy them too. But, totally broke my heart that no one has done any 'sharing' this september. So I thought I'd start a new one..

"Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me."
— Nicole Krauss The History of Love

I came across this passage the other night and thought it might be something other LT members would enjoy. The book is lovely, by the way. It is, at least in part, a meditation on the question: Books. Why?

"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif -- books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at bedside, to be dutifully examined -- to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."

-- Louise Erdrich Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of my Ancestors

>2 How have I managed to miss this book for the last six years???? I thought I'd read all of Erdrich except her YA books.

I didn't know Erdrich had been to my house....

dancingstarfish -- I love that book, too. Thanks for reminding us to share.

emaestra -- I felt the same way. The passage reminded me of what Anna Quindlen says -- "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

teelgee -- Erdrich's book is part of a series: National Geographic Directions. Authors were commissioned (probably not the right word) to write about various places:

Howard Norman wrote about Nova Scotia; Oliver Sacks about Oaxaca, Francine Prose about Sicily, Jamaica Kincaid about the Himalayas . . . there's a link to a list of them below. I don't know if it's the entire list and I don't know if there will be more of them in the future. One can only hope.

I've read the Erdrich book and the one by Norman and I've loved both, so I think I may try a few others.

http://www.longitudebooks.com/find/d/50082/printable/1

I read Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country years ago, and purchased it (new! no discount!) at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis (Louise owns the store) this summer along with The Red Convertible. I am savoring both of them with reading bits at a time. Just love Erdrich's writing and the quirky people she writes about.

I am reading War and Peace and was surprised when I came upon this passage:

"Prince Andrey was on duty that day, and in close attendance on the commander-in-chief. At six o'clock in the evening Kutuzov visited the headquarters of the Emperors, and after a brief interview with the Tsar, went in to see the Ober-Hofmarschall Count Tolstoy."

belva

ooo now i want to read The Aspern Papers drat you, i just bought 7 new (used) books yesterday!

From my most recently in progress:

But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.

Yes, that's from one of Jane Austen's books. Mansfield Park, to be exact.

#8 dancingstarfish -- I spent Saturday morning reading The Aspern Papers -- I'd read it in college, but that was forty years ago, so it was like reading it for the first time. Good old Henry James -- all that beautiful prose and so much going on beneath the surface, as in the canals winding their way through Venice.

"I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with that queer air of sociability, of cousinship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice. Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most ornamented corner and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration. And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar, domestic and resonant, also resembles a theatre, with actors clicking over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fondamentas. As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little houses of comedy, strike you as members of an endless dramatic troupe."

--Henry James The Aspern Papers

Florian Kilderry is clearing out his family home in anticipation of selling it. He's built a bonfire in the backyard to burn old furniture, pictures, household items.
There are some things, though, he simply can't bring himself to commit to the fire . . .

Here's the passage I like . . .

" On his way . . . to his garden bonfire he was interrupted by the doorbell and knew who it was. Books were stacked against a wall in the hall, ready for the dealer who had come when he'd said he would. A stranger to Florian, he was a restless man in a brown striped suit, with a narrow fringe of black moustache and a hat he didn't take off. He made a swift, cursory examination, repeatedly shaking his head. ' "The Razor's Edge",' was his only comment. 'Not many'd read that today.'

'I would myself,' Florian mildly protested.

He couldn't have burnt the books; he couldn't have so casually destroyed the pages on which he had first encountered Miss Havisham and Mr. Verloc, and Gabriel Conroy and Edward Ashburnham and Heathcliff, where first he'd glimpsed Netherfield Park and Barchester.

'I'm a sentimental reader,' he admitted to his visitor.

'A general disposal, would it be?'

'It would. I'll help you with them to your car.' "

From Love and Summer by William Trevor

All right, all you sentimental readers, this should be easy:

Miss Havisham . . . Mr. Verloc . . . Gabriel Conroy . . . Edward Ashburnham . . . Heathcliff . . .
Netherfield Park . . . Barchester . . .

Name the books in which Florian encountered them. The authors, too, of course.

This is from The Playboy of the Western World which I finished a few days ago. I simply loved reading this quirky and dark comedy! This is the last passage of the first act,

"CHRISTY -- (as she goes to inner room.) -- May God and Mary and St. Patrick bless you and reward you, for your kindly talk. (She shuts the door behind her. He settles his bed slowly, feeling the quilt with immense satisfaction.) -- Well, it's a clean bed and soft with it, and it's great luck and company I've won me in the end of time -- two fine women fighting for the likes of me -- till I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by."

Heathcliff - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
One of my favorites books of all time!

Miss Havisham - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens...duh

Gabriel Conroy - The Dubliners by James Joyce I believe...

Netherfield Park - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Another favorite!

English degrees are so helpful for things like this :)
Somebody else can get the rest

I'm reading the Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. I'm on book 7 right now, A Crown of Swords, but this quote from book 6, Lord of Chaos, really struck me (and for me to remember it out of 900+ pages per book is impressive, I think!):

"We are always more afraid than we wish to be, but we can always be braver than we expect."

bibliolee8 -- very good . . . Gabriel Conroy is the main character in Joyce's story "The Dead" (which of course is one of the stories in Dubliners

Does anyone know about Mr. Verloc or Edward Ashburnham or a place called Barchester? (Hint: The book about Mr. Verloc was published in 1907 but has gone through a period of renewed interest in recent years.)

This is from Chai, Chai: Travels in Places Where You Stop but Never Get Off by Bishwanath Ghosh which I finished a few days back. Its an unpretentious light read but manages to touch your heart when you least expect it. This is one such passage:

"The images of the bedecked biers kept swimming in my head as the Ambassador rattled down the dusty road to Mughal Sarai. Everybody has to die one day, but you don't want to be reminded of that, do you? It is, however, not the thought of your own death that makes the sight of the biers so terrifying: it is actually the thought of your near and dear ones being carried away in that fashion. It is a thought you consider secretly in the deepest crevices of your heart, not even sharing it aloud with your own self."

goddessladyj > I like that!

“Who do you mean, my dear? I know of nobody that is coming, I am sure, unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call in, since she is an unmarried woman of seven-and-twenty, and as such should expect little more than a crust of bread washed down with a cup of loneliness.”

- pride and prejudice and zombies

I still need to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, haha. I wonder if that line is in the original as well, or if it's new for this version?

Remaining answers to the question on #11:

Mr. Verloc -- Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent
Edward Ashburnham -- Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
The fictional city of Barchester is the setting of Anthony Trollope's series of novels "The Chronicles of Barsetshire": The Warden, Barchester Towers. Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Here's a line from The Warden:

"You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart."

>19, goddesladyj - the original is less mean. lol it says something like "since she is an unmarried woman... my dinners are more than good enough for her"

The Zombies version is much funnier, and very enjoyable. I didn't read it right away, but it was great, and I'm listening to the book-on-cd version now, which is soo funny because the girl does the voices of the characters, including the zombies.

I kiss'd your writing over in the hope you had indulg'd me by leaving a trace of honey . . .

- from a letter of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, from Posthumous Keats:a personal biography

From When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 by Louise Levathes:

Zhu Di’s first act upon ascending the throne on July 17 was to execute those officials and military officers who refused to recognize him, along with their relations to the ninth and tenth degrees and their neighbors, teachers, servants, and friends … Zhu Di picked the name, Yongle, meaning “lasting joy,” as the name of his reign.

Louise Erdrich and her youngest daughter are traveling through Ojibwe country and they spend time on Mallard Island, what some call "the island of the books", where an explorer, writer, photographer and friend of the Ojibwe named Ernest Oberholtzer ("Ober"; 1884-1977) had his home. It has been preserved and select visitors are allowed to spend a night there -- the walls are lined with shelves which hold Ober's books. After putting her daughter to bed, Louise spends the night exploring the books, many of them from the 1800s, wishing she had more time with them.

Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country:

". . . I am led to picture an alternate life . . . In my imagined life, there is an enchanted interlude. All children are given a year off from school to do nothing but read (I don't know if they'd actually like this, but in my fantasy my daughters are exquisitely happy). We come to this island. One year is given to me, also, to read. I am not allowed to write. I am forced to do nothing but absorb Oberholtzer's books. Every day, I pluck down stacks of books from the shelves upon shelves tacked up on every wall and level of each of the seven cabins on Ober's island. Slowly, I go through the stacks, reading here and there until I find the book of which I must read every word. Then I do read every word, beneath a very bright lamp. When my brain is stuffed my daughters and I go swimming, play poker, or eat. Life consists of nothing else."

That sounds awfully good, doesn't it? A wonderful enchanted interlude for booklovers. Thanks, mollygrace.

I am currently reading The Tao of Wu by The RZA. Don't shy away from this book because of it being by a rap artist. I happen to like some rap and Wu-tang Clan and RZA is seriously some of the most thought provoking lyrics out there. As the book says, "They rap kung fu." This book is about RZAs early life before he became a rap star and how he looks back on it and finds Buddhist philosophy in his past. It is a spiritual book, not a book about how he went around being a drug dealer and how big of a thug he was back in the day. Its sincere and good read so far.

Here is a quote from the book. To put it in context RZA is talking about one of the Ghettos he lived in when he was a kid and how human feces floated in their basement where he slept during a hard rain.

"It's like a story from the life of Da'Mo, the Indian monk who brought Zen Buddhism to China. One day, Da'Mo was talking with another monk, who began to denouce mud--saying how dirty it was, how a man should stay clean, keep away from mud. But Da'Mo observed that the lotuse grows on mude: 'How can you defame mud when such a beautiful flower grows from it?' he asked." A little further down the page. "I apply Da'Mo's wisdom to the projects. I believe the misery there brought forth a certtain flower that wouldn't have grown anywhere else."

From The Tale of Despereaux:

Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform.

Reader, you may ask this question; in fact, you must ask this question: Is it ridiculous for a very small, sickly, big-eared mouse to fall in love with a beautiful human princess named Pea?
The answer is ... yes. Of course, it's ridiculous.
Love is ridiculous.
But love is also wonderful. And powerful.

This is a very appropriate line (esp. for me, since I'm an introvert) about peers in a new school/workplace/city.

"If you fear them, they'll dislike you."
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

From Germinal by Emile Zola discribbing the coal miners going to work...

"... from the dark, silent village to the puffing steam of Le Voreux, a long line of shadows moved slowly forward in the gusting wind, the miners on their way to work, shoulders hunched and superfluous arms folded across their chests. ...
Shivering with cold in their thin clothes they made no effort to hurry but quietly tramped along, strung out like a straggling herd of animals"

From Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde:

"I found Jane, too, or perhaps she found me. It doesn't really matter. We found each other. And although she was Grey and I was Red, we shared a common thirst for justice that transcended Chromatic politics. I loved her, and what's more, I was beginning to think that she loved me. After all, she did apologize before she pushed me into the leafless expanse below the spread of the yateveo, and she wouldn't have done that if she'd felt nothing."

It's a hilarious tale so far, as one might expect from Fforde.

"Logic is rarely permitted to determine history"

How true. From The Tyrannicide Brief.

"In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earh, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence."

Opening of volume I of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I have read this line about Shakespeare “Shakespeare could not have written any plays, he was just a cover man for Francis Bacon, the true author” in Shakespeare’s Truth by Rex Richards with facts proving this line.
Novel contains lots of secrets about Queen Elizabeth, Royal Family & Prince William, facts about Shakespeare and many more interesting.
If any body like books by Dan Brown, John Grisham, Ken Follett, Bernard Cornwell, and you want a page turner with serious food for thought.... then I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy reading Shakespeare’s Truth!

Not to be too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.

- The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

I'm reading The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic edited by Elizabeth Kolbert (Arctic half) and Francis Spufford (Antarctic). This quote is taken from the selection from Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen:

"Presently the aurora borealis shakes over the vault of heaven its veil of glittering silver--changing now to yellow, now to green, now to read. It spreads, it contracts again, in restless change; next it breaks into waving, many-folded bands of shining silver, over which shoot billows of glittering rays, and then the glory vanishes. Presently it shimmers in tongues of flame over the very zenith, and then again it shoots a bright ray right up from the horizon, until the whole melts away in the moonlight, and it is as though one heard the sigh of a departing spirit. And all the time this utter stillness, impressive as the symphony of infinitude."

It almost makes me want to brave the cold of the Arctic to see the aurora borealis myself...

"I love seeing bookshops and meeting the booksellers - booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up a clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one - the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it - along with first dibs on the new books."

- The guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

"To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl's Court"

p.38 Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton

What a line.

A passage from the classic noir The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. This recent read has left a deep impression on my mind.

In this passage, the protagonist, Lou Ford, talks about his struggle of maintaining a facade of normality for society at large all the while trying not to let his sickness re-surface.

"You ask me why I stick around, knowing the score, and it's hard to explain. I guess I kind of got a foot on both fences, Johnnie. I planted 'em there early and now they've taken root, and I can't move either way and I can't jump. All I can do is wait until I split. Right down the middle. That's all I can do..."

>36 The same could be said for librarians, no? :)

haha yes, but its a book passage! It is what it is.

>36,39,40 It is in a book because it is so true!
I managed a used bookstore, for each and every one of those reasons listed! I could have bought the store from my boss, but I knew how hard it was to try and make money.

P.S. - I knew there was a reason I wanted to read The Guernsey book

"If you did see the clip, you might wonder what this boy with mountain features was doing in the desert, why he was surrounded by four-star generals, why was he smiling. It's because I had had my punishment. As Obaid would say, there is a poetry in commiting a crime after you have served your sentence. I do not have much interest in poetry, but punishment before a crime does have a singsong quality to it. The guilty commit the crime, the innocent are punished. That is the world we live in."

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammad Hanif

I finished re-reading Wuthering Heights last night. These are my favourite lines from the book,

“...for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree - filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women - my own features - mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”

I am currently reading Why I am an Atheist by Madalyn Murray O'Hair. I am really enjoying it so far and here is a short passage that I really find inspiring...

'An Atheist knows that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants an ethical way of life.'

Madison

I'm on a bit of a poetry kick at the moment. Was reading Wendall Berry today.

"I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots."

Finished re-reading Plays Unpleasant by George Bernard Shaw. A very good reading experience, as always.

Here is a passage from the second play of the book, The Philanderer (The spelling follows the original text).

CHARTERIS (unfolding his arms in terror) No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.

>41, Bibliolee8 .. I LOVED The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society its one of my new favorites. Also if you love books that talk about the love of books, you must must must read Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman and The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee. They are great.

Read Girl in Hyacinth Blue and absolutely loved it! Easily one of my favourites this year.

I especially loved the last passage of the book,

“She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.”

I am moving quickly through The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which I am thoroughly enjoying. I thought this passage was simply lovely:

"...the sound of his voice made her notice the darkness beginning to puddle in the corners of the sitting room. She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees and shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full."

>49, bibliolee8, i like that passage! I will have to look up that book :)

>dancingstarfish, I am loving this book! The main character is a graduate student, and as it usually does, her family is turning out to be way more than she expected. Look it up, I think you'll definitely like it.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue....

I've been wanting to read this one. Thanks for sharing this!

#52 You’re welcome! I really liked Susan Vreeland's writing. So easy to read but so graceful.

"Laszlo buckled the scabbard into his belt and covered it with his cloak. The armor still left him feeling vaguely ridiculous, but at least he trusted his steel. Thus protected, layered head-to-to in leather, enchantments, and weapons, he was at last ready for the final challenge each fifth-year student faced if they wanted to return for a sixth.

Today, Laszlo Jazera would return a library book."

Scott Lynch's short story "In the Stacks" in Swords and Dark Magic. So far the best story in the book (and, considering some of the other stories, that's saying a lot!)

"In the summer of 1984, a lawsuit was filed by a subject against a writer in which, remarkably, the underlying narrative of betrayed love was not translated into any of those conventional narratives, rather, was told sraight--and, moveover, told so compellingly that at trial five of the six jurors were persuaded that a man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of his wife and two small children was deserving more sympathy than a writer who had deceived him."

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm.

From Tolstoy's last novel Resurrection, the very first paragraph reminds me why Tolstoy will still be read one hundred years from now and Dan Brown won't.

"Despite the best efforts of people congregating in hundreds of thousands on one small spot to disfigure the land they had squeezed onto, despite their clogging the land with stones to make sure nothing could grow, despite their elimination of every last grass shoot, despite the fumes from coal and oil, despite the lopping of trees and the driving out of animals and birds, spring was still spring, even in the city. The sun was hot, the green grass was recovering, and it grew through in any place where it hadn't been scraped away, coming up between the paving stones as well as on the civic greenswards, while the birches, the poplars and the wild cherry trees unfolded their sticky, scented leaves, and the linden-buds swelled to bursting. Jackdaws, sparrows and pigeons built their nests with the chirpiness of springtime, and flies buzzed against the sun-heated walls. Joy was everywhere, in plants and birds, insects and children. But the people-the adults, the grownups-continued to deceive and torment both themselves and each other. The people saw nothing sacred or significant in this spring morning, this God-given worldly beauty, a happy gift to the whole of creation, a beauty inclining towards peace, harmony and love; no, for them the sacred and the significant meant anything they could devise to gain power over others."

From This Book is Overdue

Question;"How do you tell a librarian from an archivist?"

Answer, "Different gang colors."

Not very highbrow but it made me laugh out loud last night and that has to be good for something.

from West with the Night by Beryl Markham

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

--

She was a little like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed the broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.

From Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

On the Medicinal Effects of Bacon.....

"You worry too much. Eat some bacon....What? No, I got no idea if it'll make you feel better, I just made too much bacon."

I just finished The Gargoyle, which was amazing I might add!

There is an inscription toward the end that is very pretty and sweet. I won't try to copy the German, but here's the translation:

"You are mine, I am yours; yo may be sure of this. You've been locked inside my heart, the key has been thrown away; within it, you must always stay."

There is so much going on in this book; I think it's a love story that even the macho types would enjoy.

Finished a re-read of a collection of plays by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. The Importance of Being Earnest always makes me laugh with funny lines like,

“Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

Or,

“Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair...”

and

“...it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth....”

Always cracks me up!

I have found a very useful method of determining if I will continue to read a book or put it down for awhile in Book Lust.

It goes like this:

"I live by what I call "the rule of fifty," which acknowledges that time is short and the world of books is immense. If you're fifty years old or younger, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100-the result is the number of page you should read before deciding. Keep in mind that your mood has a lot to do with whether or not you like a book. I always leave open the option of going back to a book that I haven't liked (especially if someone I respect has recommended it to me) sometime later. I've begun many books, put them down unfinished then returned a month or two, or years, later and ended up loving them."

Very good advice!

Read the short story collection The Lady of the Barge and Other Stories by W. W. Jacobs. I found this particular passage from the story Cupboard Love funny,

“He broke off and eyed with dignified surprise a fine piece of wireless telegraphy between husband and wife. It appeared that Mr. Negget sent off a humorous message with his left eye, the right being for some reason closed, to which Mrs. Negget replied with a series of frowns and staccato shakes of the head, which her husband found easily translatable. Under the austere stare of Mr. Bodfish their faces at once regained their wonted calm, and the ex-constable in a somewhat offended manner resumed his inquiries.”

I just finished Joyce's Dubliners, and "The Dead" has such an amazing ending (especially the final sentence) I had to share it:

"It had begun to snow again...It was falling, too, upon every part of the churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

I like this text so much better than Ulysses, and even more so now that I've read those final lines. That's an ending that will stay with me.

Pot Luck (Oxford World's Classics) by Émile Zola (otherwise under Émile Zola)

The landlord is showing octave to his new apartment and telling him who is living on each floor as they walk up.

"..... Then, as he went past the second floor without mentioning the occupants, Octave asked:
' And who lives there? pointing to the door of the main suite.
'Oh, there?' he said. 'People we never see, whom no one knows. The house could well do without them. But nowhere's perfect, I suppose.'
He sniffed disdainfully.
'The Gentleman writes books, I believe.' ..."

From Le Carre's The Looking Glass War:

"There were times when Avery felt for Leclerc a deep, protective love. Leclerc had that indefinable quality of arousing guilt, as if his companion but poorly replaced a departed friend. Somebody had been there, and gone; perhaps a whole world, a generation; somebody had made him and disowned him, so that while at one moment Avery could hate him for his transparent manipulation, detest his prinking gestures as a child detests the affectations of a parent, at the next he ran to protect him, responsible and deeply caring. Beyond all the vicissitudes of their relationship, he was somehow grateful that Leclerc had engendered him; and thus they created that strong love which only exists between the weak; each became the stage to which the other related his actions."

I'll just give a quick translation:

'Her future suddenly appeared to her like a menacing tide. The infatuation for chess, that drove her to her stay in the city, burst like a bubble, and she was overwhelmed by the return to her routine life. She had lost her only friend. She would probably be fired and her husband would leave her. He would never get over the insult. In spite of her tiredness, she couldn't close her eyes. She pulled herself up on her seat, waiting anxiously for the docking of the ferry, for this moment of truth that would throw her into a miserable loneliness. Her life was over. 'Folly', she thought, feeling for the first time the dark weight of a word that, until now, had had the taste of a springtime afternoon in the Luxemburg gardens. And yet, something in her, something unavowable, was savagely glad, like a bewitching tarantella. Eleni picked up her perfume and dripped a tiny drop behind each earlobe.'

This extract is from 'La joueuse d'échecs' from Bertina Henrichs ('The Chess Player').

Sometimes a passage warrants attention for the beauty of its composition. Other times it is because of the message conveyed. I appreciate both. But the one that recently caught me up short is the following from The Maytrees by Annie Dillard: "Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that that they had equal time." It's caused me to be much more conscious about how I am filling my days and I am suddenly finding more free time available for me.

This made me feel sad:

It's my fault. I know that now. To bring her up in my mother's beliefs seemed so natural at the time. It gave us a plan; a tradition of our own; a magic circle into which the world could not enter. But where the world cannot enter, we cannot leave. Trapped inside a cocoon of our own making, we live apart, eternal strangers from the rest.

The Girl with No Shadow by Joanne Harris

Here is a song from the book Mockingjay that I really love. I shortened it up to make it look like song lyrics instead of the poem format it used.

Are you, are you

Coming to the tree

1. Where they strung up a man they say murdered three

2. Where the dead man called for his love to flee

3. Where I told you to run, so we'd both be free

4. Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me

Strange things did happen here

No stranger would it be

If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree

Hi all. I just discovered this thread yesterday. Don't have anything to post yet, but I often am struck by something I'd like to share. So, looking forward to more of yours and adding some of my own. I'm often struck by one sentence, or even one phrase that really strikes me, that expresses something perfectly.

Read and loved Seize the Day by Saul Bellow. Why did I wait eight long years to read this book? It’s full of quotable lines.

These lines really bring out the protagonist’s desperation,

“Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.”

Finished Silas Marner, just in time for George Eliot's birthday! Eliot’s insights into the human psyche are spot on. I found the following lines to be startlingly true,

“Instead of trying to still his fears, he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come;...”

From Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold:

Miles says: "All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed."

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:

"Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed."

75: That was a good quote! Is the book interesting? I usually find Bryson to be a little depressing or snarky or something but that sounds like a different kind of book, more interesting than travel writing.

#76 nhisecord

I found At Home: A short history of private life to be fascinating at times and very enlightening. I actually learned quite a few things I had never heard before, and I enjoyed Bryson's style in this book. If I had one criticism I would say that sometimes he would jump about a bit - he would start off writing about one thing and then really digress before coming back to the original topic. There were always linkages though, and it helped to see the bigger picture. All in all, I'd readily recommend the book, though my favourite Bryson is still A Walk in the Woods - to which none other can compare IMO.

Thanks Phlox, I've added it to my list.

Finished reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. Some parts of it are hilarious!

“You start on Monday with the idea implanted in your bosom that you are going to enjoy yourself. You wave an airy adieu to the boys on shore, light your biggest pipe, and swagger about the deck as if you were Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and Christopher Columbus all rolled into one. On Tuesday, you wish you hadn't come. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, you wish you were dead. On Saturday, you are able to swallow a little beef tea, and to sit up on deck, and answer with a wan, sweet smile when kind-hearted people ask you how you feel now. On Sunday, you begin to walk about again, and take solid food. And on Monday morning, as, with your bag and umbrella in your hand, you stand by the gunwale, waiting to step ashore, you begin to thoroughly like it.”

Porua, you have reminded me of how much I enjoyed Three Men in a Boat.

# 80 When Three Men in a Boat was funny it was funny! But I found some of parts of it rather dull.

For me Three Men in a Boat was too short and too light to be dull exactly, but you and I seem to be in general agreement -- I apparently laughed out loud less than you did. I am not unhappy to have read the book. Some people, however, seem to think that it is nineteenth century England gift to the world of laughter, and it is not.

Robert

"Henrietta's children grew up hungry. Every morning Ethel fed them each a cold biscuit that had to last them until dinner. She put latches and bolts on the refrigerator and cupboard doors to keep the children out between meals. They weren't allowed ice in their water because it made noise. If they were good, she'd sometimes give them a slice of bologna or a cold wiener, maybe pour the grease from her bacon pan onto their biscuit, or mix some water with vinegar and sugar for dessert. But she rarely thought they were good."

From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

# 82 I think perhaps I enjoyed Three Men in a Boat a little bit more than you did. But yes I do agree that it is not nineteenth century England's gift to the world of laughter.

From Dracula. Chapter XI- Lucy Westenra's Diary

"Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, with such unknown horrors as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly and brings nothing but sweet dreams. Well, here I am tonight, hoping for sleep, and lying like Ophelia in the play, with 'virgin crants and maiden strewments'. I never liked garlic before, but tonight it is delightful. There is peace in its smell; I feel sleep coming already. Good night, everybody."

From Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist:

They. They can count themselves lucky if there are two of them. Usually it's just the one. They are not necessarily relentlessly victim-ised or bullied. Sometimes, yes; but often their role is to be the one against whom the gang measures itself, so to speak. The gang is a gang by not being the outsider.

This quote was in my planner last week, and each time I read it I wanted to reread The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move....Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

#88

I love that quote. Now I want to re-read The Cather in the Rye (again), too. Funnily enough the last time I read it was for a reading group where most of us had read the book before. We were all agreed that we felt differently about the book and got different things from it on second or third readings. So the quote could actually apply to the book itself!

“One day,” F’lar shouted, “we will not sit tamely here, awaiting your fall. We will fall on you, where you spin, and sear you on your own ground.”

-Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

This just sounded cool, really cool.

#89 Thanks Soupdragon! That's really insightful.

From Life by Keith Richards

"I had spent my entire school life expecting to do National Service. It was in my brain...And suddenly, just before my seventeenth birthday, in November 1960, it was announced that it was over, ended forever. (The Rolling Stones would soon be cited as the single reason why it should be brought back.)"

From The Excellent 11 by Ron Clark p. 12-13

"I knew that I could repaint the walls white, if they threatened to fire me, but if I painted those desks, there was no turning back. I stood there for a few minutes, and then I slowly touched the end of the brush to the bottom of the seat, electric blue exploding across the dull yellow. It looked good. I painted every desk."

I don't think I would have the guts to even paint the walls of my classroom, let alone the desks!

From Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

"Where the trees thicken into a wood, the fragrance of the horses' hoofs fills my soul with delight. I particularly love that smell, - it brings before me the entire benevolence of nature, for ever working death and decay, so piteous in themselves, into the means of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours as she works."

Not so many "sweet odours" coming up from the Brisbane river flooding at the moment I assure you!

From Deceiver by C.J. Cherryh: I have to paraphrase because I don't have the book any more. She wrote something like this:

"There are 2 kinds of people: those who ask for favours, and those who want to do favours for people. The first person wants things and the second wants power. So now you know how to work with them."

I thought about this for a while, then decided I was the second person. A person who does favours for people is not the supposedly powerful person out in front but is the more powerful person with whom those out front want to work, and that work can be done in the background with less interference.

From Guideposts to Health and Vigorous Long Life by John H. Tobe:

"Nowhere along the path of my formal education, which was the same as yours and everyone else's, was I told that there is a reward for those of us who think and reason for ourselves...in fact, if you dare think for yourself, you are slapped down and sat upon. Often for this bit of effrontery your scholastic career is abruptly brought to an end."

thebeadden: I like this quote and I agree. However, it is difficult to decide when one should be rewarded or needs to be somewhat redirected. ;)

I think if I had been in a school where individualism was rewarded I might have done more with my life. As it is, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And I'm past grown up.

And if I had been in such a school, I likely would have been sent down to the CIA to cause havoc in the world!

nhlsecord: I liked what you wrote too. It sounds interesting. Thank goodness you aren't out causing havoc in the world! ;)

Edited to add: When I clicked on the link to your book it went to an author page. Just thought I would let you know.

In Jeff Shaara's To The Last Man, a young Manfred von Richthofen (Red Baron) meets the higher-ups for the first time:

"He had been nervous about meeting men in such positions of authority, the ridiculous concern for his unkempt uniform, his clumsiness with words. Now he was terrified. As he stepped out into the open air and sunshine he realized he was one small piece of a vast world controlled from behind those very walls. He felt ridiculous thinking he was ever in command of anything... for a brief few minutes he had been in the presence of the man who controlled it all (note--the kaiser) He had dared to believe he was a hero...It was a foolish exercise in self-indulgence, and he scolded himself for it. You are merely a tool, a weapon, an extension of the machines guns on your plane. Your red plane. A good commander knows how to make the best use of his resources. So they have made the best use of you."

From The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber:

Henry Rackam is telling Mrs Fox that one of their acquaintances feels as though she's being stigmatized because her husband committed suicide, to which Mrs Fox replies, "Couldn't he just have divorced her?"

millhold, I am very tickled by that quotation.

Robert

thebeadden: Apparently Deceiver is the name of an author as well as the name of the book I wrote about. I don't know how to fix that!

Deceiver the book.
Deceiver the author.

Done per the touchstones instructions to the right of the message box.

Robert

Deceiver Deceiver

Okay Mr.Durick, you win. I won't say that I tried that and I didn't think it worked because it just makes me look worse. :}

#76, nhlsecord, some of his books are snarky/depressing. But definitely read 'In a Sunburned Country' if you haven't. its funny and light and enjoyable.

Re-read one of my most favourite books of all time, The School for Scandal and Other Plays by Richard Brinsley Sheridan some time ago.

Here are two of my favourite quotes from Sheridan's, The Critic,

"PUFF: There, you see relationship, like murder, will out."

"Enter Tilburina and Confidante mad, according to custom

SNEER: But, what the deuce, is the confidante to be mad too?

PUFF: To be sure she is. The confidante is always to do whatever her mistress does- weep when she weeps, smile when she smiles, go mad when she goes mad.-Now, Madam Confidante! But keep your madness in the background, if you please."

From The Warmth of Other Suns bringing up a past we wish never were:
Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.

From The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes:

"This books has no literary merit whatsoever."

from The Winter's Tale:

It is an heretic that makes the fire,
Not she that burns in 't.

Great quote, AnnaClaire.

This is a passage from Robert Coles' Handing One Another Along. The author is discussing Raymond Carver's short story, "The Cathedral", in which a man attempts to help a blind friend understand something of what a cathedral looks like, what the term actually means. The blind man suggests that they draw one together and the sighted man places his hands on the hands of the blind man and guides him to draw the cathedral (on an old shopping bag that once held onions) as he describes it in words.

"Note the details of the growing human connection, this trust between a story's twosome: a humble shopping bag, onions (as in something that gets to the eyes and makes us cry and quickly brings emotion to us), and the humility of not fancy drawing paper but, rather, an old crease-ridden shopping bag -- these "things" become the stuff of touching, learning, telling, listening. A scene of two men with their hands on each other, as they begin to build a cathedral: the blind man "sees" a cathedral. The teacher, who can see, sees the cathdral through the help of (the need of) the blind man, as in the blind leading the blind. As in the blindness that we all have. Others can see what we can't, give us sight that can become more than sight -- the insight that teachers help us find, and yes, that students help their teachers find. This was one of Carver's greatest stories, and may well be one of the great American stories of this (the 20th) century. Blind, we see with and through one another: we notice, understand our fellow human beings. A gift from Carver to us -- he the storyteller trying to find his way, see his way, toward human affiliation, and we, his readers, becoming gratefully, knowingly, wide-eyed."

#111 fabulous stuff!

From Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

"Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can."

From Mama Day by Gloria Naylor said by a guardian at the Wallace P. Andrews state shelter for boys, often while grabbing a boys face in her strong hands, Only the present has potential, sir. Then she goes on to describe the practicality of the place I don't know of anyone who became a drug addict, petty thief, or a derelict. I guess it's because you grew up with absolutely no illusions about yourself or the world....it wasn't the kind of place that turned out many poets or artists -- those who could draw became draftsmen, and the musicians were taught to tune pianos. If she erred in directing our careers, she erred on the side of caution. Sure, the arts were waiting for poor black kids who were encouraged to dream big, and so was death row.

From The Deluge by Arthur Marwick about life in Britain in 1914 :-

"The most-used argument to confute suffragette claims had been that women were incapacitated from voting by their inability to participate in the military defence of the community, a curious line of thought when few men really expected that they would be called upon to handle a rifle, but symptomatic of the orientation towards the prospect of war."

In Ward Just's Forgetfulness, the main character, Thomas Railles, is dining alone at home, about to commit a private act of revenge . . .

"Thomas pushed a button on the stereo and Billie Holiday was back on her sailboat in the moonlight, a voice filled with regret and desire; revenge would be the furthest thing from her mind. Successful revenge require the cramped discipline of an accountant and she preferred the unruly emotions of the spendthrift. She needed protection but there was none and so she sang. He threw a log on the fire and stood staring into the flames and then he threw another on for good measure. For what he was about to do Thomas needed fortification and so he poured a glass of calvados and listened to the song, true American blues, imitated everywhere in the world, never equaled. He wondered if there was anywhere now where you could hear the real thing. The Mississippi Delta of course, probably New Orleans, perhaps South Side Chicago. It would be a good thing if presidents were obligated to listen to the blues in the vast formality of the White House and a good thing also if they were to drink while listening. The blues would give them an idea of the limits of human ambition and the consequences of righteous action, an appreciation of grief and ecstasy and inscrutable providence and the certainty of betrayal, along with the imprecision of memory and often its loss altogether. Truth and falsehood were next of kin. This was what Lincoln knew."

"Swarms of waxwings have settled in the ripe clusters of rowanberries. It is said that they come only every seven years from high up north, from Lapland or Siberia, and only when the winter threatens to turn exceptionally severe."

(Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear)

From Willa Cather O Pioneers

"The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted."

Writing about how dueling was finally abolished, Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about the fact that dueling pistols were notoriously unreliable (who knew?) and quotes another argument"If having seized a man who has murdered my wife, I should carry him before a tribunal, and demand justice, what should we think of that judge, if he should order that the criminal and I should cast lots which of us should be hanged."

"The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. The first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past - the schools and dormitories of its youth, army barracks and tenements, house razed to the ground and rebuilt, places that recall love and guilt, difficulties and unbridled happiness, optimism and ecstasy, memories of grace meaningless to anyone else - and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. For this reason, the living bring their own rituals to a standstill: to welcome the newly loosed spirit, the living will not clean, will not wash or tidy, will not remove the soul’s belongings for forty days, hoping that sentiment and longing will bring it home again, encourage it to return with a message, with a sign, or with forgiveness."

- The Tiger's Wife

What a great quote, dancingstarfish. I may have to read The Tiger's Wife.

oh you must! its so good, I am just loving it.

The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories by Michel Faber, "The Apple" from Sugar's perspective:

"Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours."

No, no, no!

Other lives, both fictional and non-fictional, ARE more interesting than my own. But to acknowledge this is not an admission of defeat. By reading, I partly remedy the situation by introducing interesting stuff into my sphere of experience.

And although i wouldn't mind living in a Georegette Heyer novel, I'm not sure I'd survive in Stephen King's world.

#123 - I've thought about that a lot and often admonish myself to get up and go live my own life. Then I think about the wonderful experiences I have had in my own life due to inspiration from my reading.

#125 Georgette Heyer regency novels are my comfort reads.

With regard to Sugar's statement in #123, I'm interested to hear what you all think, because it flabbergasted me when I read it!

"Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours."

Rather, I think it shows that you're not just totally self-absorbed.

I think that if I had interesting things to do, I wouldn't read as much. I get the grunt work out of the way so I can do fun things such as read. So if I had more interesting fun things to do, would I read as much?

If I had more of a social life, I'd likely go out more and so couldn't read as much, but then part of what I'd be doing when I go out might have a lot to do with reading books, but if I didn't have time to read would I be talking to people about reading? Not likely.

Books give me this world and many other worlds in many enjoyable ways, but if I suddenly got a social life, or more access to interesting experiences, I bet books would be the thing I didn't have time for.

This is not a question I'll ever have to worry about. :)

I HAVE to read. When my children were small and my husband was out of town so much and I was incredibly busy and had a huge social life and we went camping and I lead a Girl Scout troop and was treasurer of the PTA and youth group leader at church, I stayed up late at night to read and I read while I cooked dinner. Reading is not optional for me. I still work, and have social life and garden and watch movies and stay busy, BUT I STILL READ at lunch, while I watch TV, late at night, whenever I have a few minutes here and there. I lead a book group and I read for that but in between book group books, I READ because I LIKE it!

Regarding reading, I also HAVE to read. No matter what else is going on, or how busy or crazy my life is, I still find time to read. It may only be a paragraph, or a page, or a chapter and sometimes the book is good enough to keep me up nights, but I will always read. I always have a book nearby for that few moments when you have to wait or simply pass the time on transit.

I want to share a quote from the ER book I'm currently reading because I though it was very timely given that tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. The book is The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice.

"Life is full of reality, no matter how talented the Irish are at avoiding it..."

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

131 omg that is a GREAT quotation!

132 - mkboylan Thank you! :) I thought so too! I must say that I'm really enjoying this book and will be looking for more by Luanne Rice.

and Anna Pigeon, after a crisis, "After all these great healing weeks with her husband, sun, orange juice, and cats on her lap, her mind still wasn't anyplace she needed to be playing by herself."

That just cracks me up. I can SO relate to it. from Burn by Nevada Barr.
NOT BURN BY LINDA HOWARD as the touchstone states.

#123, millhold, i had the irrational urge to flag your post for abuse after reading that quote lol interesting take on reading though!

#135 I know. It stopped me cold! I was simultaneously horrified and just the slightest bit intimidated.

"Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons" Someone Knows My Name-Lawrence Hill

In David Grossman's To the End of the Land, Israeli soldiers are trapped in a war-room bunker. The enemy is all around them -- they are sure they will not survive.

"A soldier who looked as if he was around fifteen, with soft, smooth cheeks, lay next to Ilan with his eyes closed, curled up and mumbling quickly, devotedly. Ilan touched his leg and asked him to say a prayer for him. Without opening his eyes, the boy said he wasn't praying. He wasn't religious at all, he was just reciting chemistry equations. That's how he used to quiet himself before his matriculation exams, and it always worked. Ilan asked him to say a few equations for him."

I love that, Mollygrace.

From R.F. Delderfield's
To Serve Them All My Days

Beth--the wife of David Powlett-Jones, a young man who survived the horrors of World War I, and who is now a teacher in a boys boarding school in England-- she is drifting off to sleep with him:

"...and in the moment before she slept she raised his hand to her breast and held it there, thinking 'Dear God, how lucky I was to lean over that pier-rail that time and fish Davy up from the beach...' and the random quality of life made her shiver a little, so that she tucked herself into him, as though fearing he might be snatched away and swallowed up with the rest of his generation, with all the boys she'd flirted with in the middle years of the war, boys who had been there one day and photographs on their mothers' mantelshelves the next."

Thanks, Citizenjoyce. I love it, too. The following is another of my favorites from the same book, but it's only a fragment of a very long, loving, heartbreaking passage . . .

Ilan -- in grave danger himself, trying to deal with the knowledge that his best friend is dying . . .

" . . . then he realized he'd never write anything to Avram again. Not notes in class, not lewd limericks, not ideas for recordings . . . or quasi-Talmudic interpretations of Fanny Hill. There would be no more songs in Rashi script describing the charms of their female classmates, not long conversations in sign language during class, right in front of the teachers. No sweet dreams about the ultimate Israeli movie . . . which Ilan would direct based on Avram's screenplay . . . No messages -- transmitted in code that was unbreakable because it was based on their own secrets and trivia . . . Gone were their joint voyages of discovery to the new continents of Bakunin and Kropotkin, Kerouac and Burroughs, and Fielding's Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, or Druyanov's Book of Jewish Jokes and Wit. Finished were the jokes . . . the witticisms, the repartee, the rude puns, the comprehension with one glance, the deep, dark, mutual identification between two spies in enemy land, two only children and what always linked them together, beyond the hysterical laughter to the point of tears . . . "

from To the End of the Land by David Grossman

Looks like there's another book I need to wishlist.

Me, too. Great passages.

From the Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. Dougal is telling Claire the story of Jamie's first flogging:

"Ye know, lass, it's failry easy to be brave, sittin' in a warm tavern ower a glass of ale. 'Tis not so easy, squatting in a cold field, wi' musket balls going past your head and heather ticklin' your arse. . . ."

The imagery made me smile, even though the topic is no laughing matter at all!

I feel perfectly brave enough to withstand the heather, musket balls on the other hand...

Being so extremely ticklish myself, I think I'd prefer the musket balls--at least as long as they're going past, and not connecting WITH my head.

Found the following passage from Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther funny where Mrs. Miniver describes the awkwardness of inviting married friends over to dinner when you only like one half of the said couple,

“A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate 'business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin.”

1 John 3:1 says "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are..." I am considering the Fatherhood of God. Oh what a sweet joy and awesome priviledge! So I'm currently reading Children of the Living God by Sinclair Ferguson. It's been wonderful and encouraging so far.

Dr. Ferguson writes, "God continues to unfold His love for His children in restoration.We have already seen the emphasis the New Testament in general places on the idea of sonship. Jesus' own preaching underscores what it means to be a child of the Father. In Paul's writings we find eloquent articulation of this concept against the background of the Old Testament revelation. He traces the Father's eternal purpose, the nature and function of Christ's incarnation and the ministry of the Spirit to the central fact-God is intent on restoring the image that He created of Himself and His glory in the life of man."

There is a story about a Navajo grandfather who once told his grandson, "Two wolves live inside me. One is the bad wolf, full of greed and laziness, full of anger and jealousy and regret. The other is the good wolf, full of joy and compassion and willingness and a great love for the world. All the time, these wolves are fighting inside me." "But grandfather," the boy said. "which wolf will win?" The grandfather answered, "The one I feed."

from The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg

#149 I love that quote!

#149 Wow, excellent.

#149 Ditto.

#149 Me too.

"He woke in the light of late afternoon on his back, eyes open on the high wide ceiling. Its unbroken stretch seemed an emblem, an earnest, of plainer life; a field on which he might outline now - with no threat of veto or external change - a life he could walk through with pleasure and generosity, not only having skills and gifts to give but easily finding the hands to receive them, hands behind which would be faces he could know, faces he would need. He began, as he had so often when a boy on summer mornings before the house woke, to write with his mind on the patient plaster surface - imaginary words inscribed by his eyes but clear and straight in his customary script . . . "

-- from The Surface of Earth by Reynolds Price

"When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina, what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being."

-- from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Ivanov No-good, pathetic, insignificant - that's the kind of man I am... How I despise myself, my God! How profoundly I hate my voice, my walk, my hands, my clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't this ridiculous, isn't this offensive? Barely a year's gone by since I was healthy and strong, I was hale and hearty, indefatigable, impassioned, worked with these very hands, talked so that even ignoramuses were moved to tears, was capable of weeping when I saw misery, feel outraged when I encountered evil. I knew the meaning of inspiration, I knew the splendor and poetry of quiet nights, when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or beguile your mind with dreams. I had faith, I gazed into the future as into the eyes of a loving mother... And now, oh, my God!

-- from the Chekhov play Ivanov, in Anton Chekhov's Selected Plays

Reminds me of what I've heard called 'The Fine Art of Self-loathing'.

And for a lighter touch :
I now live in a place where I am awakened each morning by a cat who thinks my eyebrows need to be groomed.
From Riding in the Shadows of Saints by Jana Richman.
; )

#157: I like that quote. I might even like the grooming if it wasn't too early ;)

# 157 - Cute! :) Much better than my Sascha who decided to bite my toes that were sticking out from under the covers one night and for no apparent reason!

I once had a tomcat who woke me up by sniffing in my ear. Have you any idea how deeply big cats breath? And all those little whiskers...

It really was wonderful.

My cat (before she started sleeping longer hours than I do) used to be very deliberate about it. If she thought I was "foxing", pretending to be asleep when I ought to have been up and feeding her, she would creep up the bed and peer suspiciously into my face to see whether I was awake - and then tap me on the cheek with her paw two or three times. Of course I always giggled and gave myself away, so then I had to get up and do my duty.

#160 - nhlsecord LOL!!!

#161 - your comment reminded me of a cat I had about 30 yrs ago. I called her Baby when I first got her and her name became Babe forever after. One morning I woke...but didn't open my eyes! What woke me was her crouched by my head and gently touching my eyelid over and over. Guess she was trying to wake me up!

I'm going to paraphrase some things from my current book, i before e except after c because I'm loving it:
StalaCtites come down from the Ceiling, and stalaGmites come up from the Ground. I'm 65 years old and had never devised a mnemonic to tell them apart. I can die happy now. By the way, Sally Made Henry Eat Onions - the 5 Great Lakes from west to east:Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. East to west it's Old Elephants Have Much Skin. What do you put on a sting? Use Ammonia for a Bee sting and Vinegar for a Wasp sting. B follows A and W follows V. ( I had no idea they were different bases of venom). I am having fun with this book.

Quote from A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

On Memory:
"Your memory is a monster;; you forget--it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you--and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory, but it has you!"

A quote of a quote from i before e except after c: The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria, and there would be no music. - Lewis Thomas

163 I love that! Beautiful and true!

165 - Thank you for quoting another favorite of mine: Dr. Lewis Thomas.

From Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell:

"Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find. The labor of art is the slow and painful metamorphosis of the One into the Other."

And, this, about the kinship Simic sees between Cornell and Emily Dickinson:

"If her poems are like his boxes, a place where secrets are kept, his boxes are like her poems, the place of unlikely things coming together."

I always like a work of art that shows how similar dissimilar things can be.

O, how full of briers is this working-day world!

(from William Shakespeare's As You Like It)

It seems ol' William knew a thing or two.

"Delius was a provincial Debussy."

(from English History, 1914-45 by A.J.P. Taylor)

I'm one of those rabid anti-cigarette people other people joke about, but this line from Grace Williams Says It Loud made me appreciate the other side of the question. Grace is a misshapen small woman who is rejected by much of society for her looks and assumed mental deficiencies. She states that smoking was encouraged in the mental institution where she lived because it could be used in a reward behavior control system.

If you've never felt untouchable, you won't know what I mean, but smoking for me is like touching - from the inside.

I'd love to share a passage from every page of Monique Truong's book, Bitter in the Mouth -- or at least from every page in the first four chapters, which is as far as I've read. But I don't think it's too early to say that I love this book -- it's got me laughing and crying all at once. In other words, my enthusiasm runneth over:

"The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word 'disappoint,' I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost as the combining or the collapsing together of the words 'disappear' and 'point,' as in how something in us ceased to exist the moment someone let us down."

Great quote, Molly.

I'm listening to The Likeness on audiobook, so I don't have the exact quote, but it goes something like this: rents in Dublin are as high as in New York City, but in New York you get New York.

From the prologue to American Sphinx:

Jefferson had risen from the dead. Or rather the myth of Jefferson had taken on a life of its own. {…} It was as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, had discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing.

A thirteen-year-old girl is curled up in her favorite chair in the coldest room in the house -- her "reading place." She, like millions of other people, is awaiting the arrival of the final book in a very popular series for young people. They've been listening to a woman read a stolen copy of the book -- which has yet to be released -- on the radio, but the girl, Tiff, suspects it's a fake -- and she's found the whole experience of listening to it unsettling . . .

"She couldn't imagine reading The Coffins of Little Hope anywhere else than in this cold room . . . wearing a pair of gloves from which she'd cut off half of each finger and drinking hot cocoa from a soup mug. Tiff suspected that her doubts about {the stolen copy} rose from the fact that it wasn't a book at all, no matter who had written it. Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page, ever ready to turn it."

From The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schallert (yes, the title of Schallert's book is also the title of the book within the book).

From Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side -- Lilly Dunne, an elderly woman in mourning, is standing on the shore gazing out to sea.

"There is much solace in the mere sight of the water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul. Oh yes I am thinking the human soul is a very slight thing, and not much evolution has gone into it I fear. It is a vague slight notion with not even a proper niche in the body. And yet is the only thing we have that God will measure."

"Julie knew that one of her least-attractive features was that she had a hypercritical inner smart-ass. She'd be enjoying the company of some normal guy, and suddenly she would begin with the scrutiny. Before it was over, she was Dorothy Parker and the guy was a pool of metaphorical blood on the floor."

The Social Animal the Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks

#179
I felt like I was having déjà vu when I read your quote because I'm reading The Social Animal right now too!

From Snowdrops by A.D. Miller....."the only free cheese is in a mousetrap" - or something to that effect - I'm listening to an audio book - that made me laugh out loud on the highway this morning....and an excuse to drink Vodka while eating pickled fish ...."Fish like to swim".

#179 - I haven't read that book, but I have done that to people. I cringe at the thought of what happens when I don't control my mouth 0-{

This is from Jim Harrison's The Great Leader.

"He hit the radio OFF button when someone on NPR used the word turd 'iconic.' He used to keep track of these obtuse Orwellian nuggets. A few years ago it was the relentless use of the word 'closure' that raised his ire and then with Iraq the silly term 'embedded.' In general Sunderson had no use for pundits. It reminded him of a recent article in the Marquette newspaper interviewing a local girl who had tried to 'make it' in Hollywood who said, 'Just about everyone you meet out there is a producer.' Pundits reflected his idea that everyone in America gets to make themselves up whole cloth, and also the hideously mistaken idea that talking is thinking."

Thekla Clark and her daughter Lisa spent part of their summers (in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s) in the company of W. H. Auden. Wystan Auden watched Lisa grow up and fretted over her when she was a teenager. Thekla writes this in her memoir Wystan and Chester:

"Wystan worried, of all things, about her success in taking examinations. 'Too important these days,' he said. He felt it was too tempting a substitute for learning. Wystan also worried about her lack of practicality. All my fault, he implied, as I had read her unsuitable books at crucial moments. Too much Dickens at the wrong time, hence her 'friend of the people' attitude that he found boring, and too much Scott, and the 'wrong' Tennyson, which accounted for her over-romantic taste in boys. Mothers, he insisted, should bring their daughters up on a strict diet of Jane Austen."

I love this passage from Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer. Maxon is autistic, an astronaut who programs robots, remembering the day he first kissed his wife.

"Maxon in the rocket could remember the energy between them, that way he felt electrified by her as all his switches turned on. All life is binary. On and off. There is no middle setting. Alive or dead. In love or not in love. Kissing or not kissing. Speaking or not speaking. One choice leads to another with no forks in the road. There are a thousand tiny yes and no decisions that make up every movement, but they are all just that: yes and no. For Maxon, awkward and waiting in the planetarium booth, it had been off. For Maxon, standing with his arms around Sunny, kissing her for the first time for real, it was then on. It never turned off again in his whole life. It was a switch that was duct-taped to one side with a sign beside it that said DO NOT TOUCH. It was nothing he could ever undo, no matter what she had said to him, or how much she had railed against him later. It was there because it had never left."

In the early days of Walt Disney's cartoon studio, when the animators were developing the now well-known characters, Norman Ferguson gave a lecture to the other animators on how to draw Pluto.

"Pluto's comedy value lies in using him as a heavy, cumbersome, awkward dog, and to avoid the effect of lightness. Whenever he is used running, jumping, or falling, it is well to bear in mind the fact that a heavy dog would naturally need more anticipation to his run or jump, and in the case of a fall his land would take more stretching and recovering than that of a lighter dog."

(from The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life by Steven Watts

What a great quote. Some of us, well, I never considered the sort of reasoning that goes into animation.

Exactly. Glad you enjoyed it, too.

Diane! THAT is an excellent one! Thanks!

This topic is new to me, and I'm still catching up on the earlier entries. Delightful!

So I'm reading " Ms. Peregrine's home for Peculiar Children" for the second time and this line from the book never fails to send shivers down my body when i read it "She was a siren. I had to be strong. "It's him you want. not me. I can't be him for you." She looked away, stung. "That isn't why you should stay. You belong here, Jacob." " I don't, I'm not like you." "Yes, you are," she insisted. I'm not. I'm common, just like my grandfather." Emma shook her head. "Is that really what you think?" "If i could do something spectacular like you, don't you think i would have noticed by now?" "I'm not mean't to tell you this," she said "but normal people can't pass through the loops." I considered that for a moment, but couldn't make sense of it. "There's nothing peculiar about me. I'm the most average person you'll ever meet." "I doubt that very much," she replied. "Abe had a rare and peculiar talent, something almost no one else could do." "And then she met his eyes and said " He could see the monsters."

BTW this is a great read, it is horror, but even if your not a fan of the genre the book still manages to captivate you.

"....I tend to like abstract rather than blood-drenched ideas." From the essay "I Married a War Correspondent" by Alissa Quart in my current read Click When We Knew We Were Feminists Ed. by Courtney E. Martin and Courtney Sullivan. I'm very much enjoying this read!

About George Washington as a young man - from Washington, A Life by Ron Chernow

"Long before he achieved great fame or renown, something about Washington's bearing and presence bedazzled people...Much of the power of Washington's presence derived from his fluid gait, the antithesis of the stiff, wooden image Gilbert Stuart grafted on the American imagination...The sculptor William Rush recalled...'I have been in battle immediately under his command. I have viewed him walking, standing, sitting.' ...In all these activities he exhibited 'the most manly and graceful attitudes I ever saw.' Washington was, quite simply, a sight to behold. 'So tall, so straight!' one servant remembered. 'And with such an air! Ah, sire, he was like no one else!'...

Jefferson extolled Washington as 'the best horseman of his age and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback' "

"Television was getting too good at manipulating your brain chemistry, it made you feel like the people on television were actually your friends." From my Early Review win First World Problems in an Age of Terror and Ennui by Dominic Peloso.

From Hotel Noir by Casper Silk:

"What is history if not one endless assault on love?"

From No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva by Pema Chödrön

"Any degree of attention to our experience will easily convince us that life is slipping, slipping by. In my own experience, getting older is a good motivator for not wasting this precious human life."

@ 196 - Wonderful quote topcat21!

Thanks Never! Pema Chodron has a way of cutting right to the heart of reality.

From A Discovery of Witches:
The strongest distinguishing characteristic of humans is their power of denial. I (vampire) have strength and long life, you (witch) have supernatural abilities, daemons have awe-inspiring creativity. Humans can convince themselves up is down and black is white. It's their special gift.
Seems to relate to our (US) or Egypt's or, I guess anyone's, election.

From Ivan Doig's The Bartender's Tale:

“People come and go in our lives; that’s as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever, and that is a fresh saga every time.”

From Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson:

about the songwriting team, Leiber and Stoller,'s work the Coasters (songs included 'Yakety-Yak', 'Charlie Brown', 'Along Came Jones', 'Poison Ivy'):

"'I think the most fun we ever had working with any artists...was with the Coasters,' Stoller said. 'We'd be falling on the floor--all of us--and staggering around the room holding our bellies because we were laughing so hard.' But it was also hard work. 'It took a lot of preparation,' Stoller explained. "...I used to rehearse them for weeks...' Despite their fierce drilling, the Coasters sang as if they could scarcely contain their glee and might at any moment burst...into gales of laughter. The genius of Leiber and Stoller's production of the Coasters--which was 'their shining hour,' according to session manager...Artie Butler--was their ability to create and choreograph painstakingly the illusion of high-spirited spontaneity."

From Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson: "I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

The protagonist of The Sense of an Ending bu Julian Barnes introducing his group of friends at school:

"That was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents. Were they the stuff of Literature?"

Pip, a boy traveling alone during the Great Depression, is riding in a boxcar along with other homeless people in Marly Youmans' A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage:

"Clacketing down the tracks, the train finally headed into the last leg of its journey toward Savannah. The world at night poured by the open door, the trees and occasional houses looking as if they were clipped from black paper by a silhouette maker. Above, the heavens were the same dazzle of lights that Pip knew from the Orphanage, blazing as if an immense oil lamp were burning behind miles of blue-black pricked paper. Even a sharecropper, even an orphan could be wealthy when he looked up at the stars, which were willing to glory-roof a paintless shack swarming with mosquitoes and flies."

From Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong by Steven Brower:

"Well, you know, my hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape...My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own."

(an interesting dilemma...how to use brackets without adding a touchstone...I used {} instead)

*edited to add brackets thanks to Mr.Durick

>205
That's a good idea: {} I think I'll use that, too.

Very interesting tidbit about Louis Armstrong.

You can use [ for [ and ] for ]

Robert

[ Thank you for the tip Mr.Durick! ]

From The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman

Writing about Arthur Balfour {British Conservative politician and statesman}:

"Including his {later to be revealed} weaknesses, he was in character and attributes the final flower of the {British} patrician and of him might have been said what {Marcel} Proust's housekeeper, Celeste, said on the death of her employer, 'When one has know M. Proust everyone else seems vulgar.' "

Before I take Mothers & Daughters: An Exploration in Photographs back to the library I want to share just a little.
I loved this poem:

Brushing out my daughter's dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head.
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It's an old
story -- the oldest we have on our planet--
the story of replacement.
Sharon Olds

and a little bit of the essay by Tillie Olsen and, who I assume is her daughter, Julie Olsen Edwards talking about the challenge of raising daughters:

It is my voice (and being) that must try to translate society's standards, realities, imperatives to her -- and it is I who will receive her despair, anger, rebellion over those lessons, over those realities.
Worse: mine may be the situation in which (having no choice) like the mothers with bound feet in old China, who were required to bind the feet of their daughters; knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly; I must bear complicity in fitting her into those maiming realities...
Those terrible realities, at war with her needs, her capacities, her potentialities
The war in her;
The war in me, too.
Ally, or foe, or both?
The tender pride in her young worth, her promise--like our old tactile pleasure in washing, brushing, braiding her hair; seeing her "presentable"--have a corrosion breeding in them now, that of the world's standards: too thin, too fat, too tall, too short, too smart, too dreamy, too athletic, too serious, too this too that;
It is the time when obsession with appearance, body, clothes begins (compelled obsession for females--but she may not know that yet, if ever). The blossoming being must be gendered.
They have eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen-year-old bodies; pregnable women's bodies in a country where sexuality is accorded primacy--where the hunger for belonging, independence, for verification of selfhood, the need to test oneself in the unknown, is too often channeled into the sexual arena.

210> Beautiful. Thanks.

From Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics... by Stephen Sondheim

Part of the lyrics from the song, "Together Wherever We Go" from the show "Gypsy":

"Wherever I go, I know he goes,
Wherever I go, I know she goes.
No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos--
Amigos,
Together!"

Jule Stein (music) and Sondheim(lyrics) were invited to preview their score for "Gypsy" for Cole Porter, who was depressed, in his apartment in the Waldorf Towers.

"After dinner, Jule and I played and sang what we had written, and when I got to the word 'Amigos'...I heard a gasp of delight in the corner of the room. Mr. Porter had been caught by surprise: he hadn't anticipated the quadruple rhyme. Needless to say, surprising a pro is one of the greatest joys a writer can experience, and this pro {Porter}...was a master of surprising rhymes...

"Any time I need an ego boost, I conjure up that gasp; it may well be the high point of my lyric-writing life."

"And is order to demonstrate his worthiness, his testicles are felt by the junior cleric present as testimony of his male sex. When this is found to be so, the person who feels them shouts out in a loud voice, "He has testicles!" And all the clerics present reply, "God be praised!"

But he was not her first thought coming to.Her first thought was of someone else, someone invisible in the black fog that filled her sight.It filled her mind too, this deep unappeasable darkness, and every tissue of her body, or so it seemed.She tried to move, tried to think.She could do neither.Yet the sense of someone remained: someone close, someone dangerous.

-Frozen Fire