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―“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”
―“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
―“To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination”
―“No, no, sometimes a person feels to be alone."
"If you're alone too much," Persky said, "you think too much."
"Without a life," Rosa answered, "a person lives where they can. If all they got is thoughts, that's where they live."
"You ain't got a life?"
"Thieves took it.”
― The Shawl“A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?”
―“It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.”
― The Shawl“I read in desperate snatches in the interstices of the Quotidian, and dream of finding three uninterrupted quiet hours to think, moon, mentally maunder, and, above all, write. I am pursued by an anti-Muse; her name is Life. Her homely multisyllabic surname is often left unenunciated, but to certain initiates it may be whispered: Exigency.”
―“The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.”
―“I write in terror...I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.”
―“Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number -- counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering!”
― The Shawl“Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves, unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens. Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. [...] Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw.”
―
“Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One's own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.”
― The Din In The Head
“James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life. ”
― Trust“People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips”
―“It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.”
― Heir To The Glimmering World“If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.”
―“I work from a different theory. For everything there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.”
― The Shawl“The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.”
― The Messiah of Stockholm“This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock.”
―“Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past.”
― The Shawl“Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?”
― Dictation: A Quartet“The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh. The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk. Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe.”
― The Messiah of Stockholm“...this is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin."
"Cramped," Rosa said.
"I work from a different theory. For everything, there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you go along better."
"I don't like to give myself lies," Rosa said.
"Life is short, we all got to lie.”
― The Shawl“She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.”
― Foreign Bodies“The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren't the lords of the earth.”
― Foreign Bodies“By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.”
―“You can never tell how genes ricochet.”
― Foreign Bodies“Brilliant students make good aides.”
― The Puttermesser Papers
Thursday, August 31, 2023
We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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