- "When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial." -- Fernando Pessoa
- "I think going [to India] taught me a lot about the position of a person who leaves one’s native country. My parents always put it as they have a foot in two separate boats, on the water, and each of the boats is floating and wanting to go in its own direction and you’re sort of stuck in between, not knowing which to go in to." -- Jhumpa Lahiri, via
- "I read to understand life. I write to understand life." -- Jhumpa Lahiri
- "At the end of the day, when the liberty was won, we found that we had not sufficiently reckoned with one incredibly important fact: If you take someone who has not really been in charge of himself for 300 years and tell him, “O.K., you are now free,” he will not know where to begin." -- Chinua Achebe, 'Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope'
- "We've both dealt with enough criminals to know that criminals look exactly like the victims." -- Cary Agos, The Good Wife (S02E10)
- "I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen halo, a zero. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring, on water, where a stone's been thrown. All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock. The geometrical days, which go around and around, smoothly and oiled. Sweat already on my upper lip, I wait, for the arrival of the inevitable egg, which will be lukewarm like the room and will have a green film on the yolk and will taste faintly of sulphur." -- Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, pg. 176
- "Living in the past is my future. -- A Single Man
- "There is more in ''Disgrace'' than I can manage to describe here. But let me end by suggesting Coetzee's most impressive achievement, one that grows from the very bones of the novel's grammar. Lurie thinks of himself as having spent his career ''explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion.'' ''Disgrace'' is, however, written in the present tense, and its title denotes a continuing condition. Disgrace continues. And so do the characters' lives, which at the end of the book remain unresolved and unfinished, their problems and possibilities still open. This novel stands as one of the few I know in which the writer's use of the present tense is in itself enough to shape the structure and form of the book as a whole." -- NYT's book review of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace
dec 26 2010 ∞
jan 21 2011 +