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- ...a story is like a gas that expands into whatever available space one has. (ZS, viii)
- ...but maybe there is also an occasional advantage in writing once again as you wrote in the very beginning, when it was still simply writing and not also a strange breed of employment. (ZS, ix)
- And let me tell you, I'm spitting kittens about it. (DM, 3)
- Watering my tomato plants calmed me, until I spotted some greenfly. The vile little things got a good drenching with aphid killer. Then it was the turn of those ants who have colonized my patio. Kettle after kettle I boiled, until their bodies covered the crazy paving like a spilt canister of commas. Suddenly I found myself sitting in the conservatory with Evita playing at an unpleasant volume. (DM, 4)
- ...leaving the rest of us to arise, like roses in a bombsite. (DM, 5)
- A sob swallowed me whole. (DM, 6)
- Let others grapple for glory. My job is thankless, and hectic... (DM, 6)
- In the kitchen, silence swelled up. Butterflies fussed on the nodding buddleia outside. A divine July... (DM, 7)
- He looked about eleven, had a lip stud, a rice-pudding complexion, and that hairstyle where strands drip over the criminal forehead. (DM, 8)
- ...looked at me with dead eyes. (DM, 8)
- And it occurred to me that Olly wasn't the only victim of that hit-and-run murderer, because the Mrs Judith Dunbar-Castle whom I would have become had also been slain. (DM, 10)
- She was content, and contentment is the best beautician... (DM, 10)
- Once I was taller than the beech hedge around Daddy's house. Now it's as high as the car port. When one returns to childhood haunts, one is supposed to find how much smaller everything has become. But in Black Swan Green, I always feel that I'm the shrinking one. (DM, 10)
- Mummy used to complain that Daddy loved his greenhouse more than his real house(...) no silky mistress was ever cared for as much as the green velvet lawn upon which Daddy lavished vitamins and weedkiller. (DM, 11)
- A lesser woman would be upset at how Daddy has let all trace of Mummy disappear from her home. What would Mummy's ghost recognize now? (DM, 13)
- Gulls are her familiars. Damp tourists, anglers, local hoodies and drug addicts, bored rich Germans, spiteful June Nolans, soya-milk Winnifreds and bronzed Marions, holiday admirals in their affordable yachts... they watch on, wondering, Who is that woman? Why is her sadness so deep? She will remain anchored in the inlets of their memories, long after today. This woman moves in a separate realm. A Meryl Streep sort of realm. A realm which ordinary people can glimpse, but never inhabit. (DM, 15)
- Some faces are windows, others are masks. (DM, 16)
- Judith Castle-Dunbar's voice is armoured in self-belief, and brings to mind the huskiness of Margaret Thatcher. I like it. (DM, 17)
- An ice-cream van crawled by in the hissing rain. Its chimes played that famous pop-ballad. About love, and Robin Hood. (DM, 18)
- He so perfectly gets how we're really all like these aliens who can never have any meaningful contact with each other because we're all so caught up in our own little self-made realities, you know? (Daniel Clowes, 21)
- Most critics will give any movie three and a half stars if it flatters their self-image. (...) Have you ever noticed how most critics usually disagree completely with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics. (DC, 21)
- I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire. (DC, 24)
- How often have we watched a movie and wished we could feel those emotions? In our real lives? But what's stopping us? Why can't we reject the mundane and embrace the possibilities offered by a cinema of pluralistic wish-fulfillment? (DC, 24)
- The room wasn't much broader than his lounge and it put Frank in mind of a bus, some kind of wide, slow vehicle, sliding off to nowhere. (A.L. Kennedy, 27)
- ...wandering a little, liking the solitude, a whole cinema of his own -- the kind of thing a child might imagine, might enjoy. (AK, 27-28)
- ...his nice privacy broken when it had extended so very far by now, right up to the black walls that melted when you studied them, disappeared down into the black carpet and left you adrift with nothing but the dull red shine of plush seats and a sense of your skin, your movement, fidgets of life. (AK, 28)
- Little vents near the ceiling breathed and whispered occasionally... (AK, 28)
- __A man should have a hat, in his opinion. Beyond a certain age it will suit him and give him weight, become a welcome addition to his face, almost a trademark. People will look at his hat as it hangs on the back of a chair, or a coat hook, or rests on the edge of his desk, and they will involuntarily assume -- Frank's here, then. That's his hat. Frank's old, familiar hat. Through time, there will be a small transfer of emotion and people who are fond of him will also like his hat, will see something in it: a sense of his atmosphere, his style, and they'll be pleased. (...) His own transfers were largely negative. (AK, 29)
- Funny how he didn't feel the pain until he saw the wound. Proximal phalanx, left ring finger, a gash that almost broke the bone. Blood. (AK, 30)
- Time spent paying attention to people is never wasted. 'Unless you're really hungry. Are you really hungry?' Her hair had been ruffled, was perhaps damp -- a pounce of bad weather between her leaving the car and reaching the doorstep had disturbed it. Skin paler than normal but with strong colour at the cheeks, as if she was cold. Her suit was the chocolaty one with the metallic-blue blouse, a combination which always struck him as odd but very lovely. 'You look tired.' It was the fit of the suit. So snug. It lay just where your hands would want to. (AK, 32)
- At which point his mind broke, dropped to silence, the foyer around him becoming irrelevant. A numbness began at the centre of his head and then wormed out, filling him with this total lack of anything to hear. He tried retracing his thoughts but they parted, shredded, let him fall through into nowhere. And the man he'd been before was gone from him absolutely, he could tell, and whatever was here now stayed suspended, thoughtless. (AK, 37)
- Our town is full of people running back and forth in torn days and every other town is like that, too. Our world is thick with it, clotted in patterns and patterns of grief. And, beyond this, I know you're sad. I know your days are bleeding, too. And I know I make you sad, I don't understand how not to, but please don't bring in more of the grief, don't add to it. If there is more, then I won't be able to breathe and I'll die. (AK, 40)
- Frank who was perfectly happy on whatever side was left free, who might as well rest at the foot of the bed like a folded blanket. It didn't matter. He didn't mind. (AK, 41)
- 'What's wrong with you.' And Frank couldn't tell her because he didn't know and so he just said, 'I understand why people look at fountains, or at the sea. Because those don't stop. The water moves and keeps on moving, the tide withdraws and then returns and it keeps on going and keeps on. It's like --' He could hear her shifting, feel her sitting up, but not reaching for him. 'It's like that button you get on the stereo on those little personal players -- there's always the button that lets you repeat -- not just the album, but the track, one single track. They've anticipated you'll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you want that. I want that. Just three or four minutes that come back.' (AK, 42)
- Frank tipped back his head and watched the opening titles, the mist, the trees, the older man's face as it spoke to the small girl's, as he spoke to his daughter, while the world turned unreliable and salt. And the film reeled on and he knew that it would finish and knew that when it did he would want nothing more than to start it again. (AK, 43)
- I'd met this really Jewish guy with this really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly, like origami. (ZZ Packer, 47)
- Whenever he'd come back to bed from gathering crickets, he'd try to wedge his cold skinny body around my fetal position. 'Come closer,' he'd say. And I'd want to and then again I wouldn't want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal, or watercress. (ZP, 48)
- One time, in a position that would have been beautiful art, he said, 'Look at me. Really look at me.' I didn't like looking at people when I did it, like those tribes afraid part of their soul will peel away if someone takes a picture of them. (ZP, 48)
- I had a little life, working at Pita Delicious, serving up burgers and falafel. (ZP, 49)
- I took the pregnancy test in the bathroom at Pita Delicious. I don't know why. (ZP, 49)
- All I knew was that something was pressing down on me, drowning me. (ZP, 50)
- I saw him never finishing his thesis and going to work for some grubby non-profit where everyone ate tempeh and couldn't wear leather and almost had a Ph.D.; I saw him hauling the kid around to parks, saying it was the best thing he'd ever done. Really. The best. (50)
- I kept walking away, quickly at first, then so fast that the tears were the only thing keeping me from burning myself out like a comet. (ZP, 50)
- Years later he remembered that walk home and the way he had felt proud at the perfect ordinariness of his school shoes. (Andrew O'Hagan, 55)
- Gordon would memorize quotations and then say them to himself under the bathwater with his ears crowding around with noise. (...) Gordon would stand in the talcum-powdered air of the bathroom muttering calculations and strange moral sums about the cause of Hamlet's unhappiness. (AO, 55)
- London is a smear of buses and chances in the afternoon. How colourful too is the capital city, how full of the foreign arts. (AO, 58)
- Hanwell Snr was Hanwell's father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way. Not in his person -- he was a 'big personality,' in that odious phrase -- but in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it. A feckless and slapdash man -- worse, in many ways, than a cruel man. Those who have experience of such people will understand. Cruelty can be righteously opposed, eventually dismissed. A freewheeling carelessness with your cares is something else again. It must teach you a sad self-sufficiency, being fathered like that, and a brutal reticence of the heart. A reluctance to get going at all. (Zadie Smith, 63)
- Hanwell Snr came to Hanwell like a comet, at long intervals. (ZS, 63)
- 'Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back': a common enough refrain in England, then and now. Only, Hanwell Snr was one of the periodic returners. This makes it worse, as previously discussed. (ZS, 64)
- A roasting August day. (ZS, 65)
- ...but, as he sat here now in the sun, the tense, resistant nub of flesh inside his back resolved itself for the first time in months. He lay down. His spine pressed into the soil a notch at a time, undid him. Upside down was a land of female legs. He was fond of these new bell-shaped skirts, wide enough to crawl under and be kept safe(...) He thought, What if I stayed here? Let the sun swallow me, and the orange dazzle under my eyelids become not just the thing I see but the thing I am, and let the one daisy with the bent stem and the rose smell and the girl upside down on the pub bench eating an upside-down ploughman's with her upside-down friend be the whole of the law and the girth of the world. Wasn't it the work of moments, of a little paint, to change(...)? (ZS, 67)
- This is reminiscent of all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else manically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them. (ZS, 67)
- Lying in a patch of long grass, Hanwell dreamed a conversation. (ZS, 67)
- When I was a kid, I had a dream -- never forgotten! -- of the cool, flat Brighton pebbles being placed over my body, as the Jews place stones on top of their dead; piled up and over my corpse, until I was entirely buried and families came to picnic over me, not knowing, for I was Brighton bedrock now, as Hanwells had been (in my dream logic) since there were Hanwells in England. There have always been Hanwells in England. But I am a female Hanwell and lost my name when I married. (ZS, 71)
- It was so hot in Leogane that summer that most of the frogs exploded(...) The frogs had been dying for a while, but we hadn't noticed, mostly because they'd been doing it quietly.(Edwidge Danticat,83)
- As soon as the burnished skins and tiny organs were exposed to the sun, the shredded frogs dried up, vanishing into the river bed. (ED, 84)
- I found her in her old room sitting in the middle of a large mahogany canopy bed that our parents had had constructed for her when she was a teenager. From the house she and Gaspard had shared for the last 20 years, she had brought a large mosquito net, which she'd draped over the canopy, making her appear as though she were trapped in a colorless dream. (ED, 90)
- Being known by Magda is a messy and unavoidably carnal experience. (Hari Kunzru, 125)
- Between Magda and Errol there is a love that can spill out in many directions. (HK, 126)
- Magda must be excused her foibles, because she is wrestling with the great question of her life: old man or young man? (HK, 127)
- ...Magda brought home a young Muslim to sit on the steps. He wore a dishdash and a white skullcap. He had a wispy beard and a cardboard suitcase and a bemused expression. I think she'd found him at the station. He looked about twenty-one. (HK, 129)
- MVT #4: A survival from the ancient world? Primal, atavistic, Greek mourner. Mammoth-feller. She slithers out of their grasp, waddling down the street in the direction of the main road. Though she's slow, she has a chaotic, lumbering motion that makes her hard to catch. (HK, 130)
- Nigora was compiling imaginary lists of her life, while watching the sullen assistant stroke sky-blue ribbon into curlicues with the back of a pair of scissors. (Adam Thirlwell, 142)
- She was haunted by the spectre of non-fulfilment. (AT, 142)
- Laziz sat in traffic and looked at the smog on the river. Like Nigora, his thoughts were nostalgic. Unlike Nigora's, they were also romantic. (AT, 144)
- Like many people who have caused their own distress, he wanted to believe that events were not a sure guide to character -- somewhere, inviolate, and far away from this scene, existed a Laziz who was powerful and perfect. And yet events are a sure guide to character. (...) Our characters (...), sadly, are nothing but events. Everything else is only romance. (AT, 146)
- As she spoke to her immortal and all-powerful God -- a God she had disconsolately adopted from Laziz... (AT, 148)
- Her life was all Laziz: they could not contemplate themselves without each other. It was Laziz/Nigora; Nigora/Laziz; and Laziz bored her. (AT, 149)
- Somewhere, everywhere, a girl is taking her clothes off. This much was true. Nigora could agree with this. But something else, she thought, was also true. Somewhere, everywhere, a girl was being raped. And the question was: how far away? How far away did something have to happen before it stopped being your responsibility? How far away did a rape need to be? Two streets? A country? A separate universe? (AT, 152)
- She was not sure if the vocabulary for everything really existed. She was not convinced by everyone's assumption of linguistic comprehensiveness. The feeling she got, for instance, when watching The Philadelphia Story, was not quite sadness; it was not quite melancholy. It was more to do with a sensation of size, of overwhelming size. (AT, 153)
- She remembered her father coming into the empty kitchen, letting his keys splay on the table. She remembered him biting the cap off a biro, as he made notes on a pile of manuscript. She remembered the first boy she ever slept with, Shuhrat, who used to swim while she lay and read on the grass by the river. He got out and lay beside her. She remembered his arms, the hair springing awry as it dried. But now she could not quite remember his face. She remembered his eyes were brown, but she could not remember his eyes. She only remembered that she knew they were brown. (-) And she missed her mother. In this new city, where Laziz was her one companion, she wanted to be home again. She wanted to be there in the kitchen, with her mother talking. And her father, as she talked, would pluck a stray hair from the base of her neck. There was a bowl of sweets on the kitchen table, underneath a tablecloth. (-) Nigora was a minor character. (AT, 154)
- She remembered writing her initials on the condensation in the car window, as her father drove her to piano lessons. She remembered the letters leaking downwards, obeying the line of gravity. (AT, 154)
- The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. (AT, 155)
- Glad Parks-Schultz's name suggests she is as dull as her mystery, an insincerely cheery woman compactly assembled, her bland orb face stacked directly atop her middle like a snowman's. Her name suggests a curt and stilted manner. We see her barking monotone pleasantries, scaring children unintentionally. There is no sense arguing with this perception, even if there is only a little truth to it. We cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz, we can only hear her name in our heads, and her name has carved a lumpen shape for her there. (Heidi Julavits, 159)
- Mothers are, in some soupy way, to blame for every act of criminality. (HJ, 161)
- Confusing, and yet this was how it happened, or rather this was how this past of hers existed. As an ever-shifting matrix of falsely interconnected selves. (HJ, 164)
- 'You loved to self-destruct in a crowd. (HJ, 164)
- She finds herself recalling incidents that are technically impossible to recall, looking up from her changing table as a weeks-old infant, a miserable ball of heat and squirm observing the haggard look on her mother's face, then gradually moving forward again, each memory chain-linked only by this: all involved her mother. This is why she doesn't put much stock in so-called secrets,, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at somebody else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused. (HJ, 165)
- The sky has purpled behind the oak trees, the island indicated only by the faraway blinking of disembodied lights. (HJ, 166)
- Lamplight from the study spread like a white carpet over the lawn. Somebody was awake. Her mother, no doubt. (HJ, 167)
- The last thing Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sees before she dies is the translucent reflection of her own sleeping face, her hands folded peacefully on top of a book whose title is inscrutable. (HJ, 167)
- A yard could be a whole world, like her yard when she was a kid had been a whole world. (George Saunders, 173)
- ...they could mess around and afterward lie there making plans, and he could do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again. (-) Why that laugh/snort meant so much to her she had no freaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha. (GS, 175)
- Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal. (GS, 177)
- Ha ha! She wasn't stupid. She just made bad choices. (GS, 179)
- Money can't buy you happiness, but happiness isn't everything. (Jonathan Safran Foer, 184)
- It's good to hold your money in a fist. (JSF, 185)
- But then I have pains, I gotta tell you. They start at the ends of my fingernails, almost like little animals biting me. Eventually they spread somewhat. And in the chest. The scan said nothing was wrong, but you think that makes any difference to my chest? (JSF, 185)
- 'Stop it,' her mother said, but laughed. The orange lipstick she'd worn all day at the bank had faded, leaving only a few vertical stripes in the dry creases of her lips. (Vendela Vida, 189)
- Her eyes were the color of nutmeg, and her wide cheeks were so flat they seemed pressed up against glass. Her hair was brown and straight, except at the bangs, where it hung in a series of S's. (VV, 190)
- They sat at the bar. Gabrielle had never been so aware of her posture and her age. She was eleven. She wore a lavender corduroy dress with a long-ribboned bow at the collar. (VV, 191)
- 'What do I smell like?' (-) 'Sweet, like strawberries,' Gabrielle said. It was true, she did smell like strawberries, but she also smelled like sweat. Not in a bad way, and not in a French way -- there was just a trace of something fermenting. (VV, 191)
- In the living room, Gabrielle's father and mother sat in the loveseat, like they always did, side by side and facing the same direction, as though riding in a bus. (VV, 192)
- Gabrielle sat up watching her, the light of the moon sliding through the blinds, striping their bodies. Soleil slept on her stomach with one leg falling off the side of the bed, like she had been poisoned. (VV, 194)
- By Thursday it was clear Soleil was bored. She walked around the house balancing water glasses on her head and turning the flowers in vases upside down. 'I learned this from a florist in Denmark,' she said. She had learned everything -- candle-making, Tai Chi, Portuguese -- somewhere else. (VV, 194)
- Soleil was big-boned and tall, and the whiteness of her outfit highlighted her size. She looked like a small ship. (VV, 196)
- Gabrielle first saw Katy through the window of her living room. She was bent over, brushing the underside of her blonde hair furiously, as if beating a rug. Soleil knocked on the door and walked in. Katy turned upright, her face pink, her hair enormous. (VV, 199)
- 'We brought groceries,' Soleil said. (-) 'You're always the best guest,' Katy said. (-) 'I'm always a guest.' (VV, 199)
- Finally, they settled on dresses that required them to adjust their bra straps with safety pins. Katy's hemline was high; Soleil's neckline was low; watching them standing side by side, Gabrielle thought they looked like they'd gone crazy with a pair of scissors. (VV, 200)
- Gabrielle watched the women's faces, and saw the stern look that passed between their inebriated eyes. She felt as though she'd swallowed a stone and it was making its way to her stomach. (VV, 200)
- Gabrielle stared at the mirror. She couldn't focus on anything she was seeing -- she saw a ghostly shape and a flashing light. She didn't look anything like herself, and, at the moment, this was an enormous relief. The stone in her throat was gone. (VV, 201)
- Keith's eyes, she noticed, were like her dad's - green and feline. (VV, 201)
- Soleil looked at Keith intently, as if he were a full glass of wine she didn't want to spill. (VV, 201)
- By the time the boat docked, it was clear alcohol had affected Katy and Soleil in different ways: Soleil was loud and Katy was quiet. (VV, 203)
- They all spilled into Katy's living room, which, Gabrielle thought, suddenly seemed to small to accommodate their limbs, their smells, their shrieks. (VV, 203)
- Gabrielle slept on the itchy living room couch. Or tried to -- noises filled the house. Doors closed and toilets flushed and a bed squeaked like a child's toy. (VV, 203)
- Finally, (Soleil) turned to Gabrielle with eyes that were strangely dull, dark as wet soil. 'Oh, grow up,' she said. (VV, 204)
- ...but we're all children when we sleep. For this reason, I always let men see me sleep early on in a relationship. It makes them realize that, even though I am five feet eleven, I am fragile and need to be taken care of. A man who can see the weakness of a giant knows that he is a man indeed. (Miranda July, 207)
- We talked ceaselessly for the next two hours, having the conversation that is specifically about everything. (MJ, 208)
- My life was far below us, in an orangey-pink stucco apartment building. It seemed as though I might never have to return to it now. The salt of his shoulder buzzed on the tip of my tongue. I might never stand in the middle of the living room and wonder what to do next. I sometimes stood there for up to two hours, unable to generate enough momentum to eat, to go out, to clean, to sleep. It seemed unlikely that someone who had just bitten and been bitten by a celebrity would have this kind of problem. (MJ, 210)
- I felt warm and simple. Nothing bad could ever happen to me while I was holding hands with him, and when he let go I would have the number that ended in four. I'd wanted a number like this my whole life. (MJ, 210)
- He helped me pull my carry-on bag down from the bin; it looked obscenely familiar. (MJ, 210)
- That evening I found myself standing in the middle of the living room floor(...) flirting with the emptiness in the center of the room. I wanted to see if I could start again. But, of course, I knew what the answer would be. The longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move didn't make it any easier. (MJ, 213)
- Over the course of my life I've used the number many times. Not the telephone number, just the four. When I first met my husband, I used to whisper 'four' while we had intercourse, because it was so painful. (...) I whispered 'four' when my dad died of lung cancer. When my daughter got into trouble doing God knows what in Mexico City, I said 'four' to myself as I gave her my credit-card number over the phone. (MJ, 214)
- I hadn't whispered 'four' in years. The idea of luck made me feel a little weary now, like Christmas when you're not in the mood. (MJ, 214)
- I dialed all the digits, including the invisible one that had shepherded me through my adult life. It was no longer in service. Of course it wasn't. (Mj, 214)
- I looked down at the number and felt a tidal swell of loss. It was too late. I had waited too long. (MJ, 214)
- 'I've never stayed at someone's house,' Cindy Stubenstock convesses. 'How do you do it? When you get there - what do you do - how do you check in?' (...) 'And what if you can't sleep - what if you need to get up and walk around? Do you have your own bathroom - I can't stay anywhere without my own bathroom even with my husband. If you pee, do you flush? What if someone hears you? It just seems so stressful.' (A.M. Homes, 221)
- 'Turns out their Warhols aren't Warhols - they're knockoffs like cheap Louis Vuittons on Canal Street.' (AH, 224)
- __Long had the poets pointed to the steep green hills around the village, noting in prose and song that with their irrational surves, their ridges rising and falling just so, the low mountains resembled the shapes of sleeping men and women. Most practical people thought the poets were pushing it a bit too far, poets being poets, but then something new happened one morning... (Dave Eggers, 229)
- ...and during the summer, the days stretched elliptically, morning meeting morning. (DE, 230)
- When there are two men and one woman, the math was cruel. What was the third to do? (DE, 232)
- There was a low rolling fog that day, woolen and colorless... (DE, 232)
- Still, there was pleasure in certain parts of a day. The first break of sun through the oval-shaped stand of pines in the flatlands to the east. A swim in the cold ocean in the afternoon. Laying on the bald peak, letting the warm rock dry his front while the sun dried his back. And yet, he did not know why he should live, why he should keep his eyes open. After a few days of near-joy, he had settled into something between life and sleep. He had seen so much. He was tired. He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again. (DE, 232-33)*
- ...Soren and Magdelena, who by then slept side by side, unmoveable, their bodies connected in a dozen ruthless ways. (DE, 233)
- He walked north, the sun a rising friend at his side, and found that the trees dwindled as he strode. (DE, 233)
- Making her laugh gave him something like pleasure, though in the moments of quiet he felt he was on the moon, frozen and dark. (DE, 233)
- So this is how they lived. For some time Theo, like a tree living in the shadow of taller trees, found a way to live off reflected light. (DE, 233)
- ...he bathed in cold black lakes, and he caught flocks of birds from the sky and ate them with something like hunger. (DE, 234)
- ...he found it harder, so much harder than before, when leaving Magdelena's perimeter. To be more than a few steps away from Amaranth caused him vertigo. His legs were not what they once were, and leaving her seemed a foolish act. (DE, 235)
- Sleep came like the lightest rain. He felt it on his skin, something like a mist, numbing his legs, his arms. He could not recall how the last long sleep had begun, but what was happening now to him seemed familiar and right. A sigh escaped him as he lay next to Amaranth, Amaranth so warm, the contour of his side echoing hers, a valley forming between them. His eyes grew heavy and could no longer stay open to the world. When he closed them, though, he still saw her shape. Her constancy kept him strong and allowed him rest. (DE, 235)
- He was, that first time, in what I would soon learn to call one of is 'ellipsistic' moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, struggling to finish a thought or begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. (Jonathan Lethem, 240)
- ...over moldering shoes... (JL, 240)
- Perkus Tooth, I'd learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. (JL, 241)
- His shirt's collar was grubby and crumpled; the green-gray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor's bucket. (JL, 242)
- ...spurred by nothing better than a cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. (...) Was I curious about Echolalia, or Morrisson Roog's faked suicide, or Perkus Tooth's curious intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye's gaze? All of it and none of it, that's the only answer. Perhaps I already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I'd drifted. How very soon after our first encounter I'd come to adore and need Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred's office or that elevator. (JL, 243)
- To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. (JL, 245)
- I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily. (JL, 245)
- Perkus reminded me of an Edvard Munch painting I'd once seen, a self-portrait showing the painter wide-eyed and whiskered, shrunken within his clothes. (JL, 246)
- He pulled out a chair at a small, linoleum-topped table, like something you'd see in a diner. The chair matched the table -- a dinette set, a collector's item. Perkus Tooth was nothing if not a collector. (JL, 246)
- Out, for Perkus Tooth, I'd now begun to learn, wasn't usually far. He liked to feed at a glossy hamburger palace around the corner, on Second Avenue, called Jackson Hole, a den of gleaming chrome and newer, faker versions of the linoleum table in his kitchen, lodged in chubby red-vinyl booths. At four in the afternoon we were pretty well alone there, the jukebox blaring hits to cover our bemused, befogged talk. It had been a while since I'd smoked pot; everything was dawning strange, signals received through an atmosphere murky with hesitations, the whole universe drifting untethered like Perkus Tooth's vagrant eyeball. The waitress seemed to know Perkus, but he didn't greet her or touch his menu. He asked for a cheeseburger deluxe and a Coca-Cola. Helpless, I dittoed his order. Perkus seemed to dwell in this place as he had at Criterion's offices, indifferently, obliquely, as if he'd been born there yet still hadn't taken notice of it. (JL, 247)
- He had the waitress refill his gallon-sized Coke, then, as our afternoon turned to evening, washed it all down with black coffee. In our talk, marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloudbank penetrated by Fokker airplanes. Did I read the New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. (...)the New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. (JL, 248-249)
- The falsely casual 'so' masking a pure anxiety. (JL, 249)
- The horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream -- below it lay the crucial material, the crux. (JL, 249)
- The feverish words were delivered with a merciless cool. Like the cut of his suit, wrinkled though it might be. And the obsessively neat lettering on the VHS tape and on his CDs. Perkus Tooth might have one crazy eye, but it served almost as a warning not to underestimate his scruples, how attentively he measured his listener's skepticism, making those minute adjustments that were the signature of his or anyone's sanity -- the interpersonal realpolitik of persuasion. The eye was mad and the rest of him was almost steely. (JL, 250)
- 'Those rock people, the rock critics, I mean -- do you want to know what they really are?' - 'Oh, sure -- what are they?' - 'Super-high-functioning autistics.' (JL, 250)
- 'The thing about a migraine-type experience is that it's like being only half alive. You find yourself walking through this tomb-like world, everything gets far away and kind of dull and dead. Smoking pulls me back into the world, it restores my appetite for food and sex and conversation.' (JL, 252)
- Soon enough those days all blurred happily together, for in the disconsolate year of Janice's broken orbit Perkus Tooth was probably my best friend. I suppose Perkus was the curiosity, I the curiosity-seeker, but he surely added me to his collection as much as the reverse. (JL, 252)
- I hadn't seen the Columbo episode since it was first aired, and it gave me a feeling of seasick familiarity. (JL, 253)
- Only half listening to Perkus, I went on staring at my childhood self, a ghost disguised as a twelve-year-old, haunting the corridors... (JL, 255)
- He told me to sit down, and not to worry, but his voice was withered, drawn down inside his skinny chest. I was persuaded at once that he spoke to me from within that half-life, that land of the dead he'd so precisely evoked with his first descriptions of cluster headache. (JL, 255)
- Then, growing compulsive, (...) I started reorganizing his scattered CDs, matching the disks to their dislocated jewel cases. This kind of puttering may be how I set myself at ease, another type of self-medication. (JL, 256)
- ...about his capacity for shifting into the satori-like state he called 'ellipsistic'; how, when he ventured there, he glimpsed bonus dimensions, worlds inside the world. Most of his proudest writing, he'd explained, emanated from some glimpses of this variety of ellipsistic knowledge. (JL, 257)
- I wanted so badly for him to have his ellipsis, have it wholly and unreservedly, wanted him to have it without cluster -- however terribly much I suspected that one might be the price of the other. I wanted this selfishly, for, it dawned on me then, Perkus Tooth -- his talk, his apartment, the space that had opened from the time I'd run into him at Criterion, then called him on the telephone -- was my ellipsis. It might not be inborn in me, but I'd discovered it nonetheless in him. Where Perkus took me, in his ranting, in his enthusiasms, in his abrupt, improbable asides, was the world inside the world. And I didn't want him smothered in the tomb-world of migraine. (JL, 258)
- __The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother. She is full tonight, and brighter than the brightest neon; there are folds of red in her vast amber. Maybe she is a harvest moon, a Comanche moon, I do not know. I have never seen a moon so low and so full of her own deep brightness. My mother is six years dead tonight, and Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep.__(Colm Toibin, 261)
- The apartment needed to be furnished, and I spent two or three days taking pleasure in the sharp bite of buying things... (CT, 262)
- I phoned my friend a few times a day, and she came shopping with me sometimes and she was fun and I enjoyed those days. The days when no one in Ireland could find me to tell me that my mother was dying. (CT, 263)
- She spoke about the family as though it were as distant as the urban district council or the government or the United Nations, but she knew and I knew that there were just the three of us. We were the family, and there is only one thing that a family is ever asked to decide in a hospital. (CT, 264)
- You know that I do not believe in God. I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me in words, or in music maybe, or in a set of colours, and then I entertain them merely for their beauty and only briefly. I do not even believe in Ireland. But you know, too, that in these years of being away there are times when Ireland comes to me in a sudden guise, when I see a hint of something familiar that I want and need. I see someone coming towards me, with a soft way of smiling, or a stubborn, uneasy face, or a way of moving warily through a public place, or a raw, almost resentful stare into the middle distance. In any case, I went to JFK that evening... (CT, 264)
- The time we were left by our mother in our aunt's house has no drama attached to it. It was all greyness, strangeness. Our aunt dealt with us in her own distracted way. Her husband was mild, distant, almost good-humoured. (CT, 266-67)
- We were emptied of everything, and in the vacuum came something like silence -- almost no sound at all, just some sad echoes and dim feelings. (CT, 267)
- But there are nights now in this strange, flat, and forsaken place when those sad echoes and dim feelings come to me slightly louder than before. They are like whispers, or trapped, whimpering sounds. And I wish that I had you here, and I wish that I had not called you all those other times when I did not need to as much as I do now. (CT, 267)
- ...I could feel that this going home to my mother's bedside would not be simple, that some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage. (CT, 268)
- ...and I drove across Dublin in the washed light of that early September morning. I drove through Drumcondra, Dorset Street, Mountjoy Square, Gardiner Street, and the streets across the river that led south, as though they were a skin that I had shed. (CT, 268)
- And I moved, in those days -- that Tuesday morning to the Friday night when she died -- from feeling at times a great remoteness from her wanting fiercely, almost in the same moment, my mother back to where she had always been, in witty command of her world, full of odd dreams and perspectives, difficult, ready for life. She loved, as I did, books and music and hot weather. As she grew older she had managed, with her friends and with us, a pure charm, a lightness of tone and touch. But I knew not to trust it, not to come close, and I never did. I managed, in turn, to exude my own lightness and charm, but you know that, too. You don't need me to tell you that either, do you? (CT, 269)
- But nights are long in winter, when darkness comes down at four o'clock and people have time to think of everything. (CT, 270)
- I am away from the east wind. I am in a place where so much is empty because it was never full, where things are forgotten and swept away, if there ever were things. I am in a place where there is nothing. Flatness, a blue sky, a soft, unhaunted night. A place where no one walks. Maybe I am happier here than I would be anywhere else, and it is only the poisonous innocence of the moon tonight that has made me want to dial your number and see if you are awake. (CT, 270)
- But, despite all the warning signals, or perhaps even because of them, I had kept my distance. (CT, 272)
- ...a hermit crab in a shoebox (crayon-decorated with the coral-hands and seaweed boas of the ocean) and the two boys would set the striped shell on the table and wait for it to emerge like a celebrity from a limo; first the filament-feelers, then the dainty little legs, and then at last the great brown claw that meant Hermie was feeling bold. (Andrew Sean Greer, 279)
- Martin, like any child, also had unplayable toys. Either broken, like the legless horse who rode only in Martin's solitary playtime, or out of sync with his age. There were, of course, the puppets themselves, lovingly donated by a rich aunt. (ASG, 279)
- They were too featureless to be loved -- no child's mind could fold itself small enough to fit inside -- and there were so many of them, a hundred, perhaps... (ASG, 279)
- But mostly they were so young that they needed nothing more than to run in circles among the trees, slipping now and then on the sickle-shapes leaves, finding new and yet newer hiding places for their tiny bodies among the bushes and the few patio chairs, waiting with a tiny beating frog-heart in the darkness of the woodpile until either the other boy leapt upon him with his own squeal of terror or the game went on too long, with the seeker beginning to cry beneath the scent and the surf-sound of the trees, and the hider jumping up, nearly in tears himself at having been lost for so long. (ASG, 280)
- That was life until thirteen. (-) There are a thousand kinds of thirteen, more than there are kinds of fifty, or eighty. There is Oddly Childlike Thirteen, and Worried and Obsessive, and Alarmingly Manly, and Girlish, and Gothic Horror, and Scapegoat, and Something Happened to Him as a Child, and Beatific and Despised, and Lonely, and Just Plain Stubborn. There is Manic and there is Depressed, still leading separate lives. There is Loves Adults and there is Steals Dad's Antique Pornography. There is Steals Everything, Period. There is Already Smokes and Already Drinks and Already Screws. There is Weeps Alone. And Misses Childhood. And Hates the World. He was none of these; he was less than these. He was the kind of boy who had been a prodigy at six and faded by seven, the kind who would be handsome by twenty and show his old yearbook photos to girlfriends, unable to feel joy when they'd exclaim how hopeless he used to be. Somewhere in between those points was where he lay, and somehow -- and this was the hopelessly sad part -- he knew it. If you asked him, on a test sheet, to name his own type of thirteen, he would write in his seismographic hand: "Waits for Time to Pass." (ASG, 281)
- ...his hair parted and set with a wet comb, dried into long lines like grass when it's been raked of leaves -- possibly sprayed with a canister of his father's Commander, it's that solid. It's a shame that photos, like children, remember only rare moments and never the everyday, for he has never looked like this in his life. (ASG, 281)
- Or perhaps he has set his face this way as he waits. For his father to adjust the lens; for the sweat to trickle into the pits of his new shirt; for the terrible moment when they have to go. A dismembered hand floating in the ink of navy. One gold button, the only proud thing in that room. (ASG, 282)
- The photo has captured nothing. (...) Not this boy's beautiful, desperate love, tamped-down inside him like brown sugar in a measuring cup, which should fill every corner of the frame. Which should make that sad house plant beside him burst into flower. (ASG, 282)
jul 12 2020 ∞
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jul 12 2020 +