181. ALL the KING'S MEN

Robert Penn Warren 1946

It has been 4 months since I've rated a book 5/5. This book deserves it for so many reasons. The plot is multi-layered and very absorbing. The prose is deceptively simple but so profound and enthralling. Supposedly based on the real life story of politician Huey Long of Louisiana, the novel traces the life of Willie Stark as he rose from an unknown to a powerful governor as chronicled by his political aide Jack Burden, the novel's narrator. But as much as this classic is about Willie Stark's politics and the power (and corruption) it brings, it is more about the story of Jack Burden and his complicated relationships with his mother, and his childhood friends Adam and Anne. Great literature at its best!

'MASON CITY.
To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up.'(opening lines)

'We would go down the Row -- the line of houses facing the bay -- and that was the place where all my pals had been. Anne who was an old maid, or damned near it. Adam, who was a famous surgeon... And Judge Irwin, who lived in that last house, and who had been a friend of my family and who used to take me hunting with him and taught me to shoot and taught me to ride and read history to me from the leather-bound books in the big study in his house.'(40)

"Dirt's a funny thing," the Boss said. "come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?"(45)

'Or is it possible that fellows like Willie Stark are born outside of luck, good or bad, and luck, which is what about makes you and me what we are, doesn't have anything to do with them, for they are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until the end. And if that is the case, then their life history is a process of discovering what they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us. And if that is the case, then Lucy wasn't Willie's luck. Or his unluck either. She was part of the climate in which the process of discovering the real Willie was taking place.'(63)

'There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place.'(128-129)

"No," the Boss corrected, "I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. ... But I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone's to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.'(136)

'But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge. The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it because so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn't eat.'(221)

'The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist any more, speaks a name -- Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave -- which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, "Gee, listen to this -- 'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves --'" the Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you anymore.'(234-235)

'... for when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it had been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus...'(282)

'If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.'(311)

"Jack", he said, "politics is always a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price."(343)

'... by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which we cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?'(351)

'A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it.'(424)

Second Harvest Book edition 1996
438 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
Book idea from Shelley @ Book Clutter. Thank you so much. Her awesome review is HERE.
BTW, I have found my favorite passage to date: passage in red from p.282.

177. BLINDNESS

Jose Saramago 1997
Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero

If you are weak in your heart (or in your stomach), this magnificently written book may not be for you. It is hard enough that you will be groping for the conversations buried within the lengthy paragraphs and the chapters that are undesignated. But harder still is where the story takes you: the dreadful abyss of the haunting life after an epidemic of 'white blindness' hits a city and the entire population (except one) goes blind. The main characters are the first people to go blind, led by the sole exception, the doctor's wife. She becomes the eyes for the doctor, the wife of the first blind man, the boy with the squint, the old man with the black eyepatch, the girl with the dark glasses, and later, the dog of tears. Vivid, detailed and organized, this atmospheric book exposes the frailness of humanity in a way that is both disturbing and thought-provoking. Is there anything we can't bear or won't do when the unimaginable thing happens?

'The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.'(opening lines)

'Who would have believed it. Seen merely at a glance, the man's eyes seem healthy, the iris looks bright, luminous, the sclera white, as compact as porcelain. The eyes wide open, the wrinkled skin of the face, his eyebrows suddenly screwed up, all this, as anyone can see, signifies that he is distraught with anguish. With a rapid movement, what was in sight has disappeared behind the man's clenched fists, as if he were still trying to retain inside his mind the final image captured, a round red light at the traffic lights. I am blind, I am blind, he repeated in despair as they helped him to get out of the car, and the tears welling up made those eyes which he claimed were dead, shine even more.'(2)

'Like most people, he had often played as a child at pretending to be blind, and, after keeping his eyes closed for five minutes, he had reached the conclusion that blindness, undoubtedly a terrible affliction, might still be relatively bearable if the unfortunate victim had retained sufficient memory, not just of the colours, but also of forms and planes, surfaces and shapes, assuming of course, that this one was not born blind. He had even reach the point of thinking that the darkness in which the blind live was nothing other than the simple absence of light, that what we call blindness was something that simply covered the appearance of being the things, leaving them intact behind their black veil. Now, on the contrary, here he was, plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible.'(6)

'The shouting had died down, now a confusion of sounds was coming from the hallway, these were the blind, driven like sheep, bumping into each other, crammed together in the doorways, some lost their sense of direction and ended up in other wards, but the majority, stumbling along, huddled into groups or dispersed one by one, desperately waving their hands in the air like people drowning, burst into the ward in a whirlwind, as if being pushed from the outside by a bulldozer.'(67)

'... if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality.'(78)

'If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals, words she repeated so often that the rest of the ward ended up by transforming her advice into a maxim, a dictum, into a doctrine, a rule of life, words which deep down were so simple and elementary, probably it was just that state of mind, propitious to any understanding of needs and circumstances, that contributed, even if only in a minor way to the warm welcome the old man with the black eyepatch found there when he peered through the door and asked those inside, Any chance of a bed here.'(116)

'How can we play a game if we cannot see what we are playing, asked the wife of the first blind man, Well, not a game exactly, each of us must say what we saw at the moment we went blind, That could be embarrassing, someone pointed out, Those who do not wish to take part in the game can remain silent, the important thing is that no one should try to invent anything, Give us an example, said the doctor, Certainly, replied the old man with the black eyepatch, I went blind when I was looking at my blind eye, What do you mean, It's very simple, I felt as if the inside of the empty orbit were inflamed and I removed the patch to satisfy my curiosity '(127)

'We're in an impossible situation, it has been impossible ever since we came into this place, yet we go on putting up with it, You're an optimist, doctor, No, I'm not an optimist, but I cannot imagine anything worse than our present existence, Well, I'm not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil,'(144)

'Little by little, under the murky yellowish light of the dim lamps, the ward descended into a deep slumber, bodies comforted by the three meals consumed that day, as had rarely happened before. If things continue like this, we'll end up once more reaching the conclusion that even in the worst misfortune it is possible to find enough good to be able to bear the aforesaid misfortune with patience,'(151)

'Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good, such are the contradictions of this world of ours, some warrant more consideration than others,'(213)

'Today is today, tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings, today is my responsibility,'(252)

'what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should trust the latter, forgive this moralising speech, you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in the world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it,'(276)

'If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls, Their souls, asked the old man with the eyepatch, Or their minds, the name does not matter, it was then that, surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.'(276)

'Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armours, we might say.'(281)

'What is your name, Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters,'(290)

'The difficult thing is not living with other people, it's understanding them,'(301)

a Harvest Book edition
326 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
Book idea from Bethany @ Subtle Melodrama (thanks!). Her awesome review is HERE.

174. FIGHT CLUB

Chuck Palahniuk 1996

Yes, this novel is different. Yes, it is a read out of my comfort zone. And yes, it is crude, raw and at times bizarre. After all, it is about an unnamed narrator in search of a meaningful life, whose idea of managing his chronic insomnia is joining support groups for terminal illnesses he does not have. There he meets and falls for Marla, a fellow faker. His best friend is Tyler Durden, inventor of Fight Club (a group of men who beat each other up for fun in the basement of bars) and Project Mayhem (a group of men who commit crimes intentionally to cause havoc). And yet, buried within this chaos is a significant life lesson, the unraveling of which I found to be so original, entertaining, and surprisingly moving. So yes, I like this book very much!

'Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.'(opening lines)

'"You cry," Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. " Go on now and cry."
The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost inside. This is when I'd cry. Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.'(17)

'Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.'(22)

'"No" Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla's eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so 'smarvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we're all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.'(38)

'The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.'(48)

"The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.'(48)

'You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends.'(48)

'That's the third rule in fight club, when someone say stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over... Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.'(49)

'After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off.'(49)

'At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.'(52)

'This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.
You had their full attention.
People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.'(107)

'You don't ask questions is the first rule in Project Mayhem... the second rule of Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions... The third rule is no excuses.... The fourth rule is no lies.'(122)

'It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.... Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.'(125)

'You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.
We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.'(149)

1st Owl Book Edition
208 pages
Book owned
Book idea from JRMD, thanks!
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

164. BALZAC and the LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS

Dai Sijie 2000
Translated from the French by Ina Rilke 2001

The magic of story-telling comes alive within this enchanting fable about the narrator and Luo, two  teenage boys sent to remote Phoenix mountain for re-education during Mao Zedong's reign in China, 1971. What would have been a very hard and drudging life drastically changes after they discover and take possession of a suitcase full of translated classic books. They become particularly enraptured with Balzac's book, Ursule Mirouet, which they use to win the heart of a beautiful Chinese seamstress.

'The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin. Among the possessions brought to this mountain village by the two "city youths" -- which was how they saw Luo and me -- it was the sole item that exuded an air of foreignness, of civilisation, and therefore aroused suspicion.'(opening lines)

'A few words about re-education: towards the end of 1968, the Great Helmsman of China's Revolution, Chairman Mao, launched a campaign that would leave the country profoundly altered. The universities were closed and all the "young intellectuals," meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, were sent to the countryside to be "re-educated by the poor peasants."'(6)

"The saying goes: a sincere heart can make even a stone blossom. So tell me, was the flower girl's heart lacking in sincerity?"(35)

'Ba-er-zar-ke." Translated into Chinese, the name of the French author comprised four ideograms. The magic of translation! The ponderousness of the two syllables as well as the belligerent, somewhat old-fashioned ring of the name were quite gone, now that the four characters -- very elegant, each composed of just a few strokes -- banded together to create an unusual beauty, redolent with an exotic fragrance as sensual as the perfume wreathing a wine stored for centuries in a cellar.'(56)

'Then I was seized with an idea: I would copy out my favourite passages from Ursule Mirouet, word for word. It was the first time in my life that I had felt any desire to copy sentences from a book.'(58)

'The old man ran his fingers lightly over the strings of his instrument, which he held like a guitar. After a few notes he launched, almost inaudibly, into song.  Our attention was immediately drawn to the contortions of his stomach, the sight of which was so extraordinary as to obliterate his voice, the tune and everything else from our consciousness. Being so thin, he didn't actually have a stomach at all, just wrinkled skin forming innumerable tiny folds on his abdomen. When he began to sing the wrinkles billowed out, forming little waves that rippled across his tanned and gleaming body. The band of plaited straw that served as his belt began to undulate too. Every now and then it disappeared into a roll of skin, but just as it seemed lost forever in the tidal flow it re-emerged, dignified and pristine. A magical waistband.'(73)

'When planning our strategy a few days earlier we had come to the conclusion that the success of our illegal entry hinged on one thing: knowing were Four-Eyes had hidden his suitcase. How would we find it? '(98)

'It was all such a long time ago, but one particular image from our sting of re-education is still etched in my memory with extraordinary precision: a red-beaked raven keeping watch as Luo crawled along a narrow track with a yawning chasm on either side. On his back he carried the inconspicuous, work-soiled bamboo hod in which he had secreted Old Go, as Balzac's Pere Goriot was titled in Chinese -- the book he was going to read to the Little Seamstress, the lovely mountain girl in need of culture.'(109)

'Suddenly, I felt the stirrings of an uncontrollably sadistic impulse, like a volcano about to erupt. I thought about all the miseries of re-education, and slowed down the pace of the treadle.'(134)

'That the ultimate pay-off of this metamorphosis, this feat of Balzacian re-education, was yet to come didn't occur to us. Were we wrapped up in ourselves to notice the warning signals? Did we overestimate the power of love? Or, quite simply, had we ourselves failed to grasp the essence of the novels we have read to her?'(180)

First Anchor Books Edition, November 2002
184 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

121. ROCK ISLAND LINE

David Rhodes 1975

The perseverance of July Montgomery, the main protagonist of this marvelous novel is utterly amazing. After a car accident kills his parents John and Sharon, he runs away from his once protected life in a small town in Iowa via the Rock Island Line to find a new life alone in Philadelphia. Barely ten years old, he finds his first home underneath a train station and his first job selling newspapers. But life is not to be smooth for him, and after a series of failed associations, and in spite of meeting and falling in love with Mal, he decides to go back to his old house in Iowa to build a new life together. July's surprisingly uplifting insightful view of life in spite of all his tragic experiences is truly astounding.

'The old people remember Della and Wilson Montgomery as clearly as if just last Sunday after the church pot-luck dinner they had climbed into their gray Chevrolet and driven back out to their country home, Della waiving from the window and Wilson leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands.'(opening line)

'After all, how odd is it really to have a momentary temper flare, where all the petty grievances of several months come together in a perfect pinnacle of outrage, actualize, exorcise, and afterward leave no trace? How odd is that? Not so very. Indeed, what would married life be without just such instantaneous outbursts, where a few spoken words become a symbol for absolute, incorrigible evil?'(9)

'As John grew older, he learned more about himself. From the very beginning he must have been aware of frightening inconsistency in the way experiences came to him. He must have felt (especially in moments of remorse) that his life was insubstantial because he could have two completely unrelated ways of viewing it-- two attitudes, neither of which could be said to be less valid or real. A feeling of disintegration-- drowning, with nothing to grab hold of that could float.'(35)

'Quickly, Sarah came over and sat beside him on the floor with his truck, and in her silent-fighter voice talked to him, and explained quite clearly and exactly how oldness, old age-- that time at the end of a person's long happy life-- that time just before they became dead-- made them act in ways different from people who were not at the end of their lives-- and that the whole thing, most importantly, the complete overall picture, was good and rejoiceful.'(108)

"You're both chicken," said Earl. "You're yellow."

'This taunt, which by itself has probably been responsible for more misdeeds among young people than any other, cut them to the quick. It's a wicked threat, one which almost anyone can wield with the same weight, one which is secretly used against oneself with terrible consequences. Its seriousness can never be overlooked-- the weapon of self-destruction, yet the foundation of noble action.'(158)

'I was deceived, he thought. Somehow, though the blame is mostly mine, I was deceived into believing nothing terrible would ever happen to me. Everyone else knew... that all it takes is one bit of bad luck-- the tiniest quirk of fate, and zip, bring in two caskets, if the little fool was running, we'd hear 'im. '(128)

'After spending a day with her parents, who generally didn't let her talk at all, this attention was welcome and it made her feel important; but better were the times when they laughed together, and best were the fleeting glimpses she had when he seemed a caricature of himself: because that was when she knew she had loved him from the first moment, as though his soul showed through him like a trapped, cloudy light wanting to come out, wishing for more air, always wanting only a couple of mouthfuls of clean air. It seemed he had somewhere inside him, bottled and smoldering though it might be, more life than in twenty of all other people she had known.' (277)

'With all these revolutionary things going on, it might be imagined that July found little time to think back on his previous life: that he would be completely occupied with the present. But such was not the case (nor was it likely to ever be). Each new emotion that he encountered seemed to let loose from his past, and the more expansive he became on the one hand, the more groundless he felt on the other, as in flying a kite, the brisker the wind, the easier to get up, but the harder to get down and the more likely to break a stick. Or so it seemed to him.'(281)

'Mal carried the necklace to the mirror in the kitchen and put it on. Looking into her own eyes and admiring the reflection, she thought: Now I must decide to stay or leave. She thought very hard, trying to be fair as possible, realizing that staying had to mean more than waiting, and leaving meant forever.'(319)

"We should take more time to notice things," he continued. "We should look and be open to more-- because the better feelings aren't the ones that come naturally. They have to be worked for. They come when everything else is shut out."(323)

'The last was the large, weightless package for July, and with the help of the puppy July tore into it, only to find it empty but for a small piece of paper on which she'd written in crayon with large, clumsy letters, making it look as though a second-grader had made it at school, Will you marry me?'(331)

'If you ever could know how much I love you, you'd be frightened.'(338)

"All I mean is that I feel sometimes that there should be more-- something that we would always be working towards. What we're doing now, is that what everybody else does, and is it the same thing for them, so on blah blah? Doesn't it seem that somehow there must be more? Because this can't be really living. Really living must be something else entirely. But maybe there isn't such a thing-- oh, I hope you're understanding all this in the right way. Maybe there isn't such a thing as really living at all, only just being alive."(344)

'The ability to be with oneself, he decided, was something that reached further back than anything else. Each person must have his own way, for better or worse, but the ease with which it can be tolerated can only depreciate from lack of practice, and never improve beyond what it was originally meant to be.'(355)

'As the days wore on, he had felt the possibilities contracting. Coming to an intersection, he could see that one and sometimes two of the four channels were slowly being sealed up, like doorways being cemented over, and it wasn't easy to get into them any more. Before long it would be impossible. He knew very clearly the substance that was sealing these avenues, knew how it was getting there but had no idea how to stop it. Invariably, it was the channels containing the good feeling which were being closed. He had seen also that the beginning work on the bad had started, and that the future held almost exclusively nonfeeling channels, when his thoughts would roll straight through his mind like a bowling ball down a narrow alley and , deviating just the slightest bit, would fall into the gutter, slide all the way to the end and drop into the machine to be returned.'(398)

"Keep yourself headed forward. There's nothing easy in this world-- and to give up is to lose everything. Do what you feel you have to, but do it in order to improve yourself. No running. Learn how to suffer and nothing will ever be able to hurt you. Reach as far as you possibly can with pride. Be more than you are able."(408)

A Milkweed Edition 2008

408 pages

Book Owned

A great review @ Bibliophiliac's blog can be found here.

83. the PAINTED VEIL

W. Somerset Maugham 1925

A quiet, uncluttered, straightforward book in its rendition of the pitfalls of adultery. When Walter Fane discovers his wife Kitty's involvement with another man Charles, he takes her to Mei-tan-fu, a far off place in China during a cholera epidemic. Kitty, brought up never wanting, raised to marry well, shallow and ignorant of sacrifice and devotion discovers what and how it is to be compassionate as she faces unimaginable poverty, hardship and death in this 'painted veil called life'.

'Kitty, coming to Hong Kong on her marriage, had found it hard to reconcile herself to the fact that her social position was determined by her husband's occupation... she has understood quickly that as the wife of the Government bacteriologist she was of no particular consequence. It made her angry.'(15)

'A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.'(21)

'Her beauty depended a good deal on her youth, and Mrs. Garstin realized that she must marry in the first flush of her maidenhood. When she came out she was dazzling: her skin was still her greatest beauty, but her eyes with their long lashes were so starry and yet so melting that it gave you a catch at the heart to look into them.'(23)

'Kitty in a panic married Walter Fane.'(25)

'But through all these day-dreams ran a current of apprehension. It was funny; it was as though the wood and the strings of the orchestra played Arcadian melodies and in the bass the drums, softly but with foreboding, beat a grim tattoo.'(47)

'Well, you know, women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.'(55)

'His tone was so contemptuous that she flushed with anger. And perhaps her anger was greater because she had never before heard him say to her any but sweet, flattering, and delightful things. She had been accustomed to find him subservient to all her whims.'(65)

'He loves me with all his heart and soul. He loves me passionately as I love him. You've found out. I'm not going to deny anything. Why should I? We've been lovers for a year and I'm proud of it. He means everything in the world to me and I'm glad that you know at last. We're sick to death of secrecy and compromise and all the rest of it. It was a mistake that I ever married you, I never should have done it, I was a fool. I never cared for you. We never had anything in common. I don't like the people you like and I'm bored by the thing that interests you. I'm thankful it's finished.'(65)

'I had no illusions about you,' he said. 'I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you... I knew that you'd only married me for convenience. I loved you so much, I didn't care.'(66)

'What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favor.'(66)

'Wounded vanity can make a woman more vindictive that a lioness robbed of her cubs.(67)

'One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.'(77)

'She was silent. Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden a suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.'(82)

'But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of colored wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming vastly and touched here and there but a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagant, but of an unimaginable richness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic place of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic, and unsubstantial to be the work of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.'(97)

'You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul.'(138)

'Beauty is also a gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.'(148)

'The dog it was that died.'(191)

'I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.'(196)

'Each member of the orchestra plays his own little instrument, and what do you think he knows of the complicated harmonies which unroll themselves on the indifferent air? He is concerned only with his small share. But he knows that the symphony is lovely, and though there's none to hear it, it is lovely still, and he is content to play his part.'(197)
_________________________________________

First Vintage International Edition, February 2004
246 pages
Book owned
_________________________________________

Personal note: This is a souvenir book bought from the Strand, New York City, February, 2010. For a great review check out Patricia's Particularity.

72. I CAPTURE the CASTLE

Dodie Smith 1948

Cassandra Mortmain at 17 lives with her family (her father, step-mother Topaz, brother Thomas, sister Rose, dog Heloise, cat Ab and helper Stephen) in an old English castle Godsend, it's tower Belmotte and a moat where she occasionally swims in the moonlight. Amidst this fairy tale and romantic setting is the reality that the castle is ancient and crumbling, their father is wasting his life away reading detective novels, they are very poor and hardly have any money for food, furniture and other necessities, and their life is soon to be very complicated by the arrival of Americans Simon and Neil Cotton. This delightful and enchanting book is divided into three books (the Sixpenny, Shilling and the Two-Guinea books) which are Cassandra's journals in her effort to become a writer and to capture the intricacies of her family life and the castle.

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy... And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring-- I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.'(opening lines)

'I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic--two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it.'(4)

'I am writing this journal partly to practice my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel--I intend to capture all our characters and put it in conversation... The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.'(4)

'I finish this entry sitting on the stairs. I think it worthy of note that I never felt happier in my life- despite sorrow for father, pity for Rose, embarrassment about Stephen's poetry and no justification for hope as regards our family's general outlook. Perhaps it is because I have satisfied my creative urge; or it may be due to the thought of eggs for tea.'(11)

'When I close my eyes, I see different castles--one in the sunset light of that first evening, one all fresh and clean as in our early days here, one as it is now. The last picture is very sad because of all our good furniture has gone...'(35)

'But there is something I want to capture. It has to do with the feeling I had when I watched the Cottons coming down the lane, the queer separate feeling. I like seeing people when they can't see me.'(63)

'Gentlemen are men who behave like gentlemen.'(103)

'He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening--I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.'(147)

'I was tired by then so I floated and Neil did too; it was lovely just drifting along, staring up at the stars. That was when we first heard the Vicar at the piano, playing "Air from Handel's Water Music, " one of his nicest pieces--I guessed he had chosen it to suit our swim, which I took very kindly.'(174)

'I do call it a sign of a beautiful nature if a girl who is in love and surrounded by all that splendor is lonely for her sister.'(193)

'I daresay I am being very sily but there it is! I DO NOT ENVY ROSE. When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending--I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters...'(197)

'Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return-- that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt I had discovered a great truth.'(224)

'Another great luxury is letting myself cry-- I always feel marvellously peaceful after that. But it is difficult to arrange times for it, as my face takes so long to recover; it isn't safe in the mornings if I am to look normal when I meet father at lunch, and afternoons are no better, as Thomas is home by five. It would be all right in bed at night but such a waste, as that is my happiest time. Days when father goes over to read in the Scoatney library are good crying-days.'(232)

'Man's extremity is God's opportunity... Of course, there are extremities at either end; extreme happiness invites religion almost as much as extreme misery.'(234)

'In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry--in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.'(234)

'I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.'(237)

"I've got to be needed, Cassandra-- I always have been. Men have either painted me, or been in love with me, or just plain ill-treated me-- some men had to do a lot of ill-treating, you know, it's good for their work; but one way or another, I've always been needed. I've got to inspire people, Cassandra--it's my job in life.'(274)

'And then--! Suddenly the whole plan was complete in my mind almost to the detail. But surely I meant it as a joke then? '(307)

'Now it's October. I am up on the mound, close to the circle of stones. There are still some bits of charred wood left from my Midsummer fire.'(330)

St. Martin's Press Edition
343 pages
Book borrowed from JRMD

69. A LESSON BEFORE DYING

Ernest J. Gaines 1993

This is a very moving novel, narrated in simple but effective prose. Set in 1940, in Bayone Louisiana, Grant Wiggins a teacher at odds with what his future life should be, debating whether to stay or leave his teaching job at a plantation school, is requested by his aunt and godmother to impart and teach life lessons to Jefferson, a young man falsely accused of murder and awaiting electrocution. Grant is to teach him how to die "like a man". Jefferson's lesson before dying affects Grant's own search of identity, beliefs and convictions.

'I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there.'(Opening lines)

'She knew, as we all knew, what the outcome would be. A white man had been killed during a robbery, one had been captured, and he, too, would have to die.'(4)

'But let us say he was not. Let us for a moment say he was not. What justice would be there to be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.'(8)

"The public defender, trying to get him off, called him a dumb animal." I told her: He said it would be like tying a hog down into that chair and executing him--an animal that didn't know what any of it was all about. The jury, twelve white men good and true, still sentenced him to death. Now his godmother wants me to visit him and make him know--prove to these white men--that he's not a hog, and he's a man. I'm supposed to make him a man. Who am I? God?"(31)

'What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?'(31)

'I don't know when I'm going to die, Jefferson. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe today. That's why I try to live as well as I can every day and not hurt people. Especially people who love me, people who have done so much for me, people who have sacrificed for me. I don't want to hurt those people. I want to help those people as much as I can.'(129)

"No matter had bad off we are," I said, "we still owe something. You owe something, Jefferson. Not to me. Surely not to that sheriff out there. But to your godmother. You must show her some understanding, some kind of love."(139)

'They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, we, us, white folks all, have decided it's time for you to die, because this is the convenient date and time.'(158)

'We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle--which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind. So he, too, must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own.'(167)

'And for Irene and for others there in the quarter, it's the same. They look at their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles, their brothers--all broken. They see me--and I, who grew up on that same plantation, can teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. I can give them something that neither a husband, a father, nor grandfather ever did, so they want to hold on as long as they can. Not realizing that their holding on will break me too. That in order for me to be what they think I am, what they want me to be, I must run as the others have done in the past.'(167)

'A whole gallona vanilla ice cream. Eat it with a spoon. My last supper. a whole gallona ice cream.'(170)

'A hero does for others. He would do anything for people he loves, because he knows it would make their lives better. I am not that kind of person, but I want you to be. You could give something to her, to me, to those children in the quarter. You could give them something that I never could. They expect it from me, but not from you. The white people out there are saying you don't have it--that you're a hog, not a man. But I know they are wrong. You have the potentials. We all have, no matter who we are.'(191)

'I want you to show then the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.'(191)

'A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth--and that's a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in.'(192)

'I cry, not from reaching any conclusion by reasoning, but because, lowly as I am, I am still part of the whole. '(194)

'Cause reading, writing, and 'rithmetic is not enough. You think that's all they sent you to school for? They sent you to school to relieve pain, to relieve hurt--and if you have to lie to do it, then you lie. You lie and you lie and you lie... You tell them that 'cause they have pain too, and you don't want to add yours--and you lie.'(218)

'i kno i care for nanan but i don't kno if love is care cuttin wood and haulin water and things like that i dont know it thats love or jus work to do an you say thats love but you say you kno i got mo an just that to say an when i lay ther at nite and cant sleep i try an think what you mean i got mo cause i aint done this much thinkin and this much writin in all my life befor

'sun goin down an i kno this the las one im gon ever see but im gon see one mo sunrise cause i aint gon sleep tonite
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First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, June 1994
256 pages
Book borrowed from the library

62. the BELL JAR

Sylvia Plath 1971

A sad and thought provoking story about Esther Greenwood's agony with depression in spite of what looked like a privileged and promising successful life. Aware that she is mentally deteriorating, feeling trapped in a bell jar, with her mother pushing her to 'just get better', she goes through the motions of therapy while contemplating various ways of ending her life.

'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions.'(1)

'The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the building were making noise, and the river was making noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.'(19)

'There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath."'(19)

'People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.(56)

'I decided to expect nothing from Buddy Willard. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.(58)

'I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.'(66)

'I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.'(77)

'I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist. A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery--air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy."'(97)

'I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind.' (107)

'I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.'(123)

'I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.'(128)

'I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million shapes and cul-de-sac of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.(147)

'Lately I had considered going into the Catholic church myself. I knew the Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it.'(164)

'My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet training.'(202)

'I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. Irwin was a full professor at twenty-six and had the pale, hairless skin of a boy genius. I also needed somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it...'(238)

'To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.'(237)

'But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?'(241)

25th anniversary Edition published 1996
244 pages
Book borrowed from the Library

52. the OLD MAN and the SEA

Ernest Hemingway 1952

A heartening symbolic novella of Santiago, an old man from Cuba, out too far into the sea, alone, courageously attempting to catch and take back home a big marlin, the big one of his dreams.

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky..."(9)

"He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride."
(14)

"Age is my alarm clock...Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?"
(24)

"He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great consequences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor his wife."(25)

"Why did they make the birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea."(29)

"He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman."(29)

"But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought."(30)

"But what a great fish he is and what will he bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?"(49)

"His sword was as long as a baseball hat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out."(62)

"But I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys that I should catch this fish and I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Cobre if I catch him. That is a promise."(64)

"He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could if he made his run."(63)

"The old man was dreaming about the lions."(127)
________________________________________________

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003
127 pages
Book borrowed from the Library
________________________________________________

Personal Note: I reread this, since I remember liking this book eons and eons ago, and somehow, I ended liking it even more.

49. the ANGEL'S GAME

Carlos Luis Zafon 2008
translated by Lucia Graves 2009

This author is such an imaginative storyteller and just like his first book, this second book is a web of intricate plots and subplots of complex and dark stories set in Barcelona and stitched together by the protagonist David Martin's love for books and a woman named Cristina.

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poson of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets most: his name printed on a iserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him."

"Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues."

"Dear David, Life is filled with great expectations. When you are ready to make yours come true, get in touch with me. I'll be waiting. Your friend and reader, A.C."

"The whole of Barcelona stretched out of my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows--my new windows--each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whomever cared to listen."

"The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction."

"I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling."

"Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books...Article two: upon adopting a book you undertake to protect it and do all you can to ensure it is never lost. For life."

"Some like to believe that it's the book that chooses the person. Destiny, in other words. What you see here is the sum of centuries of books that have been lost and forgotten, books condemned to be destroyed and silenced forever, books that preserve the memory and soul of times and marvels that no one remembers anymore."

"Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."

"Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated."

"Isabella, if you really want to devote yourself to writing, or at least to writing something others will read, you're going to have to get used to sometimes being ignored, insulted, and despised and to almost always being considered with indifference. It's an occupational hazard."

"Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally opportunity."

"An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished bu his intellect...The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual."

"As life advances and we have to give up the hopes, dreams, and desires of our youth, we acquire a growing sense of being a victim of the world and of other people. There is always someone else to blame for our misfortunes or failures, someone we wish to exclude. Embracing a doctrine that will turn this grudge and this victim mentality into something positive provides comfort and strength."

"One of the first expedients of the professional writer that Isabella had learned from me was the art of procrastination. Every veteran in the trade knows that any activity, from sharpening a pencil to cataloging daydreams, takes precedence over sitting down at one's desk and squeezing one's brain."

"Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives."

"The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world."

43. the SPARROW

Mary Doria Russell 1996

An extraordinary science fiction with strong religious and philosophical undertones about extraterrestrial life in planet Rakhat. The voyagers are a group of friends: Emilio Sandoz, Anne, George, Jimmy and Sofia. Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest and lone survivor of the mission recounts their compelling story in alternating present and flashback telling. It is a story of love and friendship, belief and faith.

"It was predictable, in hindsight. Everything about the history of the Society of Jesus bespoke deft and efficient action, exploration and research. During what the Europeans were pleased to call the Age of Discovery, Jesuit priests were never more than a year or two behind the men who made initial contact with previously unknown peoples..."

"Ruminating over the same problem as he walked back to his lightless room on the eastern side of the Rome Ring, John Candotti had his own theory about how things had gone wrong. The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully constructed decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters."

"Sometimes... I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present."

""Do you know what made me fall in love with you?" George asked suddenly. Anne shook her head, puzzled that he should ask her this now. "I heard you laugh, down the hall, just before I got to Spanish class that first day. I couldn't see you. I just heard this fabulous laugh, like a whole octave, top to bottom. And I had to hear it again.""

"At first, they simply listened to the fragment of music over and over, each time groaning as the signal fell off to static just as the music began to build to something wonderful. Then after the third hearing, Anne said, "Okay. What can we tell about them? They sing in groups, and there is a lead singer. So they have a social organization. Can we assume they breathe air because their music can be heard like this?""

"The discussion went on for some time, with George, Anne and Jimmy extrapolating, deducting and arguing. Emilio, thoughtful, went back to the music again, playing it through softly once more, but then he turned the playback off. Sofia alone had neither comment on the music nor any speculation about the singers..."

"Trained as linguist and a priest, Emilio had a hard time understanding the Einsteinian physics that predicted that the transit time elapsed on Earth would be around seventeeen years, while the effect of traveling near light speed would make it seem closer to six months for the crew onboard the asteroid."

"And now we have evidence that another sentient species exists nearby and that they sing. They sing, Anne... We have to find out about them. There is simply no alternative. We have to know them."

"Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always 'Thank God," and when the patient dies, it's always blame the doctor."

"When he got back to the apartment, he found that the household numbers were somewhat reduced that evening. Askama had left to play with her friends, as she often did if Emilio was out of sight for a while. Manuzhai had gone visiting. She might not come back at all; equally likely, she might return with five or six guests who'd spend the night. Chaypas was away on some errand, for some unspecified length of time. People often disappeared like that, for hours or days or weeks. Time seemed unimportant to the Runa. There were no calendars or clocks."

"The Runa could be perceptive, but he did occasionally find some of them -- not dense really, but limited somehow. "The technological basis for the society is gathering." George was saying disgusted. "They collect food. and flowers, for crying out loud. Damned if I know what they do with them.""

"Emilio, everything I have learned about the mission leads me to believe that you went for the greater glory of God. You believed that you arrived at your destination by the grace of God. In the beginning, everything you did was for the love of God. I have the testimony of two of your superiors who believed sincerely that something far out of the ordinary happened to you on Rakhat, that you--..."

"There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, when we are in the midst of life -- moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness -- times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. and when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth."

Personal Note: Read and was amazed: May 1, 2010 Amsterdam, Netherlands. Thanks to Bibliolatry

38. the ROAD

Cormac McCarthy 2006

This bleak, frightening story rendered in remarkable lyrical prose is about the world after a great catastrophe, when the life that we now take for granted is gone and all that is left is the road that is barren and unpredictable. This is a gripping account of an unnamed father and son on this road.

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before."

"Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget."

"On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?"

"No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, He whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you."

"As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."

"After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin."

"He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps that child had known this better than he."

"He lay there a long time, lifting up the water to his mouth a palmful at a time. Nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good."

"Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe...Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

"Maybe you should always be on the lookout. If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it."

P"eople are always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

"When we're all gone at last then there'd be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there will be nothing to do and nobody to do it to."

"When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up. I won't let you."

"Of a thing that could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

36. LARK and TERMITE

Jayne Anne Phillips 2009

Two parallel narratives in time, place and hardship, July 26-31, 1950 and 1959, war in Korea and flood in West Virginia. Termite is a boy who cannot talk nor walk and Lark is his half-sister, protector, the one who can hear him. Robert Leavitt is fighting a war, longing for Lola, Lark and Termite's mother. The plot is simple, the writing is not. It is complex, dense, poetic and marvelous.

"He'd shipped out to Occupied Japan in December'49; whatever baby was a tucked seed inside Lola's sex, a nub the size of a tailbone."

"Lola's voice drifts close unbidden and it's like she's standing in the war next to him. No matter how loud the ordinance or artillery, how loud his own heart hammers, he hears her. Words she said when he could touch her."

"He might be thinking how great it would be, wind and rain, real hard rain, not like the summer rain we let him sit out in sometimes, He likes motion."

"Dish washing doesn't make money but I like at home when I'm alone. I'm so used to being with Termite, he feels like alone to me. He's like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened."

"He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves.He can see into the sky where there are no shapes. The shapes that move around him are big, colliding and joining and going apart."

"If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad."

"Pregnant felt like nothing else. Not tired exactly, not sick or nervous, but edgy, distinct. Focused tight, in sync, like when you've hit a phrase in a song just right and it lays itself out through your throat, moving from you across the lights into faces you can't see in the dark, faces whose eyes you feel play across you."

"It's a fact. Termite can only tell the truth. I know she means she wishes, she wishes, he could say something more than the sound of what he's just heard. I pretend he thinks more, backward and forward for miles."

"Oceans have waves like a pulse, Lark says, and she puts his fingers on her wrist to feel the tiny beat. The sound in her skin surges but the sound in the shells only circles, coming and going in one curled space. His birthday comes and goes and Lark makes every birthday."

"Taking Termite to the ocean has always seemed to me like taking one full space to another. The ocean is the biggest sound I could ever show him, bigger than rivers or trains."

"She's told him that whirl and thrill that opens songs is an orchestra, men playing horns before the voices sing asked me how I knew. He moves the blue and moves it and hears Lark singing true is true. She's told him replied means yes and denied means no. Cannot be denied means always yes. No in songs is yes and smoke gets in your eyes."

"The air is white with cloud, and the sun is flat, bright blade at the horizon, like a slit under a door. All else is drifty, misted. The warmth in the ground rises in a fog over the cold water, stirring in slow parches over a dark, swift weight."

"The moving air is full of dense wet cloud. Termite hears it rain and rain the story of the train. The water and the train and the pounding are raining and pouring through. Even on a clear day, he can hear it. Now the sound is wide. He listens."

Personal Note: Thanks to Bibliophiliac whose great review convinced me to read the book.

29. LOLITA

Vladimir Nabokov 1955

This controversial book is on my list because of the incredible writing that made me see way past the very awful subject matter: Middle-age Humbert Humbert is obssessed with a twelve year old 'nymphet' Lolita..

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

"And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears."

"This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe."

"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece."

"You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate ..."

"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

"There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)."

"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen."

"I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."

"The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road."

"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."

"He broke my heart. You merely broke my life."

28. the NAMESAKE

Jhumpa Lahiri 2003

In a moving and informative story, Gogol Ganguli, born in Boston, narrates his struggles: foremost with his name Gogol, his Bengali parents Ashoke and Ashima, the balance between two cultures with its clashing traditions, his love interests and ultimately his heritage as it relates to his own place in this world.

"On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix."(1)

"You are still young. Free...Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late."(16)

"My grandfather always says that's what books are for...to travel without moving an inch."(16)

"When he looks back at the child, the eyes are open, staring up at him, unblinking, as dark as the hair on its head. The face is transformed; Ashoke has never seen a more perfect thing...As a father to his son...Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second."(24)

"Pet names are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered. Unlike good names, pet names are frequently meaningless, deliberately silly, ironic, even onomatopoetic."(26)

"But this isn't possible, Ashima and Ashoke think to themselves. This tradition doesn't exist for Bengalis, naming a son after father or grandfather, a daughter after mother or grandmother. This sign of respect in America and Europe, this symbol of heritage and lineage, would be ridiculed in India. Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred, inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared."(28)

"For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy--a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."(49)

"As a young boy Gogol doesn't mind his name. He recognizes pieces of himself in road signs: Go Left, Go Right, Go Slow."(66)

"...the only person who didn't take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol."(100)

"A bowl of small, round, red potatoes is passed around, and afterward a salad. They eat appreciatively, commenting on the tenderness of the meat, the freshness of the beans. His own mother would never have served so few dishes to a guest."(133)

"She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other that herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing far more foreign to him that the beautiful house she'd grown up in, her education at private schools."(138)

"How long do I have to remember it?"..."Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go."(187)

"He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respected families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing."(281)

"In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another."(286)

"The Short stories of Nikolai Gogol. "For Gogol Ganguli..."(288)