The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
Bleak House by Charles DickensSmoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall of snow.
The children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress;
She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.
“Nemo is Latin for no one.”
It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!
The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!
that ghostly stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be covered,
There was a folding-window to the carriage-head, but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out hope.
The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty
Loitering: New & Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosioin a sense we truly have history only insofar as it’s shared, and too much uniqueness really leads away from individuality to anonymity, the great sea of the forgotten.
I suppose it could also be said we’re known to the extent that we’re dull and orbital about our life, that what’s quotidian about us is more easily shared than the exuberances and passions that push us out of the predictable.
he’s mostly a misanthrope and a sentimentalist (how often those things go together!),
Randall Jarrell once wrote that even in the Golden Age people were always griping about how everything looked yellow; all our hopes elude us.
Just as shadows fall across lives, history falls across cultures. Things unravel never to reknit again
It’s always been a fond Western dream, after all the blood and pavement and franchising, to undo the whole sorry business and begin again.
“Relation is a mathematical notion which means one-to-one correspondence.”
Brick is relocated earth,
they wanted antiques without time.
Many of these gamblers were afraid of the past, haunted by it, and this tilted their faith in the direction of fate, a less ample, less accommodating idea.
As long as you could fall farther you distinguished yourself from the fallen.
anxiety has no object; in fact, it tries to become fear because fear has a definite object that can be faced with courage.
The absence of “real” money, flat money, is essentially the absence of a future. Not that the boys lack one—rather, possible futures never enter into their calculations; a cigarette equals pleasure, not the hoarding of deferred possibilities.
Is it size alone that accounts for the blurring of identity in a big family? The fact that you grow up crowded into the same bathroom, brushing your teeth in front of a mirror that has three or four other foamy white grins reflecting back at you—is that it?
suicide: that it’s always accompanied by some shift away from life’s normal priority, where it’s perfectly natural and expected that you’d defend yourself from danger, to a condition where you give up, defenseless, or even join in on the attack.
Is silence for a writer tantamount to suicide?
The belief in a single Truth leads to doubt about everything.
It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.
This seemed a crude and retrogressive project, since what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve.
Whereas prison, well, what is it, really? A shortage of space compensated for by an excess of time.
This picture [of a man jumping/falling from the Twin Towers during 9/11] also brings us to a prison, one without a shortage of space; in fact, there’s a sudden, horrifying excess, a terrible liberation, with time in short supply.
If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature—and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution—is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.—Joseph Brodsky
A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult
Mischling by Affinity KonarDust that fuzzes the edges
A great detritus fog
Made up of hair & skin & dandruff & powdered sweat & nubs from blue sweaters & sloughed mud from trainers worn when it rained & pollen from a mountain hike to Looking Glass Falls where ox-eyed daises rigidly rocked as if uprooting themselves to stalk after you--
Pieces of you attract and collect to your abandoned surfaces
As if it could proliferate thick enough to claim the matter as its own
As if you wanted to stay all along.
Those precocious motes dance
dizzy in the sun
like echos of your soul and
trace the erratic trajectory of your
travels in the shadows.
Let the dust nest in my brain
Let it choke my lungs
Let it mold its exoskeleton around me
Let all your pieces become my peace.
