luce (cry baby) > Books: reviewed-in-2019‎ (233)

“Colour and scen

“Colour and scent and sound, rain and the lapping of water, even the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood tide, these are memories of Manderley that will not be denied.”

“I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you cannot just go around shooting peopl

“I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you cannot just go around shooting people. That's going to be a problem.”

“[S]he could not conceive that any one could tire of her of whom she had not first tired.”

“It never occurred to her that other people's lives went on when they were out of her range of vision.”

“Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel.”

“Russian literature deserves more love letters written by total idiots. For too long it has belonged to very clever peo

“Russian literature deserves more love letters written by total idiots. For too long it has belonged to very clever people who want to keep it to themselves.”

“But first, an important disclaimer. This is not an intellectual book. It is not a work of primary research. It is not an academic thesis on Russian literature. It’s not supposed to be the last word in interpreting Russian literature. […] Instead it’s a guide to surviving life using some of the clues left in these great classics. It’s an exploration of the answers these writers found to life’s questions, big and small. And it’s a love letter to some favourite books which at one point helped me to find my identity and buoyed me up when I lost it again.”

“Had Harold Pardee killed his wife? In hair salons, at lunch counters, the question was posed. Such a death, in Bake

“Had Harold Pardee killed his wife? In hair salons, at lunch counters, the question was posed. Such a death, in Bakerton, was without precedent.”

“In Bakerton a murder would not have been forgotten. The local memory was a powerful tool, an instrument so sensitive it recalled events that hadn't actually occurred.
Conscious of its new status as a place where things happened Bakerton cleared its throat and commenced speculating.”

“I won't introduce you to my father, not personally, not yet. Changes are you already know him.”

“I won't introduce you to my father, not personally, not yet. Changes are you already know him.”

“Honesty comes in an infinite variety, none crueler than a teenager's tedium.”

“Why am I here? he asks himself. What am I doing?”

“Why am I here? he asks himself. What am I doing?”

“Scott was so much trouble, whatever the reason was. A beautiful disaster.”

“Even then, ha he would endlessly be a curiosity and not a person. He would forget this was true and then be reminded this way, this he most recent in the jarring series of moments that threaded thorough his whole life in America. When did it end? When would they all just get used to him—to all of them?”

“L'amore è opaco come i vetri delle finestre dei cessi.”

“L'amore è opaco come i vetri delle finestre dei cessi.”

“There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.”

“The sea was a dangerous enemy, and we were surrounded by it. But I remembered what my father had told me. You could grow to love something so strong and elemental, but you'd have to value the beauty of it more than you did your own life.”

“I closed my eyes and went through a list of everything I wished I could thank him for giving me. Patience, loyalty, trust, and hopefully, in time, kindness.”

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

“It’s best to start with the beginning—or at least what feels like it. I realise now that we never much talked about ou

“It’s best to start with the beginning—or at least what feels like it. I realise now that we never much talked about our pasts. Maybe it would changed something if we had, maybe we would have understood each other better and everything would have been different. Who can say?”

“You listened, really listened, gentle eyes taking me in without judgment, making me feel more heard than I knew I could be.”

“To my own surprise, I was unable to accept the shame he wanted me to feel. It was too familiar to be imposed: I had produced it myself for such a long time that, right then, I found I had no space left for it any more.”

“Selfish. Growing into yourself is nothing but that.”

“I even attempt a smile. But I sense that either way my foreignness somehow absolves me from their judgment. To them, it must explain my strangeness completely.”

“I was transported into a vision of my life that made me so dizzy my head began to spin. Shame, heavy and alive, had materialised, built from buried fears and desires.”

“My life was a tiny narrow corridor with no doors leading of it, a tunnel so narrow it bruised my elbows, with only one way to go. That or the void, I told myself. That or leave.”

“One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.”

“But like stones thrown into the sky with all one’s might, pieces of that night - the boys and the men who wanted them, the flirtation, the codes of seduction I could only guess at - returned to me with even greater intensity than I had lived. The law of gravity applies to memories too.”

“I wondered about your role in all this, what kind of pact you’ve made with yourself. Because we all make one, even the best of us. And it’s rarely immaculate. No matter how hard we try.”

“I was paralysed by possibility, caught between the vertigo of fulfillment and the abyss of uncertainty.”

“How does one bond with another child, as a child? Maybe it’s simply through common interest. Or maybe it’s something that lies deeper, for which everything you say and do is an unwitting code. ”

“It sounded like an appeal, a right violated and invoked. My hand on the door handle, my back to you, heart pulsing in my temples. I could sense the word throbbing in the air. My name, claiming me. It wrapped its fingers around my shoulders and tried to hold me back.”

“I mean: how shall I explain? I—it’s always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.”

“I mean: how shall I explain? I—it’s always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.”

“Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, arid underneat

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, arid underneath our sofa, and on. top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?”

“This model of readers as consumers—one I have abetted in many a book review myself—neatly omits what I consider the heart of reading: not whether we wish to purchase a new book but how we maintain our connections with our old books, the ones we have lived with for years, the ones whose textures and colors and smells have become as familiar to us as our children’s skin.”

“While I’ll try to put Jane back into her social class and time, I must admit that I also write as a signed up ‘Janeite’, a devotee and worshipper. I too have searched for my own Jane, and naturally I have found her to be simply a far, far better version of myself: clever, kind, funny, but also angry at the restrictions of her life, someone tirelessly searching for ways to be free and creative. I know who I want Jane Austen to be, and I put my cards on the table. This is, unashamedly, the story of my Jane, every word of it written with love.”

“What a treat. And just up the road from the cottage, at Chawton Great House, lived one of Jane’s favourite girls in the whole family, Fanny Austen.”

“But if you follow me this far in the idea that Jane was undermining the very moment where you’d expect marriage to be most praised, there could be an explanation. Remember that ‘double-voiced’ nature of Jane’s letters? The same applies to her novels. At first reading, these are stories about love and marriage and the conventional heterosexual happily-ever-after. Only at the second does a sneaky doubt perhaps creep in to suggest that maybe marriage is not the best thing that could ever happen to these women.”

“It has been suggested that with these clever layers of meaning, Jane was perhaps even more subversive than we give her credit for.”

“While Jane did not forget Lyme, the town did not forget her, either. You can still eat at Jane’s Cafe, walk in Jane Austen’s Garden, and buy souvenirs in the Persuasion gift shop today.”

“I like to think that this last, insubstantial image of Jane running through the Hampshire grass in fact shows her running away from all the eager hungry biographers keen to get their teeth into her.”

“I had the children. They caught on fire. I had to keep them from catching on fire.”

“I had the children. They caught on fire. I had to keep them from catching on fire.”

“I don’t know why, but I had just assumed that the kids would one day appear at the estate, maybe stuffed inside a giant wooden crate, packing peanuts pressed against their rickety bodies. I thought I’d just take them in my arms and place them in our new home like dolls in a dollhouse. ”

“We were a world unto ourselves, even though I knew it was temporary. Eventually we would have to figure something out, a way to integrate the children into the real world. I imagined a time when they sat at that huge dining room table in the mansion, eating eggs Benedict or whatever the fuck while their father read the paper and told them scores from the Braves game the day before.”

“She wasn’t really one for big groups, but she quite liked this, the jokes and the merriment, and the way

“She wasn’t really one for big groups, but she quite liked this, the jokes and the merriment, and the way that you could see actual friendships springing up around the room, like green shoots.”