#GreatJonesStreet
#DonDeLillo
It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension…I was interested in endings, in how to survive a dead idea…For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions….
#TheCollectedStoriesofLydiaDavis
#LydiaDavis
People of all ages are hired by the city to act as lunatics so that the rest of us will feel sane…These jobs have all been filled…Naturally some…lunatics have no trouble holding down two jobs at once by wearing strange hats as they lope and shuffle along.
Loved this book.
#Serotonin
#MichelHouellebecq
I hated Paris; that city infested with eco-friendly bourgeois…I mightn't have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet…I systematically sabotaged the selective recycling system…I was rather proud of my lack of civic spirit…
A young woman in a black dress leaning against an elaborately decorated door with her right hand on the doorknob.
The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen
Finished #RatnersStar
#DonDeLillo
There is a life inside this life…If only I could remember what the light was like in that space before I had eyes to see it with…There is something in the space between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for.
#InSearchofLostTime
#MarcelProust
Volume 1, #SwannsWay
Modern Library
#CKScottMoncrieff, translator
#TerenceKilmartin, translator
Revised by #DJEnright
#SwannsWay
#MarcelProust
…I have been increasingly able to catch…the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out…with Mamma…their echo has never ceased it is only because
life is now growing…quiet round about me that I hear them afresh….
Loved Flyn’s description of the High Line in NYC. You take out the wild native species and put in a curated garden, calling it then wild and native.
Finished #Moderan
#DavidRBunch
a beautiful man…copy of me before the new-metal steel…Well,how had he fared with the War…why did he,the man of Faith…bring me only a message of tears…Was he telling me how sorry he was at my condition, each new-metal part of me but a faucet to turn on his tears?
#TheDeathoftheHeart
#ElizabethBowen
“don't see why she wrote the thing at all."
""Perhaps,"said St. Quentin mildly, "she's interested in experience…remember the first sentence…?"
"I do,"Anna said. “‘So I am with them,in London.’”
"With a comma after the 'them'?...The comma is good;that's style...”
#TheCollectedStoriesofLydiaDavis
#LydiaDavis
Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing…the question really is,Why doesn't that pain make you say,I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that,but you don’t.
Finished #TheBroomoftheSystem
#DavidFosterWallace
“Rick, I can explain..."
"No problem at all. Let me just...I have to hurry."
"What are those?"
"These are our connection, Lenore. I forgive you."
"Handcuffs? You're going to forgive me with handcuffs that say 'Bambi's Den of Discipline' on them?"
“…Aye, men, hell rise once more, —but only to spout his last! D'ye feel brave men, brave?"
"As fearless fire," cried Stubb.
"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab.
#MelvilleMonday 🐳
Finished #MobyDick
#HermanMelville
“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man.
This whole act's immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders….”
#MelvilleMonday 🐳
A young man with mathematical equations on his face.
Ratner's Star
by Don DeLillo
#TheBeginnings
#AntonioMoresco
…a moment later, when I went back to kneel, no human ear could hear the uproar of smoke sprung from the censer that I had begun once more to splash to both sides, in dense clouds…We were approaching the consecration….
Then the transubstantiation took place in silence.
Finished #ScreenTests
#KateZambreno
Since moving here I have taken to wearing too much makeup. Old-lady makeup. Penciled red lips, Chanel red, penciled-in brows, black eyeliner. Sometimes I feel skinless, raw. Like I don't have a face.
How can I be sure that I have any coherence unless I outline it?
#TheBroomoftheSystem
#DavidFosterWallace
“You and Gramma Lenore should get together…I'm sure she'd hit you with all the paddles you want. Bats, mallets…”
"For Christ's sake, Lenore."
"I do the best I can, Rick."
"So you do love me."
"I do the best I can."
"Meaning exactly what?"
".…”
Finished #IfonaWintersNightaTraveler
#ItaloCalvino
…the book to be written…should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
"Your whole history in America has been one long religious war…kidnapping half the continent into slavery…shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats…”
"The Civil War? That was economics…”
“…You people really just believe everything you're taught, don't you?"
#AgainsttheDay
#ThomasPynchon
“there's no 'state religion' in the U.S.A…freedom of worship,it's guaranteed in the Constitution…”
"The Cherokee," replied Prance, "the Apache…every native…you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you've simply killed."
"That was about land," said Kit…
x.com/dalkey_archi...
#Moderan
#DavidRBunch
Our world ministers negotiated and drew up some good rules for a dirty war. Even a dirty war must have good rules,they said…You know who won…He won with a rotten underhanded dirty trick,this vile vile man…his plaques are bigger than mine! HIS ARE FIRST-PLACE PLAQUES…l HATE HIM!
#MobyDick
#HermanMelville
…whether Leviathan can long endure…whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters…we account the whale immortal…In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark…if ever the world is to be again flooded…the eternal whale will still survive….
#MelvilleMonday 🐳
A penguin, a prosthetic leg, a frog, a phone, and a cockatiel.
The Broom of the System
by David Foster Wallace
Finished #Perfection
#VincenzoLatronico
How could they ever have chosen to spend their days…hunched over a computer screen…they had loved the work,they will tell themselves…the repetitiveness provided a counterbalance to…the rest of their days. Now,they will realize,nothing remains but the work.
#TheBookofDisquiet
#FernandoPessoa
My pride was stoned by blind men, my disillusion trampled on by beggars….
I suffer, without knowing if I deserve to…
I'm not a pessimist. I'm sad.
#TheBookofDisquiet
#FernandoPessoa
My pride was stoned by blind men, my disillusion trampled on by beggars.
