Female Malady

Again, from The Thirteenth Tale by Dian Setterfield:

Dr. Clifton came. He listened to my heart and asked me lots of questions. "Insomia? Irregular sleep? Nightmares?"

I nodded three times.

"I thought so."

He took a thermometer and instructed me to place it under my tongue, then rose and strode to the window. With his back to me, he asked, "And what do you read?"

With the thermometer in my mouth I could not reply.

"Wuthering Heights--you've read that?"

"Mm-hmm."

"And Jane Eyre?"

"Mm."

"Sense and Sensibility?"

"Hm-m."

He turned and looked gravely at me. "And I suppose you've read these books more than once?"

I nodded and he frowned.

"Read and reread? Many times?"

Once more I nodded, and his frown deepened.

"Since childhood?"

I was baffled by his questions, but compelled by the gravity of his gaze, and nodded once again.

[ . . .]

He removed the thermometer from my mouth, folded his arms and delivered his diagnosis. "You are suffering from an ailment that afflicts ladies of romantic imagination. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. You'll survive."

[ . . .]

"Treatment is not complicated: eat, rest, and take this . . ."--he made quick notes on a pad, tore out a page and place it on my bedside table--"and the weakness and fatigue will be gone in a few days."

[ . . .]

I reached for the prescription. In a virgorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Author Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.

I Understand Completely

"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes--characters even--caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that."

--from Dian Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale

Fully Human

" My chosen vocation . . . [has] remained a subset of a larger vocation, which was the job of loving God and neighbor as myself. Over the years I have come to think of this as the vocation of becoming fully human.

Since some people consider being human a liability, and 'fully'would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that 'I'm only human' does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as a blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.

'The glory of God is a human being fully alive,' wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago. One of the reasons I remain a Christian-in-progress is the peculiar Christian insistence that God is revealed in humankind--not just in human form but also in human being."

---Barbara Brown Taylor in An Altar in the World

Righteous Indignation

I never thought of it quite this way before:

" . . . the wrath of God is a symbol of holy mystery that we can ill afford to lose. For the wrath of God in the sense of righteous anger against injustice is not an opposite of mercy but its correlative. It is a mode of caring response in the face of evil, aroused by what is mean or shameful or injurious to beloved human beings and the created world itself. Precisely because Holy Wisdom cares with a love that goes beyond our imagining, the depths of divine anger are likewise immeasurable. . . . [Divine anger] stands as an antidote to sentimentality in our view of God's holy mystery as love . . ." Elizabeth A. Johnson

Wish I'd Said That

"The hardest thing about writing is telling the truth. Maybe it's the hardest thing about being a woman, too." ---Sue Monk Kidd

No Gleanings from Twilight

I know I said I was through with Twilight, but I just can't help myself. If you remember, I've done a recurring post called "Gleanings from My Readings" with beautiful or profound or funny or interesting quotes from whatever I've read lately--magazines, poetry, newspapers, novels, whatever. (At least, I've done it when I haven't been so immersed in writing that my reading life is nonexistent.) But I just spent almost two weeks reading Meyer's four novels, and although I almost always read with a pencil in hand to underline great sentences or make marginal notes, it didn't take long to find out I didn't need one for the Twilight saga--around 2000 pages without one passage begging me to underline it. Pretty sad. Well, I was tempted to underline for repetitive word use and make nasty comments in the margin, but that was just the editor in me coming out.

So, in honor of my tradition, here are some *great* lines from Twilight. Please feel free to guffaw loudly.

And, no, I didn't waste my time gathering these quotes myself. You can find them and more at Twilight Quotes. Ready? Here you go:

Edward's Best Lines:

Bella: You were right. Edward: I usually am, but about what in particular this time?

Perhaps something more private?

Do I dazzle you?

Your number was up the first time I met you.

I don't want to hear that you feel that way. It's wrong. It's not safe. I'm dangerous, Bella - please, grasp that.

You were right - I'm definitely fighting fate trying to keep you alive.

Do you really believe that you care more for me than I do for you?

Darkness is so predictable, don't you think?

I can be patient - if I make a great effort.

I'm the world's best predator, aren't I? Everything about me invites you in - my voice, my face, even my smell. As if I need any of that! As if you could outrun me. As if you could fight me off.

Don't be afraid. I promise ... I swear not to hurt you.

So where were we, before I behaved so rudely?

You are exactly my brand of heroin.

You are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever.

Edward: And so the lion fell in love with the lamb ... Bella: Stupid lamb. Edward: Sick, masochistic lion.

As you are not addicted to any illegal substances, you probably can't empathize completely.

Are you still faint from the run? Or was it my kissing expertise?

Edward: Bella, I've already expended a great deal of personal effort at this point to keep you alive. I'm not about to let you behind the wheel of a vehicle when you can't even walk straight. Besides, friends don't let friends drive drunk. Bella: Drunk? Edward: You're intoxicated by my very presence.

Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet.

I may not be a human, but I am a man.

Your hair looks like a haystack ... but I like it.

I could hardly leave in the clothes I came in - what would the neighbors think?

Bella: I love you. Edward: You are my life now.

What am I going to do with you? Yesterday I kiss you, and you attack me! Today you pass out on me!

You're worried, not because you're headed to meet a houseful of vampires, but because you think those vampires won't approve of you, correct?

It seems I'm going to have to tamper with your memory.

If you let anything happen to yourself - anything at all - I'm holding you personally responsible.

They gave you a few transfusions. I didn't like it - it made you smell all wrong for a while.

Bella: You stole a car? Edward: It was a good car, very fast.

Bella: Edward I honestly can't dance! Edward: Don't worry silly. I can.

Twilight, again. Another ending. No matter how perfect the day is, it always has to end.

Bella's Best Lines:

Stupid, shiny Volvo owner.

I thought you were supposed to be pretending I don't exist, not irritating me to death.

And how long have you been seventeen?

I fall down a lot when I run.

I do have some trouble with incoherency when I'm around him.

Sometimes it seems like you're trying to say goodbye when you're saying something else.

I'm absolutely ordinary - well, except for bad things like near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I'm almost disabled.

His eyes did that unfair smoldering thing again.

Did they know that I knew? Was I supposed to know that they knew that I knew, or not?

My decision was made, made before I'd ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him.

Edward: I was thinking, while I was running ... Bella: About not hitting trees, I hope.

It's an off day when I don't get somebody telling me how edible I smell.

I need another human minute.

Vampires like baseball?

Edward: Now, what exactly are you worrying about? Bella: Well, um, hitting a tree - and dying. And then getting sick.

It would be nice if I could find just one thing you didn't do better than everyone else on the planet.

Don't I taste as good as I smell?

I was not finished kissing you. Don't make me come over there.

Are you tired of having to save me all the time?

A man and woman have to be somewhat equal ... as in, one of them can't always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each other equally.

You are my life. You're the only thing it would hurt me to lose.

I'm not coming over anymore if Alice is going to treat me like Guinea Pig Barbie when I do.

In what strange parallel dimension would I ever have gone to prom of my own free will?

Other Best Lines:

Jake: You wouldn't happen to know where I could get my hands on a master cylinder for a 1986 Volkswagen Rabbit?

Mike: He looks at you like ... like you're something to eat.

Alice: It sounded like you were having Bella for lunch, and we came to see if you would share.

Renee: Try to be more careful when you walk, honey, I don't want to lose you.

Now, aren't you just dying to read this literary treasure?

First Lines, Final Installment

Here's the last 25 of the 100 Best First Lines:

76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. � Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. � Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. � L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. � Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. � William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. � J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. � Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." � Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. � John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. � James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. � William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. � Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. � Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. � Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. � Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. � John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. � Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. � Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. � Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person--a shy young man about of 19 years old--who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle--a journalist, fluent in five languages--who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man--a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school--that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.--Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. � Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

97. He--for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it--was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. � Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. � David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. � Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. � Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

First Lines, Part III

Here's the third installment of the Best First Lines ever:

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. � Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. � Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. � Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. � Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. � Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. � Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. � David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. � George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. � Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? � Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. � W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. � Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. � G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. � F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. � Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." � Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. � Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. � David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. � Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. � Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. � G�nter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. � Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. � Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. � Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. � Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

First Lines, Part II

Okay, here's the next 25 Best First Lines of all time:

26. 124 was spiteful. � Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. � Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. � Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. � Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. � William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. � Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? � Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." � Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. � John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn't. � Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. �Money . . . in a voice that rustled. � William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. � Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. � Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. � Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. � Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. � Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. � Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; � Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. � Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. � Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. � Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. � C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. 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. � Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. � Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. � Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

First Lines, Part I

Okay, I have to be honest. This past week I’ve done a lot of writing, but not as much reading as I’d like. And I didn’t find anything particularly quotable in the reading that I did get to do. So I thought I’d do something a little different for the next few Saturdays. I found a list of the 100 Best First Lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University. I’ll share them with you, 25 at a time.

1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. � Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. � Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. � Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. � Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. � Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. � James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. � George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. � Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. � Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble? Do-you-need-advice? Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. � Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. �Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. �Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. �Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. �Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. � J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. � James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. � Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. � Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. � Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. � James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. � Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. � Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. � Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. � William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

To be continued . . .

Gleanings from My Readings

"To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment."
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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“We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.”
---Augustine

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“Young Lincoln did have the King James Bible—who on the frontier didn’t? You could tell as much from his House Divided speech that stirred the whole country during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and by the biblical cadences, and content, of his Second Inaugural. The stories in The Book might not all have stuck with him, but the language certainly did.

And he had Shakespeare. Stored away in his memory and at the ready. Like a portable arsenal, entertainment, comfort, guide, treasure and elevation. Shakespeare and the King James Bible. No one could say he entered the fray unarmed.”
---“Where Did He Come From? The Enduring Mystery of Abraham Lincoln,” 2/12/09 editorial,
Arkansas Democrat Gazette

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“A BlackBerry can have detrimental effects even, or especially, when users turn it on when they are doing ‘nothing.’ That ‘nothing’ is what our pre-BlackBerry forebears called daydreaming, which is a propitious mental state for creativity, insight, and problem solving. Truly novel solutions and ideas emerge when the brain brings together unrelated facts and thoughts. . . . Daydreaming or thinking about something else keeps the signals off those rutted roads and allows far-flung facts and ideas to combine in novel ways . . . Hence the common experience of an ‘aha’ moment of creativity or insight about some problem when it is not commanding your conscious attention. If mental downtime becomes BlackBerry time, eurekas will be rarer.”
---Sharon Begley, in “Will the BlackBerry Sink the Presidency?” Newsweek 2/16/09

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“We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly. Until family members, rolling their eyes, remind us it’s a free country and you don’t have to read it every time.”
---Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“What a delightful library you have at Pemberly, Mr. Darcy!”

“It ought to be good,” he replied, “it has been the work of many generations.”

“And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books.”

“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.”

---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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“The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life . . . This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”
---Caitlin Flanagan, in “What Girls Want,” The Atlantic, December 2008

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“Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist, it is the examined life that is not worth living.”
---James W. Sire, in The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog

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Academic postmodernism is “a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies and post-colonial theory . . . that borrows freely from a host of works (in translation) by such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. . . . Given the impossibility of imposing logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument.”
---Mark Lilla, in “The Politics of Jacques Derrida,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
---Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey

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“Reading from a monitor, instead of a book, is like playing videogame football instead of tossing a football around.”
---Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

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“It’s magic to see Spirit, largely because it’s so rare. Mostly you see the masks and the holograms that the culture presents as real. You see how you’re doing in the world’s eyes, or your family’s, or—worst of all—yours, or in the eyes of people who are doing better than you—much better than you—or worse. But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You’re not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You’re here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill—and we’re all terminally ill on this bus—what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.”
---Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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“Highly credible people make decisions to ‘suspend judgment’ when considering another person’s perspective. They do this because they are okay with being wrong—or, at bare minimum, okay with having their opinions challenged. This doesn’t mean they don’t have passion and strong beliefs. It simply means that their minds are open to other opinions, even if those are quite different from their own.”
---Sandy Allgeier, in The Personal Credibility Factor

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“Hillary’s campaign illustrates how far we’ve come, and how far we haven’t come. The tone and tenor of the debates around Hillary, and around Sarah Palin, was far more personal and mocking than toward their male counterparts. Maybe the material was richer, but there was no attempt to dance around gender issues the way there is with race. As a society, we still condone sexism; we view it as a part of nature, a given that isn’t worth bothering our pretty heads about.”
---Eleanor Clift, in “Suffrage, Hillary Style,” Newsweek 1/27/09 Commemorative Inaugural Edition

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty.”
---Jane Austen, in Lady Susan

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“History is most responsibly understood as a mosaic of probabilities or as something like a babble of voices from which emerges a fallible consensus of opinion. Narratives give us focused, if varied, points of view, and storytellers elide, forget and filter whatever facts they believe they possess. About the best you can hope for in a movie’s presentation of history is that it is not an overt lie.”
---Philip Martin, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, in his article “Defiance Is Riveting Drama; Is It History, or Its Shadow?” 1/20/09

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“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the sad feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
---Andrew Wyeth, American artist

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“There is, of course, a cognitive disconnect to reading poetry to an audience numbering in the millions, as Alexander did. Most poets never reach that many people in a lifetime, which may have something to do with the choice to keep her focus simple, her imagery direct. Even so, the crowd began dispersing well before she was finished, as if her words were little more than an afterthought. Partly, that has to do with her placement on the program—after the president; she had the misfortune of following the main event. But even more, it suggests the tangential role of poetry in our national conversation, which is unlikely to change no matter how seriously this president, or any other, takes the written word.”
---David L. Ulin, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, in his article “The Poem That Failed”

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Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem:
“Praise Song for the Day”

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

"We do not look in our great cities for our best morality."
---Jane Austen

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“Nearly all of us . . . are offended by violations of some kinds of linguistic taboos. Political conservatives tend to be more offended by profanities and obscenities, whereas liberals tend to be more offended by racial and ethnic slurs as well as by slurs against homosexuals. Pinker says that words are arbitrary labels and that linguistic taboos embody a kind of magical misconception about language. In fact, though, speakers within a linguistic community typically show widespread agreement about the relative offensiveness of words. Linguistic taboos are real, then, not magical.”
---Gilbert Youmans, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Missouri, in a letter to the editor of The Atlantic (Jan/Feb 2009)

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“[Both my mother and the librarian] taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself. . . . I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space.”
---Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
---William Hazlitt, in his essay “On Wit and Humour”

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“Language is to some extent tendentious. This is what we have to work with. Think of words in terms of foodstuffs: whatever we cook up won’t be composed of pure nutrients: it will derive from odd life-forms that breathe underwater of grow in the ground. But we can use fresh, organic ingredients, we can wash contaminants off them, and we can avoid globbing them up with heavy batter and frying them in oils that clog our arteries. Actually, it’s a lot harder to do that with words than with trout or carrots, but it’s the goal for an honest writer to aspire to.”
---Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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NEW WORD: orthorexics—people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating

“...nutritionist thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”
---Michael Pollan, from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

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“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
---Aldous Huxley, novelist

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“To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.”
---Jodi Picoult, novelist

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From Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
[. . .]
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”

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From Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World”:

“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled . . .”

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

Since I’ve been reading Jane Austen all week, I thought I’d share some witty quotes. Enjoy!

From a letter to her sister Cassandra:

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

From Sense and Sensibility:

“There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.”

From Pride and Prejudice:

“It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?”

From Northanger Abbey:

“A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

From Emma:

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

From Mansfield Park:

“Nobody minds having what is too good for them.”

From Persuasion:

“To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.”

Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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“Fortunately, I enjoy fooling with letters, moving them around, going back and forth over them, over and over, screaming . . . The terrible thing about writing is also the great thing about it: you can keep on changing it. ‘We say that we perfect diction,’ wrote Wallace Stevens. ‘We simply grow tired.’ But it’s a good tired.”
---Ray Blount, Jr., in the Introduction to Alphabet Juice

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“A powerful agent is the right word . . . Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
---Mark Twain

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“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
---William Faulkner

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“She tried to remember that last time she’d tucked herself in to the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized the musicians in the park of been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.”
---Patricia Cornwell, in her latest novel Scarpetta

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From Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time”: (1648)

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.”

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From Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare”:

“He was not of an age, but for all time!”

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Happy Reading!