"And yet despite its inherent physicality--the routers, the interchanges, the telephone poles strung with wires, and the fiber optic cables crossing the sea--we persist in our belief that the Internet is inchoate, a cloud."
"'Somehow in the diesel hiss and whine of the bus I look east toward the glow of the rising sun. I am murmuring prayers, because I am frightened as if I had somehow allowed myself, a child of God, to be sent back to Egypt. It was as if my yearning had got me out of an imagined bondage for the real one of the unknown. Probably everyone feels this on their first true flight from whatever nest, but it is no less real for being so universally shared! We all have mothers and fathers, and what sweet anguish, sometimes terror, there is in those names. If you give it much thought, the skeleton of life is stupendously ordinary. So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are nineteen or twenty, doesn't it? After that, especially by our age, we seems like stone walls, mortared together by scar tissues. The whole point is not to be. From all my reading done in construction camps throughout the world, the main point of challenge is to stay as conscious as possible, absurd as that seems.'"
Sundog, Jim Harrison
"Life is not segmented artificially by what we call days, months, years, dawns, noons, evenings, night; rather, life is segmented by our moods, impressions, traumas, odd transferences of power from inanimate objects--the aesthetic principle--dreams, linked by time spans of loves and hates and indifference, unexpected changes in the prism of our understanding, areas of passion or lust that disappear in a moment, lapsing into a kind of sloth, dread and slowness..."
Sundog, Jim Harrison
"'For instance, you don't even understand the internal combustion engine that's been hauling you around all your life. I got this little theory, an utterly unimportant theory, that most people never know more than vaguely where they are, either in time or in the scheme of things. People can't read contracts or time schedules or identify countries on blank maps. Why should they? I don't know. There's a wonderful fraudulence to literacy. Yet these same people have emotional lives as intricate as that Bach piece my niece played.'"
Sundog, Jim Harrison
"Something essentially mean-minded in me wanted to probe deeper for a raw nerve, for the great leveler that is at the heart of all personal journalism, wherein the noblest human might be made pedestrian at least for the length of time it took to read the article: ' Faulkner was laughably short,' or 'Churchill, fat as a toad, coughed up his last bite of flan,' or 'Eisenhower, despite his questionable talents in World War II, appeared ill at ease and simple-minded during an after-dinner conversation at Stokely Van Camp's winter home at Hobe Sound.'"
Sundog, Jim Harrison
"Looking back at this with the estranged sensibilities of someone who has spent most of his life in foreign countries, I see that it all doesn't fit together. It's not supposed to. Symmetry is a term better suited to engineering than to people's lives. By the time you wish to become something, you're already something else. In the living nightmare after my accident, I had a dream that we were all black, fertile eggs, each of us encapsuled in our small, liquid universe. I'm aware that everyone sees the world differently, and what I've been telling you might be too peculiar to be of any use. I'm doubtful if I've felt really at home in the world since that summer morning I said good-bye to Violet. I couldn't very well feel homesick when, like so many of us, my home had disappeared. I guess I've moved too fast back and forth across the earth to become preoccupied with the question."
Sundog, Jim Harrison
"Now I was driving straight into half a red ball that was the sun; immense crows swooped back and forth across the road looking for carcasses to pick. I remembered in a confusing moment that Mother had told me to look for the ravens that favored northern climes: My confusion was over a feeling of déjà vu, of a twelve-year-old boy being driven east, then south in 1953 to a faraway home he neither desired nor would ever feel truly at home in; and the boy in a state of petulance and anger staring out of the back seat of the car at this self-same swamp, and how he may have blocked those memories of the first twelve years until he no longer understood their language, which still somehow emanated, however weakly, but was suffocated with irony and mock sophistication. Now the ravens, the puddle ducks in the swamp, the geese wheeling to land in the distance, the dead raccoon and the setting sun, the road itself, cut clumsily but forcibly through the thirty intervening years, leaving them as badly lit photos. There was then, and there was now."
Sundog, Jim Harrison
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| Blue Diary (1997) |
"--that the turmoil of so many new things crowding in on the old ones was more than she could take; but a second--or many--later she stopped feeling the weight of uncertainty and guilt; she thought back to her people as though recalling the contours of a lovely landscape that was now fading away: the Village, the Little Town, the Big Chilango, all those colors, and she saw that what was happening was not a cataclysm; she understood with all of her body and all of her memory, she truly understood, and when everything in the world fell silent finally said to herself I'm ready."
Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera
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| La désenchantée (1990) |
"Cause I could know myself, that's all. Some lazy thing I could always do because I was dumb and not normal, but special... something crazy--maybe that could be my job? I had that thought just briefly one tiny light and then it was gone."
Inferno, Eileen Myles
"We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music."
--"Something That Needs Nothing"
"We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares abpout anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren't killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a real breakthrough in their relationship with themselves."
--"Making Love in 2003"
"I brushed my new short hair with the same long strokes I had used for my old hair, accidentally hitting the brush against my shoulders. It was a delicate, new strangeness, and I held on to it like a candle, hoping it would lead me to an even newer, stranger strangeness. Or perhaps I could accumulate many small new ways and pile them up to form one large new way."
--"Mon Plaisir"
No one belongs here more than you: stories, Miranda July
"When he needed a piece of wood for some job, he chose it carefully, looked at it as though asking who it was, examined its grain, and looked for suggestions from the wood itself. For me it was a lesson to be taken as a rule of life: never do things by chance, never exaggerate needlessly, as when one gives too much importance to a person, or too much love, or an excessive tip."
Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley)
"The idea of reflections came to me in reading an observation by Pascal, cited in a book by W.H. Auden, who wrote an unusual kind of autobiography by collecting the quotations he had annotated in the course of his life, which is a good way of displaying oneself, as a reflection of these quotations."
Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley)
"It's better to leave certain things in peace, just the way they are in memory: with the passage of time they become the mythology of our lives. I haven't even wanted to see certain people again with whom I had been more or less friendly in terms of time and place: schoolmates, childhood companions. You can't resume a dialogue that never was a real dialogue but rather a temporary complicity, the kind of complicity established among people occupying the same compartment in a train. Of course, if I had to go back and live on Palas Street in Bucharest, where I spent my childhood and youth, yes, I would do it; but to pay the place a hasty visit would seem to me an inadmissible lack of respect."
Reflections and Shadows, Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi (translated by John Shepley)
"A peer vote!--it was unbelievable! Every move Glenn had made undoubtedly worked against him like a captured weapon in the peer vote. In the peer vote he was the prig who had risen at the séance like John Calvin himself and told them all to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry. He was the Eddie Attaboy who had gotten up every morning at dawn and done all that ostentatious running and tried to make the rest of them look bad. He was Harry Hairshirt who lives like an Early Christian martyr in the BOW. He was the Willie Workadaddy who drove around in a broken-down Prinz, like a lonely beacon of restrain and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies."
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
"I clicked through all the pictures Brigitte had taken so far. What was I looking for? I supposed I was looking for calendars. More pictures of calendars. And there they were. Everyone had them, and they were all hardworking calendars. They seemed weirdly compulsive for a moment, as if I'd stumbled on a group of calendar fanatics, and then I remembered that we all used to have these, until very, very recently. We all laid our intricately handwritten lives across the grid and then put it on the wall for everyone to see. For a split second I could feel the way things were, the way time itself used to feel, before computers."
It Chooses You, Miranda July
"Pam opened another album, and as we looked at pictures of the rich, white strangers on a boat, I had the queasy feeling that I was Pam, in reverse. She'd invented all kinds of happiness for these people who seemed boring to me, while her immigrant story struck me as inherently poignant and profound. And probably neither of us was entirely wrong; it's just that we were, more than anything, sick of our own problems."
It Chooses You, Miranda July
"We had gone to the place where all living things come from; it was fetid and smelly and cloyingly sweet, filled with raw meat and curling horns, her face was smashed, everything was breeding and cross-breeding, newborn and biblical. And I couldn't take it. The fullness of her life was menacing to me--there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. She wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her."
It Chooses You, Miranda July
"Naturally, nobody built hotels in Cocoa Beach, only motels; and when they built apartment houses, they built them like motels, so that you could drive up o your own door. At neither the motels nor the apartment houses did you have to go through a public lobby to get to your room. A minor architectural note, one might say--and yet in Cocoa Beach, like so many towns of the new era, this one fact did more than the pill to encourage what would later be rather primly named 'the sexual revolution.'"
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
"The real problem was that reporters violated the invisible walls of the fraternity. They blurted out questions and spoke boorish words about... all the unspoken things!--about fear and bravery (they wold say the words!) and how you felt at such-and-such a moment! It as obscene! They presumed a knowledge an an intimacy they did not have and had no right to."
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
"Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually intertwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn't be helped. We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful doh, because that's what I was to myself. Go on, boy, get. I watched myself dutifully trot ahead. Then I lowered my rifle ad what actually happened was I began to have a bowel movement. It was unplanned, but once begun it was best to finish. I flushed and washed my hands and only by luck did I happen to glance back at the toilet. It was still there. One had to suppose it was the dog, shot, but refusing to die. This could get out of hand, I could flush and flush and Phillip would wonder what was going on and I'd have to say The dog won't die gracefully. ..."
The First Bad Man, Miranda July
"'Tonight?' I asked, checking my watch.
'Tonight's too late, Jack. It's already tomorrow in France,' she said, and then, leaning in to be kissed, knocked over the flute with the last of her wine."
"Waiting," Paper Lantern, Stuart Dybek
