Henry Fool (1997)

Draughtsman's Contract (1982) 

"Back then I thought they could do anything. I didn't belong, but I felt lucky just to be near."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

"Ray, you wanna learn how to dance? (yeah) 'cause you gotta touch someone when you dance."

"Citizens, the time for pussyfooting is over. The time for dillying, for dallying. No more can we use rhetoric as a replacement for deeds. No more can I hide behind words, yearning instead of learning, using sentiment to substitute for--see, I'm doing it again. No, this is a new era, a new me. ... I have wasted too much time already. Love is sweet and life is short."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

"Portion of Wall Misplaced, Whereabouts Unknown"

"Dieter was hunched forward, balanced on the balls of his feet, his chin jutting out from his chest. He had his hands up, palms out, fingers splayed. He patted the air in front of the hole, swiping at it, running his hands back and forth and up and down along an invisible plane, mere inches from the guards' faces. They stared, transfixed. No one spoke. Dieter continued to slide his hands through the air, reaching forward again and again, each time stopping in the space where the wall once stood. 

The two guards stood frozen in contemplation. The bushier one opened his mouth and then closed it. The other opened his own mouth and left it that way. 

'Upon further examination,' said the first, 'I might want to revise my initial opinion.' 

'I was just thinking the same thing,' said the other. 'I can't say it looks exactly the same as other walls I've seen. But there's clearly a wall there--I feel sure of that.' 

His partner squinted. 'I feel the same way. I wasn't sure how to say it, but you--you've described it perfectly' 

'Not all walls are the same.' 

'Certainly not.'"

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

The Trouble With Angels (1966)

"... the curve of a tree trunk, a muscle or a column, will display the essence of its form--for the tree, sap, for the muscle, blood, and for the column, an inner cohesive core providing structural integrity. Therefore, a convex wall will be characterized not only by an outward expansion but also by an inward-looking characterization."

"The Convex Wall," Archetypes in Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen

Francesco (1984)

"Gravity will always draw objects and ourselves down, representing in the extreme an annihilation of existence. That something stands up against this force by rising up is therefore synonymous with survival--and survival implies freedom from the earth."

"Gravity and Motion from Above Downward," Archetypes in Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen

Psycho III (1986)

best-quality deputy

John Lurie & the Lounge Lizards, "Show 122," Sunday Night (1989 TV)

"Anyway, ringmastering was for ringmasters, and I still had the bat cages to clean. 'You are so good with the shovel,' Zloty would say, tousling my hair. 'You are a true master. I would not deprive you of an opportunity to display your talents.' Sometimes I thought about the farm, the dirt-prod, the three unfinished mounds, but never for very long--there were so many bat cages.

That was six years ago. I think. ... I'm no longer a little girl, and I'm no longer such a sucker for enchantment. I used to dream of someday standing in the center of the ring myself, mesmerizing a hushed throng of ladies and gentlemen, spinning acts into feats. Now I mostly dream of a waterproof blanket, and mostly I keep my mouth shut."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

"The show was just beginning when I arrived. Zloty stood in the center of the ring, his arms outstretched, tracing circles in the air to indicate the boundlessness of the wonders we were soon to witness. He used words like intrepid and spellbound and liability waiver. He said we were privileged to witness such feats. Had I ever really witnessed anything before? I searched my memories, but mostly it was just a whole bunch of ordinary seeing. On the farm, there was only the work and how the work got done. You looked at the dirt mounds, you looked at your hands, splinter-rich from the dirt-prod, and then you went to bed. But to witness something--to become an accomplice just by watching--that was something else. 

...By the grand finale the bleachers were almost empty. But I hardly noticed--I was entranced. I stayed until the end, when had the troupe came out to take a bow to scattered, anemic applause. And I stayed to watch Rueben push a wide broom across the dirt floor and into a pile in the corner. And while they dismantled the ring and packed up the lights, I curled into a wooden crate filled with novelty wigs and buried myself deep inside. If I wasn't chosen, I would choose. I'm a performer now, I thought, and I felt the netting of a wig settle into place just above my ears. I thought about my dirt-pod still lying next to those three mounds, and then I fell asleep."  

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

Trust (1990)

"... I understood that we would forever be trailing five years behind the dream of prosperity. I saw that I was not the chosen one. There was no chosen one. My purpose in the world, which once seemed so clear and crisp, had fallen away, and in its place was just the glacial creep of the hard days ahead."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

"Despite the festive atmosphere, the air was rank with an unmistakable Kornblattery. The man was apprehended, yes, but his ideas remain, airborne pustules of mental infection, wafting along a gentle breeze of passivity. A figure like Zloty Kornblatt does not simply materialize out of the fermented mists, and his network of dedicated followers does not simply wither away in his absence. At this moment, highly trained disruptor cells lurk just a river's width from Destina, in Burford, our nation's spiritual pantry, a city of earthly fold living happy, brine-spattered lives. These humble people aren't distracted by Destina's insatiable appetite for novelty, the endless chase of new flavors, delicious foods, fresh vegetables. They don't have to worry about being first to discover the new treat of tomorrow; there, tomorrow is the same as today and yesterday, only slightly more vinegary. Yes, theirs is an innocent, authentic existences, uncluttered by the pleasant odors and dull administrative powers of our capital city."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

(subterranean)

The Paper Chase (1973)

"I'd started wetting the bed again, yeah. After two years dry."

Escape from L.A. (1996)

"Till the Morning Comes," The Ones That Got Away, Stephen Graham Jones

your collecting has been restricted

White Lightnin' (2009)

"Don't come near me, Jennifer, I wouldn't know what to say to you now. My memories of you have coexisted for too long with too many dialogues between us that never occurred and I don't want to add more exchanges to this jumble. Don't have the wherewithal to parse imaginaries."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"(... simply what? what have you done with the memory of what was given to you? -- forget her?)"

It's Pat (1994)

"(how many times does the Virgin Mary need to appear to remind us of what we already know? how many times do we need to induce ourselves into believing she has come to warn us again that we're on the wrong path? in how many places around the world does she need to appear for no one to disbelieve anymore? or are her recurrent appearances what perpetuate disbelief?)"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas 

"-- Why are you telling me all of this Rolando? -- oh -- so you were not asleep -- he doesn't say -- what is he supposed to say? -- I'm sharing all these tender memories with you so you'll know -- what? -- that I am not what I am? --"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"... builds a / valentine out of a blue / leaf & tree pitch for his missing sister"

Figures for a Darkroom Voice, Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Wise Blood (1979) 

"Distance is not something to believe in, & yet, you are so far from the image of yourself."

Figures for a Darkroom Voice, Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

(I was first shown how things grow here.)

"--and she seems to be talking to the plants or petting the plants as if trying to console them -- That's my grandmother she's apologizing to the tomatoes and the potatoes because we'll have to eat them soon."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

Oh Lord, let this be my motto:

"I in You, and Ye in me."

  

"his bountiful inner life would have shielded him from his bountiful inaction"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"The PTA Disbands," The Simpsons (1995)

"... discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to the embarrassing myths about himself -- everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Drool -- although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live ..."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"... the hobble / of too much replaced by the common limp / of too little. But I almost got there."

"The Seekonk Woods," The Past, Galway Kinnell

"I have read it and each time I have heard / his voice saying it under my voice, / and in fact in those auditoriums / that don't let you 'hear yourself,' sometimes / I hear only his voice, ..."

"The Last Holy Fragrance (In memoriam James Wright)," The Past, Galway Kinnell

(it's about a) doggone

"... she scribbles her spine's / continuation into immaterial et cetera, ..."

"The Angel," The Past, Galway Kinnell

An Angel at My Table (1990)

"Ruth had been brought up to believe in revelations, in words of awful import spoken on special occasions, in strange languages or other unusual ways. The doctors might call it delirium, but how could they be sure? Things that were hidden from the wise were revealed to babes and sucklings."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"--Ruth was back in those childhood days on the lonely hills of Paradise, when Paul had been her only childhood friend, a refuge from a family of fanatics, with a father who beat her to make her think like him. Back there she had known that Paul was a great man, and had followed him all these years; she had watched his mind unfolding, and learned everything she knew from it--and now, to see it destroyed by a brute with a piece of iron pipe!"

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"--but the more it changed, the more it was the same thing."

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

"This was Big Magic."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"In this white flame of suffering Paul's spirit had been tempered to steel, and the crowd of workers shared this process, and took new views of solidarity; Bunny felt the thrill of a great mass experience, and yearned to be part of it, and then shrunk back, like a young man in the Bible story who had too many possessions."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"To the hour of his death, the elder Ross never really understood this strange son of his. He was always being surprised by the intensity with which Bunny took things, which to the father were part of the nature of life. The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, half-hearted, but stubborn way. But here was this new phenomenon, a boy's mind which was all one compartment; things ought to be right, and if they were not right, you ought to make them right, or else what was the use of having any right--you were only fooling yourself about it."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

Age of Summerhood (2013)

"... 'Gee whiz, Dad!' exclaimed the boy. 'Eli was saying every word that you taught him! Do you suppose he really believes it all?' 

Dad answered that only the Holy Spirit could tell that. Eli was a lunatic, and a dangerous one, but a kind that you couldn't put in an asylum, because he used the phrases of religion. He hadn't wits enough to make up anything for himself, he had jist enough to see what cold be done with the phrases Dad had given him; so now there was a new religion turned loose to plague the poor and ignorant, and the Almighty himself couldn't stop it."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

9 1/2 Weeks (1986)

"Dad's mind wasn't like that; it got on one subject and stayed there, and ideas came through it in a slow, grave procession; his emotions were like a furnace that took a long time to heat up. Sometimes on these drives he would say nothing for a whole hour; the stream of his consciousness would be like a river that has sunk down through the rocks and sand, clean out of sight; he would be just a pervading sense of well-being, wrapped in an opulent warm overcoat, an accessory, you might say, of a softly purring engine running in a bath of boiling oil, and traversing a road at fifty miles an hour. If you had taken his consciousness apart, you would have found, not thoughts, but conditions of physical organs, and of the weather, and of the car, and of bank-accounts, and of the boy at his side. Putting it into words makes it definite and separate--so you must try to take it all at once, blended together. 'I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster,  and J. A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, and now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Lobos River, and at sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and "Bunny" is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have the painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say.'"

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"The Library" Seinfeld (1991 TV)

knuckle down

Barfly (1987)

knuckle under

The Blues Brothers (1980)

"'I want Garp,' Alice said. 

'I''m sorry that you can't have him,' Helen said. 

'I'm thorry, Helen,' Alice said. ... 

Time, Garp knew, would ease everything. Time would also prove him wrong about Alice's writing. She may have had a pretty voice but she couldn't complete anything; she never finished her second novel, not in all the years that the Garps would know the Fletchers--or in all the years after. She could say everything beautifully, but--as Garp remarked to Helen, when he was finally exasperated with Alice--she couldn't get to the end of anything. She couldn't thtop. ... 

... And perhaps what remained of the friendship between the Garps and the Fletchers was actually saved by the Fletchers' having to move away. This way, the couples saw each other about twice a year; distance diffused what might have been hard feelings. Alice could speak her flawless prose to Garp--in letters. The temptation to touch each other, even to bash their shopping carts together, was removed from them, and they all settled into being the kind of friends many old friends become: that is, they were friends when they heard from each other--or when, occasionally, they got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another."

The World According to Garp, John Irving

"'We're talking about sincere gestures,' Jenny said. 

'We're talking about stupid gestures,' Garp said."

The World According to Garp, John Irving

"Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was 'sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.' 

'Maybe so,' Garp wrote, 'But he was also an extremely bad writer.'"

The World According to Garp, John Irving

"...live your own life with a little privacy."

Element of a Crime (1984)

"She watched Sergeant Garp suckle in his sleep and tried to imagine that his ultimate regression would be peaceful, that he would turn into his fetus phase and no longer breathe through his lungs; that his personality would blissfully separate, half of him turning to dreams of an egg, half of him to dreams of sperm. Finally, he simply wouldn't be anymore."

The World According to Garp, John Irving

House of Games (1987)

"'I used to think if there was a bare room in your house, without anything in it, not even a carpet, it would do me good to go in and lie face down on the wooden floor.'"

The Conversation (1974)

The Actual, Saul Bellow

the trap is set

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

Leaving Normal (1992)

"He looked at her again. Pretty. Pretty little black girl. Pretty little black-skinned girl. What had Pilate done to her? Hadn't anybody told her the things she ought to know? He thought of his two sisters, grown women now who could deal, and the litany of their growing up. Where's your daddy? Your mama know you out here in the street? Put something on your head. You gonna catch your death a cold. Ain't you hot? Ain't you cold? Ain't you scared you gonna get wet? Uncross your legs. Pull up your socks. I thought you was goin to the Junior Choir. Your slip is showin. Your hem is out. Come back in here and iron that collar. Hush your mouth. Comb your head. Get up from there and make that bed. Put on the meat. Take out the trash. Vaseline get rid of that ash."

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

this is how you go home

Dreamy Draw, "moving up from under the moon"

Leaving Normal (1992)

"Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be... what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness. 

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self--the cocoon that was 'personality'--gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself."

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

"'Did you do it yet? Do you know something both exotic and ordinary the I have not felt? Do you know what it's like to risk your one and only self?  How did it feel? Were you afraid? Did it change you? And if I do it, will it change me too?'''

Song of Solomon, Toni Morisson

and Yma Sumac go '..."

An Angel at my Table (1990) 

"Cry, Cries of animals. A special word is used for the cry, call or sound of many animals, and it would be wrong or even ludicrous to use these words indiscriminately. Thus, a dog does not 'buzz' and a bee does not 'bark'. The following are appropriate words for each:

Apes gibber
Asses bray
Bears growl
Bees hum
Beetles drone
Bitterns boom
Blackbirds and thrushes whistle
Bulls bellow
Calves bleat
Cats mew, purr, swear and caterwaul
Chaffinches chirp and pink
Chicks cheep
Cocks crow
Cows low
Crows caw
Cuckoos cuckoo
Deer bell
Dogs bark, bay, howl, whine and yelp
Doves coo
Ducks quack
Eagles, vultures and peacocks scream
Falcons chant
Flies buzz
Foxes bark and yelp
Frogs croak
Geese cackle and hiss
Grasshoppers chirp
Guinea pigs and hares squeak
Hawks scream
Hens cackle and cluck
Horses neigh and whinny
Hyenas laugh
Jays and magpies chatter
Kittens mew
Linnets chuckle
Lions and tigers roar and growl
Mice squeak and squeal
Monkeys chatter and gibber
Nightingales pipe and warble
Owls hoot and screech
Oxen low and bellow
Parrots talk
Pigs grunt, squeak and squeal
Pigeons coo
Ravens croak
Rooks caw
Screech owls screech or shriek
Sheep and lambs bleat
Snakes hiss
Sparrows chirp
Stags bellow and call
Swallows twitter
Swans cry and sing just before death
Turkeys gobble
Wolves howl

For some animals there are also words to imitate the cry, call or sound itself. Thus:

Cats go 'miaow'
Cocks go 'cock-a-doodle-doo'
Cows go 'moo'
Dogs go 'woof" [sic]
Donkeys go 'hee-haw'
Guinea fowls go 'come back'
Nightingales go 'jug jug'
Owls go 'to-whit to-whoo'
Pigs go 'oink'
Sheep and lambs go 'baa'
Yellowhammers go 'a little bit of bread and no cheese'"

"Cry. Cries of Animals." Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Adrian Room.

"Finally Pilate began to take offense. Although she was hampered by huge ignorances, but not in any way unintelligent, when she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair. That was one thing she didn't want to think about anymore. Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. ..." 

... She gave up, apparently, all interest in table manners or hygiene, but acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships."

Song of Solomon, Toni Morison

"Die, Hagar. Die. Die. Die." (hot pink mouth)

Barfly (1987)
"woof, woof, woof, woof!"

"'If you keep your hands just that way,' he said, 'and then bring them down straight, straight and fast you can drive that knife right smack in your cunt. Why don't you do that? Then all your problems will be over.' He patted her cheek and turned away from her wide, dark, pleading, hollow eyes."

Song of Solomon, Toni Morisson

Barfly (1987)
"... oh, beautiful..."

INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, Part I (1975)

"But her glance was nutritious; the spot became, if anything, more pronounced as the years passed."

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

"Oh, what, sorry, I forgot the bags are alphabetized."

("What?")

"Every other week you pull everything out of this cabinet, spread it out on the kitchen floor, then crawl around in it like an archeologist."

TB

Sweetie (1989)

"I arrive with fifty records, three sticks of incense, and at least ten plans."

Sweetie (1989)

"And the bodies spoke to me. I saw stories in flesh, the untold tales of dead arms just hanging there, of pelvises locked in 'Park,' of clenched fists and locked jaws, in physiques molded into attitudes of 'I'm not good enough' or 'Get out of my way.' Chests sunken in shame, shoulders riding high, voices edgy with anger or constricted with fear. The body never lies. 

Who could believe that the secret lay in movement? In making a home of this flesh we cart around like a burden?'

Maps to Ecstasy, Gabrielle Roth

"A moment's hush runs like a fuse through the wet sky."

Not Quite Human 2 (1989)

"'When I was a kid,' she began after a pause, 'I found a rope doll, an Indian doll. I liked it better than all my other dolls for a while, because I could pretend it was anything I longed for it to be.'"

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

"Our egos are menageries of dull, predictable soap opera characters we learn to play. They keep us from being who we are, knowing how to live and what to do, by sapping our creative power and sabotaging the authentic expressions of human energy..."

Maps to Ecstasy, Gabrielle Roth

"...I wan tu aul I wan tu nuthing."

Trust (1990)

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

Your Brother and You

"But fellers, I pleaded into the whorled ear of rain, fair's fair, now, isn't it? Fair's fair? 

Yet, even in the face of that time-revered truth, the phantoms hung back; fair might be fair and all, they couldn't argue with that, but when it came to first baseman--or second or third--they wanted a cool head and a brave heart, not some dang punk who throws his fist up in front of his specs every time he sees a fast one skipping in his general direction. 

But guys... 

Not some dang sissy who falters, fidgets, and finally faints dead away and wakes up five minutes later with his trousers around his ankles and an ammonia capsule under his nose--just because a nurse pricked him from behind with a little penicillin. 

Wait, fellers; it wasn't just a prick. The needle was this long! 

This long, the sissy says. This long. Willa listen at him.  

It was so! Please, fellers ...maybe home base? 

Home base. Willa just listen at the pantywaist.... C'mon; let's get at it..." 

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

"And I fled to my room to recuperate."

"Nothing there. Nothing but dreams and delusion. They all were driven by the need for something else. But when the drive was over, and the dreaming and deluding worn out, they all ended up with the same dull old scene."

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

"'So you came?' I asked, feeling my disappointment turn to a covert elation... And your jealousy has given me strength to make the moon wait another month. 'In Viv's place?'"

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

"THIS IS A VITAL ELEMENT."

Bull Durham (1988)

The Crush (1993)

can you see my wild native blood?

Sweetie (1989)

"When I was young and walked this way--somber, sallow, and morose as a mudball--when I was six and eight and ten and thought my life doled out to me in mean, cheap distances... when I was a boy and should have sprinted barefoot in bib overalls along these ways where quails piped and field mice hid... 'why was I kept in Buster Brown oxfords and corduroy slacks and a room full of big-little books?'... 

... 'Why was I spun into an upstairs cocoon? This is a land for childhood frolic, with forests dark and magical... why, then, did I refuse it as my world-to-grow-up-in?' 

The question had a new and fearful ring to me. Always before, whenever I brooded in some moody apartment with some melancholy wine and let my mind wander back to stand gaping, perplexed and horrified, on the brink of my past, I was able to fix the blame on some convenient villain: 'It was my brother Hank; it was my ancient fossil of a father, who frightened and disgusted me; it was my mother, whose name be frailty... they were the ones who tore my young life asunder!'... 

... But that doubting moon wouldn't let me get away with it. 'Be fair, be fair... Can you blame the first ten years on the eleventh?'"

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

keep it in, keep it out

"... Kesey stopped writing novels for more than twenty years. Decades later he offered this bit of advice to writers: 

'... And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out your mouth like golden pennies. It's the job of the writer in America to say, "Fuck you, God, fuck you and the Old Testament you rode in on, fuck you." The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Anytime anybody says come to me and says, "Write my advertisement, be my ad manager," tell him "Fuck you." The job is always to be exposing God as the crook, as the sleaze ball.'"

"Introduction," Charles Bowden (Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey)

I. (where are your teeth now?) "... making it more than what it is lessens it."

"And I never understood why until that afternoon in Wakonda at the union meeting, sitting there remembering how I'd lost my bobcats, looking out the window of the grange hall at the spot where my boat had sunk in the bay, and hearing Floyd Evenwrite say to old man Syverson: 'All it wants is its fair advantage.'

So as close as I can come to explaining it, friends and neighbors, that is why that river is no buddy of mine. It's maybe the buddy of the brant geese and the steelhead. It is mighty likely a buddy of old lady Pringle and her Pioneer Club in Wakonda -- they hold oldtime get-togethers on the docks every Fourth of July in honor of the first time some old moccasined hobo come paddling across in his dugout a hundred years ago, the Highway of Pioneers they call it... and who the hell knows, maybe it was, just like now it is the railroad we used to float our log booms down -- but it still is no personal friend of mine. Not just the thing about the bobcats; I could tell you a hundred stories, probably, give you a hundred reasons showing why I got to fight that river. Oh, fine reasons; because you can spend a good deal of time thinking during those thinking times, when you're taking timber cruises walking all day long with nothing to do but check the pedometer on your foot, or sitting for hours in a stand blowing a game call, or milking in the morning when Viv is laid up with cramps -- a lot of time, and I got a lot of things about myself straight in my mind: I know, for an instance, that, if you want to play this way, you can make the river stand for all sorts of other things. But doing that it seems to me is taking your eye off the ball; making it more than what it is lessens it. Just to see it clear is plenty. Just to feel it cold against you or watch it flood or smell it when the damn thing backs up from Wakonda with all the town's garbage and sewage and dead crud floating around in it stinking up a breeze, that is plenty. And the best way to see it is not looking behind it -- or beneath it or beyond it -- but dead at it.


And to remember that all it wants is its fair advantage."

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

II. (digging t-th'ina)

"So by keeping my eye on the ball I found it just came down to this: that that river was after somethings I figured belonged to me. It'd already got some and was all the time working to get some more. And in as how I was well known as one of the Ten Toughest Hombres this side of the Rockies, I aimed to do my best to hinder it. 

And as far as I was concerned, hindering something meant -- had always meant -- going after it with everything you got, fighting and kicking, stomping and gouging, and cussing it when everything else went sour. And being just as strong in the hassle as you got it in you to be. Now that's real logical, don't you think? that's real simple. If You Wants to Win, You Does Your Best. Why, a body could paint that on a plaque and hang it up over his bedstead. He could live by it. It could be like one of the Ten Commandments for success. 'If You Wants to Win You Does Your Best.' Solid and certain as a rock; one rule I was gut-sure I could bank on. 

Yet it took nothing more than my kid brother coming to spend a month with us to show me that there are other ways of winning -- like winning by giving in, by being soft, by not gritting your goddamn teeth and getting your best hold... winning by not, for damned sure, being one of the Ten Toughest Hombres west of the Rockies. And show me as well that there's times when the only way you can win is by being weak, by losing, by doing your worst instead of your best. 

And learning that come near to doing me in."

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

"...and, with this just-for-fun contest, begins springing on herself an old, old trap."

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

"lying to herself with the truth: 'No one can see me.'"

"'Who knows who he snatched it from,' the seamstress thought. 'To think I had to eat what a thieving wind brought me!'"

The Seamstress and the Wind, César Aira

arrigato gozaiwash ..tu, fella.

It's Pat (1994)

1991-1992?

In dad's old pickup,
saddle blanket seat covers
wore elbows and thighs.

"The worst of being in prison, he thought, is not being able to lock one's door."

"Julien felt himself hardly worthy of so much devotion -- in truth he was weary of heroics. He would have found a simple, naive, even a timid tenderness affecting, whereas, on the contrary, the notion of an audience, of the presence of others, was always a requisite to Mathilde's haughty soul."

The Red and the Black, Stendhal (M-H B)

permanent change, active reading

"Little by little, self-command returned. He compared himself to a general who has just half won a great battle. The advantage is assured, he said to himself -- and is immense; but what will happen tomorrow? all could be lost in an instant. 

With a passionate gesture he opened the Memoirs Dictated at St. Helena by Napoleon, and forced himself to read them for two long hours; his eyes alone were doing the reading -- but that did not signify; he compelled himself to go on. During this strange exercise, his heart and mind, soaring to the highest possible plane, worked on unconsciously. This is a heart altogether different from that of Mme de Rênal, he was saying to himself -- but got no further. 

'Make her afraid,' he cried suddenly, flinging the book away. The enemy will obey me only so far as I frighten him, that's when he daren't despise me."

The Red and the Black, Stendhal (M-H B)

26 Bathrooms (1985)

"Ah well, it's all over, she said to herself with apparent calm; what remains is a great lesson for me; it was a terrible blunder, humiliating! It will teach me wisdom for the rest of my life."

The Red and the Black, Stendhal (M-H B)

The Blues Brothers (1980)

"1ce the Powers luce itwl fetch itwl move itwl happen every 1 whats in its road. Some 1s got to happen it. If it aint me or you cud wel be some 1 wersen us cudnt it. So I wer on for letting it happen."

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban