"All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life--where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how to they cope inside of it."

"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 

"the steward of your legacy."

"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 

"He looked at the ceiling, summoning a vision as if I had asked him to actually see his own future."

It Chooses You, Miranda July 

"It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk."

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 

"Suddenly it occurred to me that nothing might be happening. I'd done that before. I had dded meaningful layers to things that were meaningless many, many times before."

 The First Bad Man, Miranda July

"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 

hold on to yourself

 "'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 

Stalker (1979)

magic circles

Pluto's haze, New Horizons's Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), 2015

"He had a new happiness at Bog Onion Road but he also had a new burden: he had done bad things in Hell. The guilt he felt about his past was the worst of the pains he now carries, but not the only one, for he had, if not daily, at least weekly, the reminder of Honey Barbara's hostility towards him. The Cadillac also reminded him of that pain."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"She had come to this, this seedy betrayal, and she knew it was time to leave these people who had such trunk-loads of dreams, ideas and ambitions but never anything in the present, only what would happen one day, and it was time to get away from it and face whatever might be waiting for her at home and hope that it might be as it had been; better and deeper pleasures with smaller, more ordinary things, pleasures so everyday that these people would never see anything in them but tiredness, repetition, discomfort, and no originality at all."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"As the weeks went on, the structural flaws in their relationship became apparent to Honey Barbara. It was, she thought, like being in a hut with a leaking rusty roof: you keep living in it, you try to ignore it, you mark the leaking parts with chalk and promise yourself you'll make temporary repairs with bituminous paint; but then, when it's dry, you forget about it. In the wet you live amongst plinking buckets but never enough of them, and you kick them over anyway, and everything becomes damp, and mould and mildew grow everywhere, even in your bed, until, in the end, it all becomes too much and you find your ladder and, just as the sunlight strikes the roof and the stream starts rising from it, you rip the fucker to pieces and the rusty iron disintegrates as easily as a dead leaf in your hand. Underneath it you find fat cockroaches, wooden battens white with rot, leaves, mulch, decay, mice, a tree snake with a yellow belly and some peculiar ice blue fungi growing from the rotten wood: a whole eco-system built on lethargy and failure."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"There was a murmuring, a slow sensuous stirring as if the house itself still contained, in its dry grey timbers, the sap of sexual pleasure, and it twisted, stretching against its nails, and through the huan pine ceiling came the moan of her daughter, soft as wool."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"Devils were devils. They did not belong to anyone, not Christ, not the Buddha--they were devils, malevolent spirits. They existed everywhere."

Black Narcissus (1947)

"When the devil has your body he knots it, makes ropes, pulls it together, ties it up, braids it, circles you, makes you strangle yourself with your own neck muscles, cut yourself with your own tissues, burst your own organs apart."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"'It's O.K., it gave me pleasure.'"

Paris, Texas (1984)

Bliss, Peter Carey

"Actors would punish him for all eternity while a child gazed through glass."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"But this is all deadly serious, and what he is doing is throwing the whole emotional balance of the household out of kilter, tipping the axis of his world and producing peculiar weather."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"They were like heavy cigarette smokers suddenly denied their drug. They raged at the slightest rejection. "

"But he withheld his love--his vast, blind, uncritical love--from them, and they were like children withdrawn from the breast When their love was not reciprocated they punished him with a fury that puzzled them and left them guilty an shaken, offering apologies that could not be accepted, the rejection of which, in turn, produced greater hurts, ripped scar tissue before it was healed, and ended in scenes of such emotion and frenzy that the neighbours turned off their lights and came out into their gardens, where they stood silently beside fragrant trees."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"But although it would be a long time before he concerned himself with goodness again, over the years it did fall into the sediment of his character, and at times over the years he found himself wondering what God would like him to do.

But now he was a man of thirty-nine lying in a hospital bed and contemplating death. He could not allow himself to know that he was sickened with his life. He was like someone who has lain in bed too long eating rich food: within his soul there was suddenly a yearning for tougher, stronger things, for ecstasies, for the thrill of goodness perfectly achieved, to see butterflies in doorways in Belize, to be part of the lightning dance, to quiver in terror before the cyclone."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"'The trees and the brush will talk back to you, when you talk to them....'"

"But, look: the place he went to when he died bears absolutely no resemblance to the little wooden church of his youth, and the smells are not the smells of his Christianity, which were dry and clean like Palestinian roads through rocky landscapes, scented with cheap altar wine, floor polish, and the thin, almost ascetic, odour of his mother's perfume. It did not fit. It did not fit. It did not fit anything at all, except perhaps some stories he has since forgotten, but still retains, so one day he will remember them, even though they never appeared to him to have any religious intent.  

Here, there, a fragment dredged up from some dark corner of his memory: Vance Joy pretending to be a Hopi Indian. 

'You may need a tree for something--firewood, or a house. You offer four sacred stones. You pray, saying: "You have grown large and powerful. I have to cut you. I know you have knowledge in you from what happens around you. I am sorry, but I need your strength and power. I will give you these stones, but I must cut you down. These stones and my thoughts will be sure that another tree will take your place." 

'The trees and the brush will talk back to you, when you talk to them. They can tell you what's coming or what came by, if you can read them.'"

Bliss, Peter Carey

"It was only a small house and when the February winds blew it rocked on its wooden stumps and it is a measure of their sense of their own specialness that they did not envy their neighbours' larger houses but found theirs in every way superior. To walk into that little cottage was to feel something that was available nowhere else in town: old oiled timbers, mellow lights, curious old rugs, and chipped plates with pretty patterns, which visitors would fondly imagine were remants of a misplaced fortune. Where everybody else bought glossy white paint and threw out their kitchen dresser, the Joys were seen removing the last vestiges of paint and fossicking out at the tip for their neighbours' rejected furniture."

Bliss, Peter Carey

"'And in me too a death is growing; it's getting bigger as I get smaller, and when we're both the same size we'll change places--I'll be my death and my death will be me.'"

Angelica's Grotto, Russell Hoban

I'd seen that look before

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

"maybe it would come to me in the fullness of time."

"I suppose the postures for every action are always there and successive generations fall into them."

The Bat Tattoo, Russell Hoban

"but I trundled on to the tube station, took a deep breath, negotiated the turnstile..."

"Always it is interesting, is it not? to look rearward from the present moment to those earlier present moments from which it has arisen. If one perspicaciously from effects to causes traces the development of anything, one sees with clarity how infallibly one thing leads to another. And yet sometimes it is easier from the present to look forward and predict an outcome than it is from an outcome to look backward and determine a cause. ..."

The Bat Tattoo, Russell Hoban

The Rachel Papers (1989)

"Clearly this kept him in a good humour; he had an easy lightness and brightness about him that made me aware of how heavy and dark I was feeling."

Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban

"But in the time that followed I often found myself shaking my head and saying, aloud to myself if I was alone, 'Why did I do that?'"

"'Look at it. You might think you can simply follow a spiral to the centre but you can't. You start around it one way but then you double back and go the other way. You expect to get closer all the time but you keep passing through where you were before, passing through yourself as you inwind to the centre. And this isn't just a matter of walking around in a funny way; this is the earth we're walking on and it takes notice of our intention: if we do it together with the intention of inwinding ourselves to each other, then once we reach the centre that's it for ever. Do you want to do that?'"

Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban

"The drawing session had been thirsty work and the pepperoni cried out for Chianti which I happened to have a few bottles of. As we ate and drank it seemed to both of us that the evening was shaping nicely. I couldn't remember a time when I had drawn to well or felt so good; I wondered if I'd ever draw that well and feel that good again. Happiness can be unsettling, like catching a baby that someone has thrown out of a window."

Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban

"It isn't that they defied description, it's just that I'm not going to describe them."

Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban

"I suddenly had the feeling you get when you reach for something on the top shelf of a cupboard and everything falls on your head. I crawled out from under the fallout and worked up some comments on dream imagery and the exploration of the subconscious."

Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban

terrestrial base

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

 

"The hours between then and bedtime were perfectly useless as far as work was concerned. I drank, I ordered in a pizza, I watched The Double Life of Veronique on video."

Amaryllis Night and Day, Russell Hoban

"'Stop! ... Go! ... Stop! ... Go! ...'"

The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima

"This boy who was so inexpert at thinking was surprised to discover that one of the expected properties of thought was its efficacy as a timekiller."

The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima

"All this she knew. The interior of the house dark even at noon, the somber pangs of childbirth, the gloom at the bottom of the sea--these were the series of interrelated worlds in which she lived her life."

The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima