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| 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."
"But he withheld his love--his vast, blind, uncritical love--from them, and they were like children withdrawn from the breast When their love was not reciprocated they punished him with a fury that puzzled them and left them guilty an shaken, offering apologies that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
"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.'"
"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."
