"--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."
"... 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 ..."
"... she scribbles her spine's / continuation into immaterial et cetera, ..."
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| 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."
"--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!"
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| The Unbelievable Truth (1989) |
"This was Big Magic."
"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."
"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."
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| 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."
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| 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.'"
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| 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."
"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.'"
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| 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."
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| The Conversation (1974) |
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| 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."
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| 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."
