night watch

"But disparaging those we love always detaches us from them to some extent. It is better not to touch our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands."

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

ball drop

"She was ripping out the lining of a dress whose scraps lay scattered around her; the elder Madame Bovary kept working her squeaking scissors without ever looking up; Charles, in his cloth slipper and the old brown frock coat which he used as a dressing gown, sat with his hands in his pockets and remained as silent as the two ladies; and near them, wearing a little white apron, Berthe was scraping the gravel of the path with her shovel."

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)

"These women, all rushing into his mind at once, got in each other's way and grew smaller, as though compressed to a common level of love. Picking up handfuls of mingled letters, he amused himself for several minutes by letting them cascade from one hand to the other. Finally, bored and drowsy, he put the box back into the wardrobe and said to himself, 'What a lot of nonsense!' 

This summed up his opinion, for his amorous pleasures, like children in a schoolyard, had so trampled his heart that nothing green could grow in it; they were still more casual than children, for they had not even left their names on the walls."

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

"even though she usually tended to be rather hard-hearted and insensitive to the distress of others, like most people born of country parents, whose souls always keep something of the callousness of their fathers' hands."
 

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

"Meanwhile, in the depths of her soul, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept scanning the solitude of her life with anxious eyes, straining to sight some far-off white sail in the mists of the horizon."

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

"His natural irresponsibility eventually led him to break all his good resolutions. One day he missed a visit to the hospital, the next day a lecture; he liked this first taste of idleness and gradually abandoned his courses altogether."

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

"'as the fellow says, after it's over we understand each other.'"

The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

LOWER YOUR PRICE

Not Quite Human II (1989)

White Palace (1990)

Found my other half

dollar, under the cushions,

fresh from the couch mint.

Paris, Texas (1984)

Vigil (1984)

"... and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?'"

It, Stephen King

Paris, Texas (1984)

"He hadn't been very good at first; he was too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job but great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with careers and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to time. That was really all there was. And that was enough."

It, Stephen King

"Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh--they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: 'Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a train whistle suddenly drop it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.' You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense."

It, Stephen King

silly ways to die

"at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting vise grips driving the seven of them together--tight, tighter, tightest."

It, Stephen King

Damned If You Don't (1987)

Hester Street (1975)

a gravitationally completely collapsed object (the return to innocence)

"Well, after you've used the phrase 'a gravitationally completely collapsed object' ten times you conclude you've got to get a better name. So that's when I switched to the word 'black hole'."

John Archibald Wheeler, A Brief History of Time (1991)

"No... no, I don't think that. But... 

But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So... what?"

It, Stephen King

STEPHEN HAWK-KING

A Brief History of Time (1991)

"The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery--things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog's odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost-halos of moisture ringing their headlamps."

It, Stephen King

"And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing's reptilian plating, Eddie's hands groped at the Creature's back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt. 

And as Eddie's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else."

It, Stephen King

New York Stories (1989) 

" 'cause what do you give a girl that has nothing, you know, that doesn't need anything, right? you give her comfort, right?"

"The Cadillac Hotel," Snap Judgement, 07.27.2017.

"Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy... Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the 'k'-sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku."

It, Stephen King

Some nights I just play black-jack.

Rain Man (1988) 

"(for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a sexual pre-signal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heat-lightning) a bright golden anklet-bracelet she wore..."

It, Stephen King

"Team Homer," The Simpsons (1995)

"My mother was not a person but the climate I grew up in."

1982 Janine, Alasdair Gray

An Angel at My Table (1990)

the sun can't be seen
behind our backs while we sleep,
radiating heat

Under the surface
of an extinguishing core,
from remnants are mined

the membrane, stripped off
like vinyl from a billboard
when the bond pays out.

Takes one year no more
to become expert at this
manual labor.

Protein-rich membranes
are dried, powdered, and processed.
Sold as supplements

to heal busted joints,
lasting muscle contracture,
palmar fascia.

"There was very little in the place, mostly it was furnished with light and quiet. It was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. There was a Chinese teapot in the kitchen, there was a copy of Lilly's The Mind of the Dolphin on the table by the bed. In the sitting room were R. H. Blyth's four volumes on haiku and some natural history. 'I don't buy books much anymore,' he said. There was a radio but no gramophone."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"I stretched out my hands, thought of holding the grey air cool and wet in my hands."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban