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"But he withheld his love--his vast, blind, uncritical love--from them, and they were like children withdrawn from the breast When their love was not reciprocated they punished him with a fury that puzzled them and left them guilty an shaken, offering apologies that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

come on lightnin'

The Rachel Papers (1989)

"I made up my mind to order, then pretend to go to the bathroom and walk out. I took off my dangly earrings and put them in my purse. I uncrossed my legs. I looked at him. ..."

"Bettering Myself," Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh

"He had been embarrassed before, and by real masters--the Grand Master, of course, being himself. Simply to crow at the man, expose his hypocrisy? Jack didn't think he was that petty."

The Shining, Stephen King

"'I'm getting better.'"

Camp Nowhere (1994)

"On the roof he felt himself healing from the troubled wounds of the last three years. On the roof he felt at peace."

The Shining, Stephen King

"for he was undergoing one of those crises in which the entire soul indistinctly shows what it contains, just as, in a storm, the sea fleetingly opens to reveal everything from the seaweed on its shore to the sand of its greatest depths.  

And he went on: "

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

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