"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

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