Thursday, May 6, 2010

Stiegg Larsson - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/The Girl Who Played With Fire

No quotes from these two books - just wanted to document that I read them. Each was very good, but the writing was much more plot driven than language ridden.. so I was caught up in the story, and no quotes would have made sense out of context! Nevertheless, a very good read, and very hard to put down.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri

"For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding." (p. 50)

"She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing far more foreign than the beautiful house she'd grown up in, her education at private schools." (p. 138)

"At forty-eight she has come to experience the solitude that her husband and son and daughter already know, and which they claim not to mind. 'It's not such a big deal,' her children tell her. 'Everyone should live on their own at some point.' But Ashima feels too old to learn such a skill. She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another." (p. 161)

"It's one of the things she's always hated about life here: these chilly, abbreviated days of early winter, darkness descending mere hours after noon. She expects nothing of days such as this, simply waits for them to end." (p. 163)

"'Will you remember this day, Gogol?' ... 'How long do I have to remember it?' ... 'Try to remember it always,' he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. 'Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.'" (p. 187)

"She does not fault him for this. Such omissions of devotion, of affection, she knows now, do not matter in the end. She no longer wonders what it might have been like to do what her children have done, to fall in love first rather than years later, to deliberate over a period of months or years and not a single afternoon, which was the time it had taken for her and Ashoke to agree to wed." (p. 279-280)

Friday, August 28, 2009

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

"'I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.'" (Epilogue x)

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting, he thought, as he looked again at the position of the sun, and hurried his pace." (p. 11)

"The boy knew a lot of people in the city. That was what made traveling appeal too him - he always made new friends, and he didn't need to spend all of his time with them. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own." (p. 15-16)

"'And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.'" (p. 22)

"At the moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke - the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well." (p. 93)

"It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning."

"'When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dreams,' said the alchemist, echoing the words of the old king." (p. 114)

"'When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.'" (p. 134)

"'That's what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.'" (p. 150)

"'Because it's not love to be static like the desert, nor is it love to roam the world like the wind. And it's not love to see everything from a distance, like you do. Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World. ... Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.'" (p. 150-151)

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Misc. - Not From A Book

"I am constantly searching for two things: Love and Truth. But I am not willing to compromise either because one is nothing without the other." -Najva S.

"And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person." - Barack Obama (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_cook)

“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” Kerouac, On the Road

Monday, October 13, 2008

I'll Take You There - Joyce Carol Oates

"I baptize thee in the name of ceaseless yearning, ceaseless seeking and ceaseless dissatisfaction. Amen!" (p. 9)

"In my pride I was hurt; I understood that I would be banished from a glamorous world in which in fact I took no interest; that I would be banished was a spur to my desire." (p. 40)

"I had decided that life is probably mostly a matter of memorized words in sequence; words, gestures, smiles and handshakes, in a certain sequence; life is not as the great philosophers taught in their loneliness, not a matter of essences pared back to theorems, propositions, syllogisms and conclusions, but instead a mtter of mouthing the correct word-formulae in the correct setting. Maybe it wasn't so serious, after all: life? Maybe it wasn't worth dying for." (p. 84)

"..he was still youngish, though with thinning hair and downturned eyes and the disfigured hand; unshaven, in an undershirt and soiled work trousers; elbows on the faded oilcloth, a bottle of whisky and a glass beside him; a Camel burning in his stained fingers; the overhead light casting crevice-like shadows downward onto his brooding yet somehow peaceful face. I saw that Where he is, no one can follow. And there was a kind of peace, too, in this realization." (p. 91)

"There can be no beauty here, therefore no hurt and no hope." (p. 99)

"... I did not yet understand that I was in love; I'd fallen in love with a man I did not know; with a man's mere voice; and that love is a kind of illness; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical condition, like grief." (p. 105)

"... never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes." (p. 106)

"I learned that the male is all eyes; his sexuality is fueled through the eyes; he assesses through the eyes; judges swiftly and without mercy through the eyes." (p. 109)

"For whom we love helplessly we love, too, to betray: any connection is thrilling." (p. 120)

"My so-called personality had always been a costume I put on fumblingly, and removed with vague perplexed fingers; it shifted depending on circumstances, like unfastened cargo in the hold of a ship." (p. 129)

"Yes but I love you, nothing can shame me." (p. 157)

"Trying to imagine my life without Vernor Matheius at its center. My life without loving him.
A hole in the heart through which the bleak cold of the universe might whistle through." (p. 182)

"I came to believe that the unexamined life, the life that's led without continuous self-scrutiny, and a doubting of all inherited prejudice, bias, "faith", was madness. In our civilized lives we are surrounded by madness while believing ourselves enlightened." (p. 182)

"... waiting for Death for take another, as in a herd of beasts terrorized by predators there must be the single instinct-wish Take another! take another and not me! This was the secret of which adults would not speak; this was a secret known by children, and forgotten by adults; a secret of which the great philosophers would not speak because it is so stark, so simple; a secret lacking revelation." (p. 203)

"... to hurt oneself sometimes is a balm; to hurt onself sometimes is the only way of healing" (p. 235)

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

The Inferno - Dante Alighieri (trans. John Ciardi)

"Your soul is sunken in that cowardice/that bears down many men, turning their course/and resolution by imagined perils,/as his own shadow turns the frightened horse." (Canto II, p. 25)

"I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORRY.
SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT." (Canto III, p. 30)

"'The double grief of a lost bliss/is to recall its happy hour in pain.'" (Canto V, p. 50)

"'Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;/in the glory of his shining our hearts poured/a bitter smoke...'" (Canto VII, p. 64)

"'O sun which clears all mists from troubled sight,/such joy attends your rising that I feel/as grateful to the dark as to the light." (Canto XI, p. 92)

"Those three sad spirits looked at one another/like men who hear the truth and understand." (Canto XVI, p. 129)

"'The man who lies asleep/will never waken fame, and his desire/and all his life drift past him like a dream,/and the traces of his memory fade from time/like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream." (Canto XXIV, p. 190)

"A man prepared is a man hurt by delay." (Canto XXVIII, p. 221)

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Dr. Zhivago - Boris Pasternak

"Every motion in the world taken separately was calculated and purposeful, but, taken together, they were spontaneously intoxicated with the general stream of life which united them all. .. This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each - a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name." (p. 13)

"When they jumped out onto the track and picked flowers or took a short walk to stretch their legs, they felt as if the whole place owed its existence to the accident, and that without it neither the swampy meadow with hillocks, the broad river, nor the fine house and church on the steep opposite side would have been there. Even the diffident evening sun seemed to be a purely local feature." (p. 15)

"'How wonderful to be alive,' he thought. 'But why does it always hurt?'" (p. 17)

"'And why is it,' thought Lara, 'that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?'" (p. 24)

"Nothing equalled her spiritual beauty. Her hands were stunning like a sublime idea. Her shadow on the wall of the hotel room was like the outline of her innocence. ... 'Lara,' he whispered, shutting his eyes, and he had a vision of her head resting on his hands; her eyes were closed, she was asleep, unconscious that he watched her sleeplessly for hours on end. Her hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart." (p.46)

"And it is this that makes the whole of life so terrifying. Does it crush you by thunder and lightning? No, by oblique glances and whispered calumny. It is all treachery and ambiguity. Any single thread is as fragile as a cobweb, but just try to pull yourself out of the net, you only become more entangled.
And the strong are dominated by the weak and the ignoble." (p. 48)

"He was so childishly simple that he did not conceal his joy at seeing her, as if she were some summer landscape of birch trees, grass, and clouds, and could freely express his enthusiasm about her without any risk of being laughed at." (p. 50)

"And now listen carefully. You in others - this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life - your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.
And now one last point. There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us." (p. 68)

"He rebelled against the motherly feeling that all her life had been a part of her affection for him and could not see that such a love was something more, not less, than the ordinary feeling of a woman for a man" (p. 109)

"How I wish your face to say that you are happy with your fate and that you need nothing from anyone. If only someone who is really close to you, your friend or your husband - best of all if he were a soldier - would take me by the hand and tell me to stop worrying about your fate and not to weary you with my attentions. But I'd wrest my hand free and take a swing... " (p. 147)

"And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness" (p. 175)

"What is truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It confronts us as suddenly as it if had always been there or had dropped out of the blue." (p. 182)

"In some inexplicable way it was clear at once that this man was entirely a manifestation of the will. So completely was he the self he resolved to be that everything about him seemed inevitable, exact, perfect - his well-proportioned, handsomely set head, his impetuous step, his long legs, his knee boots which may well have been muddy but looked polished, and his gray serge tunic which may have been creased but looked as if it were made of the best linen and had just been pressed.
Such was the irresistible effect of his brilliance, his unaffected ease, and his sense of being at home in any conceivable situation on earth." (p. 248)

"Filled with the loftiest aspirations from his childhood, he had looked upon the world as a vast arena where everyone competed for perfection, keeping scrupulously to the rules. When he found that this was not so, it did not occur to him that his conception of the world order might have been oversimplified. He nursed his grievance and with it the ambition to judge between life and the dark forces that distorted it, and to be life's champion and avenger." (p. 251)