s.penkevich > Books: love‎ (62)

‘May your hand be in mine, by sun and by night. Let our breaths twine and our blood become one, until our bones return to dust.’

‘ was only thinking how strange it is. To think how many people we cross paths with in our lives. How someone like me has found someone like you.’

‘he associates his best friend’s wife with a summery, exotic fruit, acidic and ample…he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.’

‘the white of Sunday is not as simple as it seems. Optics teaches us that white is the result of a combination of every color (and not the absence of color, as I once thought). It’s not the purity of the bride or the emptiness of the blank page: Sunday is neither neutral nor naive. White is the synthesis of every color, just as Sunday is the synthesis of every day of the week. It’s the final result, the last chapter, the solution.’

‘Absorbed in my translation, I wonder if that expression, so difficult to translate into French, testifies to the fact that English-speakers love differently than us. Do they make more effort? For them, is it possible to make love last? To reignite a desire that’s been extinguished? How do they do it? ’

‘In reality, marriage didn’t calm me down. I realized at the very moment we said “I do” that my husband could still divorce me…I was constantly awaiting the next step. I discovered a world of proofs of love, with commitment everywhere and love nowhere. And fifteen years after our first date, I still sleep just as poorly.’

‘I think I was always writing for myself, to sort through my loss and worry and tangled ambitions. Even now, I think about how effortless it is to lose oneself in words, and yet also find out who you are.’

'I hear that you're to be neutral reporters, but I also don't think that's quite possible, if I'm frank...I think the best piece of advice, Miss Winnow, is to write what you see happening and what you feel and who we are and why it's vital that the people in Oath and the cities beyond join our effort. Is that something you think is possible?'

‘Sometimes strength isn't swords and steel and fire, as we are so often made to believe. Sometimes it's found in quiet, gentle places.’

‘ I think we all wear armor. I think those who don't are fools, risking the pain of being wounded by the sharp edges of the world, over and over again. But if I've learned anything from those fools, it is that to be vulnerable is a strength most of us fear. It takes courage to let down your armor, to welcome people to see you as you are.’

‘One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’

‘The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I’ve already written, more or less — I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I’m doing now is both different and the same.’

‘poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that’s what we were. That’s how I came to be here with you.’

‘he’s a man who must make love a lot, a man who’s afraid, he must make love a lot to fight against fear.’

‘We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We're on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves.’

‘its while its being lived that life is immortal, while its still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown’

‘No matter how it turns out—good or bad—I’m going to start living for me and what I want, instead of for other people and what I think they want me to do.’

‘It is difficult, these days, to know how to be. Not a new phenomenon, of course, but one lent a certain urgency by the situation. People protest, or forget to protest. People hoard food, medical supplies, use them up and hoard them again…they suspect that there is less time than predicted, throw parties to celebrate the endless ending, pretend the coming on of something new. It’s always been this way, always worsening. A contradiction: the fact of something always being the case and yet that case being flux, deterioration.’

‘Something I’ve been preoccupied with throughout my career is the concept of a pervasive norm – the way that banality and dailiness always assert themselves no matter the extremes people find themselves in. This can be a good thing, inasmuch as it shows how adaptable people can be, but it also signifies a kind of apathy and powerlessness in the face of an overriding system, and I’m extremely interested in that.’

‘The problem, of course, is the general worsening of things—things being housing, and the weather, and The State Of It All. The problem is private companies springing up every other week to mishandle the business of dealing with it and siphon off funding in the process. The problem is the fact that there’s no money, and nowhere to put people, and the fact that they’re working on a skeleton staff with no time and no way to do more than they’re already doing…They are, as Jude reflects, a ship being mended as it sails, except that they aren’t really being mended and their sailing has become less a smooth progress and more the basic act of staying afloat.’

‘The problem, of course, is that there’s always something, and it can be easier on occasion to ignore it and take your partner back to bed.’

‘The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviours. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.

‘Then let me advise you to take up your little burdens again; for though they seem heavy sometimes, they are good for us, and lighten as we learn to carry them. Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for every one; it keeps us from ennui and mischief; is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion.’

‘that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.’

‘All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart…’

‘Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.’

‘Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.’

‘This is the first book that I set fully in, like committed to writing about Kentucky…One of the reasons that I had found that difficult to do before is because I find it to be a place of very mixed experiences that I love very, very, very much, and which has just an incredible violence and terror to it.’

‘Because I dreamed of Starling House long before I ever saw it. Because sometimes when the light slants soft through the west windows and turns the dust mots into tiny golden fireflies I like to pretend the house belongs to me, or that I belong to it.’

‘They simply told themselves a different story, one that was easier to believe because they’d heard it before: Once there was a bad woman who ruined a good man. Once there was a witch who cursed a village. Once there was an odd, ugly girl whom everyone hated, because it was safe to hate her.’

‘Shame was of no use to me, what it did was open the door to the street, and when the door closed behind me, with the whole street out in front of me, the whole world out in front of me, I let go of shame’s hand.’

‘Our teacher explained words in poems mean more than they seem, words are stretched, so where words alone can’t go, with poetry they can, they fly, like the bird, the bird that can hear loud silences, that can open up dawns, shrink rivers, horizon stretchers, only words can do that!’