(no subject)
And I'm back with another meme, one more distraction from reality. Really, though, this one was so damn tempting. There are a couple that I'm not entirely sure any of you have read, but what can I say?-I'm hopeful.
I tried to cut recognizable bits from my favorite books, and they're all pretty excessive. Have at it-comments are screened until I give in and post answers.
Hints: There are four authors repeated (twice each, oops, but I love them), two lesbian classics in a row, two with “God” in the title (also in a row; I blame my subconscious), and two plays.
1. “To calm the girl down, to get her to listen, I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.”
2. “Movie characters might chase each other through the fog or race down the stairs of burning buildings, but that’s for beginners. Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings. I wanted to say something to this effect, but my hand puppets were back home in their drawer. Instead, I pulled my chair a few inches closer, and we sat silently at our little table on the square, looking for all the world like two people in love.”
3. “Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
4. “What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in someone’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”
5. “I will break, I will burst, into one million tiny pieces of joy! I will be so happy that I won’t be able to be a creature anymore, I’ll become-pure happiness!. . . So I have to stay just like this, perfectly still, frozen, so I can always be someone who just heard you say, ‘I love you.’”
6. “I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?”
7. “They talked about school and music and surfing and stuff. Nothing much. But it felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that-whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as a code for all the things you love about each other.”
8. “Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.”
9. “Cathy said [dying] was like you’re in a store and a friend drives up to the front door in a beautiful car and says ‘Hop in-let’s go on a trip!’ And so you go out for a spin. And once you’re out on the road and having a great time, suddenly your friend turns to you and says, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re dead,’ and you realize they’re right, but it doesn’t matter because you’re happy and this is an adventure and this is fine.”
10. “It had been quiet in [his] head before [she] came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade and light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat. The world, locked out for years, suddenly flooded in, and now [he] couldn’t hear himself for the noise.”
11. “Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”
12. “Darling, my darling-have you ever been to a picnic? And someone blows up a balloon, and everyone starts tossing it around? And the balloon drifts and it catches the light, and it’s always just about to touch the ground, but someone always gets there just in time, to tap it back up. That balloon-that’s God. The very best in all of us. The kindness. The heavy petting. The eleven o’clock numbers.”
13. “Goddamnit, woman, I’m doing the best I can to help you do whatever it is you have to do. No, I’m not crushed. Do you want me to be crushed and fizzle in a puddle at your feet like the Witch of the West? And yes, I will miss you. I’ll miss making love with you and going to the Thalia and you’re probably the only woman I’ll ever know who kicked a fat pig down the stairs when she’s in total drag. Okay?”
14. “‘You smell,’ she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like-’
‘Like a herring!’ I said bitterly. . .
‘Not at all like a herring,’ she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid. . .”
15. “Why do I long for another turn of time? Why do I want the clock to go faster when my life depends on holding back the hands? Why? I want to kiss you.”
16. “Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. But all I could say as a Christian then was, ‘Life sure is funny sometimes.’”
17. “‘Belief in the future is a disreputable virtue, don’t you think? It’s sort of like building ships in bottles. You know? Admirable, but in a creepy kind of way.’”
18. “Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. ‘It’s right there,’ she said, ‘I can feel it.’ ‘Swiss peasant would use the tip of her tongue.’ ‘Lick it out?’ ‘Yeth, shly try?’ ‘Sure,’ she said. Gently, I pressed the quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. ‘Goody-goody,’ she said nictating.”
19. “‘All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.’”
20. “‘Overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?’”