Book quotes
Bluebeard's Egg - Margaret Atwood
The forgetting was deliberate: it was the same as remembering only in reverse.
She should know by now that over is over, that when its says The End at the end of a book it means there isn't any more; which she can never quite believe. The problem is that she's invested so much suffering in him, and she can't shake the notion that so much suffering has to be worth something. Maybe unhappiness is a drug, like any other: you could develop a tolerance to it, and then you'd want more.
The Freds of this world make themselves explicit by what they do and choose. It is the Bettys who are mysterious.
Of course it satisfies him: you can always tell when men are satisfied.
It's a bad habit, fooling around with her head this way. It does no good. She knows that if she could quit she'd be happier. She ought to be able to: she's given up smoking.
The thing is there, standing in one corner of whatever room she happens to be in, like a stranger whose face you know you could see clearly if you were only to turn your head. Alma doesn't turn her head. She doesn't want to look.
I don't know why funerals are supposed to make people hungry, but they do. If you can still chew you know you're alive.
"We went down and bought our urns today," my father says.
"You what?" I say, shocked. There is nothing wrong with my parents. They are in perfect health. I on the other hand have a cold.
How will I handle it? Only time, which does not by any means tell everything, will tell.
Inkspell - Cornelia Funke
It was far easier to believe in unhappiness than in happiness.
"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?...As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar."
The idea hovered and shivered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else. -- Philip Pullman, Northern Lights
"Will I live on, neatly pressed between the pages of my words? Nonsense! We're none of us immortal; even the finest words don't change that, do they?"
Words were useless. At times they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moment you really needed them. You could never find the right words, never, and where would you look for them? The heart is as silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice.
Fengolio's angels of death. Did they make dying easier than it was in the world he came from? No. Nothing could make it easier. You lost what you loved. That was death, here as well as there.
Song lies asleep in everything
That dreams the day and night away,
And the whole world itself will sing
If once the magic word you say. -- Joseph von Eichendorff, "The Divining Rod"
His voice was shaking--heavens, what a plague love was! Anyone who claimed otherwise had never yet felt that wretched trembling of the heart.
Thunderstorms were because the sky longed to be united with the earth, and reached out fiery fingers to touch it on such nights.
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
I think of my heart as my companion on an endless forced march, the two of us roped together, unwilling conspirators in some plot or tactic we've got no handle on. Where are we going? Towards the next day. It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it.
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?
At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
More and more I feel like a letter--deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.
"Now that takes the gold-plated gingerbread," said Reenie.
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
Nothing.
Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.
A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used--metaphorically, of course--to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else--to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know--because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint--Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?
...it's longing that raises the mirages--hope against hope, and longing in a vacuum. Perhaps her mind is slipping, perhaps she's going off the tracks, perhaps she is coming unhinged. Unhinged, like a broken door, like a rammed gate, like a rusting strongbox. When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.
She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
But her mind can't hold him, she can't fix the memory of what he looks like. It's as if a breeze blows over the water and he's dispersed, into broken colours, into ripples; then he reforms elsewhere, past the next pillar, taking on his familiar body. Around him is a shimmering.
The shimmering is his absense, but it appears to her as light. It's the simple daily light by which everything around her is illuminated. Every morning and night, every glove and shoe, every chair and plate.
The Moving Finger writers, and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears blot out a Word of it.
They should all be cheered by it, for isn't it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one; a message that cannot be cancelled out.
But such messages can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate.
(Think twice, said Reenie. Laura said, Why only twice?)
I used to have a daydream about myself--still have it, come to that. A ridiculous-enough daydream, though it's often through such images that we shape our destinies.
"There's no place like home..." No place=home. Therefore, home=no place. Therefore home does not exist.
I'm sure they're blameless, but they're alive, and whoever's left alive gets blamed. That's the rule in things like this. Unfair, but there it is.
The dying are allowed a certain latitude, like children on their birthdays.
But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw. Cries of the thirsty ghosts.
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
Happiness is a garden, walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
"Immortality," said Crake, "is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal..." -- Oryx and Crake
The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
Every single molecule that Charis is taking into her lungs has been sucked in and out of the lungs of countless thousands of other people, many times. Come to that, every single molecule in her body has once been part of someone else's body, of the bodies of many others, going back and back, and then past human beings, all the way to the dinosaurs, all the way to the first planktons. Not to mention vegetation. We are all a part of everybody else, she muses. We are all a part of everything.
Their presences are more important to her anyway than what comes out of their mouths. Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance. But auras don't lie.
There's an element of sheer mischief in history, thinks Tony. Perverse joy. Outrageousness for its own sake. What is an ambush, really, but a kind of military practical joke? Hiding yourself, then jumping out and yelling Surprise! But none of the historians ever mentions it, this quality of giddy hide-and-seek. They want the past to be serious. Dead serious. She muses over the phrase: if dead is serious, is alive then frivolous?
His eyes shine milky white in the moonlight. Blue eyes, she's read, are not the basic colour of human eyes; probably they grew from a mutation, and are therefore more prone to cataracts.
You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot, and scream, and wear yourself out.
Get me through this, God, and I'll scrub a million toilets for you! Not that you'd be interested, because in Heaven, who shits?
...art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.
Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.