two new favorites.
White Noise
Don Delillo
“In a rooming house. I’m totally captivated and intrigued. It’s a gorgeous old crumbling house near the insane asylum. Seven or eight boarders, more or less permanent except for me. A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room. A woman who stands by the letter box for hours, waiting for something that never seems to arrive. A man with no past. A woman with a past. There is a smell about the place of unhappy lives in the movies that I really respond to.” (p10)
[continuation:
“Which one are you?” I said.
“I’m the Jew. What else would I be?”]
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation. (p31)
He would look off into the middle distance, not angry or bored or evasive- just detached, free of the connectedness of events, it seemed. When he did speak, about the other boarders or the landlord, there was something querulous in his voice, a drawn-out note of complaint. It was important for him to believe that he’d spent his life among people who kept missing the point. (p54)
“I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a move as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.”
“Look past the violence.”
“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.” (p219)
Goodbye, Columbus
Philip Roth
Actually we didn’t have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them- at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. (p19)
He gave one the feeling that after swimming the length of the pool a half dozen times he would have earned the right to drink its contents; I imagined he had, like my Uncle Max, a colossal thirst and a gigantic bladder. (p20)
Mrs. Patimkin continued to smile at me and Mr. Patimkin continued to think I ate like a bird. When invited to dinner I would, for his benefit, eat twice what I wanted, but the truth seemed to be that after he’d characterized my appetite that first time, he never really bothered to look again. I might have eaten ten times my normal amount, have finally killed myself with food, he would have still considered me not a man but a sparrow. (p56)
and without citing what copies i'm using, the page numbers are quite random, too. in paper writing induced formality, though, they're there. to stay.