"The Stone Gods" by Jeanette Winterson
First read: 15.10.10
I haven't liked Winterson this much since The Passion, i think. A bit like The Powerbook this tries to analyse the relationship between storytelling and life. And the cyclical nature of both. So the main character, Billy, goes through similar experiences in different lifetimes, and slowly the very same story becomes more transparent, clearer. The ending is a bit wonky, but I think it was bound to be, with a story about how there are not endings. It's strange that even as it should be hard to read with the multiple retellings and the imaginery, it's taken me but a few days, it might more my mood than the book, admitedly.
Have quotes:
☀ Am I a prude? Am i a moralist? Am I letting life’s riches pass me by? Why do I want to go for a walk in the woods and say nothing until you turn to me and I take your face in both hands and kiss you?
☀ I don’t even know who you are. PP. 20
☀ The science never gets as far as the strangeness. The more sophisticated y equipment, the stranger the worlds it detects. I sometimes think I’m sailing through a vast thought. PP. 47
☀ “Stories are always true,” said Handsome. “It’s the facts that mislead.” PP. 53
Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth. PP. 62
☀ …I don’t know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood. PP. 63
☀ “Exactly,” said Spike, glancing at me. “Humans have given away all their power to a “they”. You aren’t able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. You made a world without alternatives, and now it is dying, and your new world already belongs to “they”.
“I never heard of an activist robot,” said Pink.
“It’s just one more thing we’re going to have to be on your behalf,” PP. 65
☀ “Don’t regret it.” Said Spike. “Change it if you have to, but don’t regret it.” PP. 69
☀ "...I did the calculations, they were wrong. They were wrong because life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation- it is a part of the equation" PP. 77
☀ "Poetry didn't save us, did it?"
"Not once, but many times."
Handome smiled - "You think so?
"It was never death you feared: It was emptiness."
PP. 78
☀ The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens. PP. 80
☀ I lay besides Spike and thought how strange it was to lie beside a living thing that did not breathe. There is no rise and fall, no small sighs, no intake of air, no movement of the lips or slight flex of the nostrils. But she was lived, reinterpreting the meaning of what life is, which is, I suppose, what we have done since life began. PP. 82
☀ The truth is that I've spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm... Maybe if I hadn't gone with Spike.. maybe if i could have lived more peacebly... maybe if i'd met the right person years ago, maybe if i hadn't done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, that promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? THe Maybe Islands are hostile to human life. -PP. 84
☀ True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction - don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end. PP. 87.
☀ She smiled. “What do you think love is, Billie?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s recognition, perhaps discovery, sometimes it’s sacrifice, always it’s treasure… What do you think it is?”
“I think it’s the chance to be human.”
“Human? You make us sound almost worthwhile.”
“One day you will be. Feel.”
She took my hand and put it agains her chest. I rested my hand there, silent, listening, wondering. Then I felt it. Then I felt it beating.
“What?”
“My heart.”
“You don’t have a heart.”
“I do now.”
“But…”
“I know it’s impossible, but so much that has seemed impossible has already happened.”
“Only the impossible is worth the effort.” PP. 90-91
☀ Emerson said that the rarest thing on the planet is a truly individual action - but I'd set the bar at a story told. It's why the nineteenth-century writers favoured usch long and satisfyingly plotted novels. Some of them - George Eliot - really believed there was something to tell and that we could tell it. Dickens knew very well that we could not, but he told it anyway, glittering and bravura. PP. 125
☀ "Did you like earning money?"
"No - it was never enough. Nobody ever had enough money. Rich or poor, money was scarce. The more we had, the less it seemed to buy, and the more we bought, the less satisfied we became. It was a relief when money was gone." PP. 138
☀ ...We're not robots - apologies there, Spike - but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement. PP. 143
☀ Because humans are involved, which is always a bad sign. PP. 143
☀ "All right, loneliness is not about being by yourself. that's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return." PP. 145
☀ There are so many things that we nearly do and they don't matter at all, and there are the things that we nearly do that would change everything. PP. 167
☀ ...I'm lucky to be alive enough to be unhappy. PP. 169
☀ I had no idea what i was going to do, but it occurred to me that this was usual, and it is only habit and routine that makes the void look like purpose. PP. 170
☀ I thought of what Friday would be saying to all of this - Utopian, flaky, unreal. But who was she harming? Who would she harm? The realistic, hard-headed practical types got us to the edge of melt-down. PP. 175
☀ "But will a soul believe you?" asked Sister Mary McMurphy. "It does seem a very far-fetched tale."
"It's not like I'm telling people I've risen from the dead." I said.
The nun was not pleased. PP. 178-9
☀ Past and future are not separate as far as the brain is concerned" said Spike. "Only the present is differentiated by the brain."
☀ "I merely observe that this is a quantum universe and, as such, what happens is neither random nor determined. There are potentialities and any third factor - humans are such a factor - will affect the outcome."
"And free will?"
"Is your capacity to affect the outcome."
PP. 180-181
☀ If I could tell you that I could tell you everything - everything about me. There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn't have separate regions for past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain. PP. 204
2010, 2010: novel in english, book-2010, #novel, *author: female, @read in english, author: jeanette winterson, +postmodern, +feminism, +lesbian, +gay, +on writing, [quotes], [quotes] book