--Jose Saramago, Blindness
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
--Jose Saramago, Blindness But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
--Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought, and wild, more life in us that we can bear, the fire infolding itself in us.
--Marilynne Robinson, Lila There was a moment of sorrow, disappointment, and deep love for his son, whom he at that second wished had had a chance of real escape. Never mind why or whether or who or what consequence or ramification--the wake of sorrow and bitterness and resentment you would trail behind you, probably mostly for me--I just wish that you had made it beyond the bounds of this cold little radius, that when the archaeologists brush off this layer of our world in a million years and string off the boundaries of our rooms and tag and number every plate and table leg and shinbone, you would not be there; yours would not be the remains they would find and label juvenile male.
--Paul Harding, Tinkers It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying For the man was canny, he was intuitive, he anticipated everything. He continually looked over his shoulders, he looked into the background with mirrors, he locked his sleeping room at night, he could pick out a whisper in the wind, he could register the slightest added value a man put into his words, he could probably read the faltering and perfidy in Bob's face. He once numbered the spades on a playing card that skittered across the street a city block away; he licked his daughter's cut finger and there wasn't even a scar the next day; he wrestled with his son and the two Fords at once one afternoon and rarely even tilted - it was like grappling with a tree. When Jesse predicted rain, it rained; when he encouraged plants, they grew; when he scorned animals, they retreated; whomever he wanted to stir, he astonished.
--Ron Hansen, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead |
Alissa B.Nothing commonplace about The Common Place. Archives
December 2023
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