A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choos...
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, b...
Outside, in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, 'It's so bitter.' 'What, Mama?' 'Old age.' [p. 187]
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.
We chart delusions through collective agreement.
The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufact...
