March 2011
30 posts
“It is sufficient to name a flower to arouse in the mind of any reader, out of the forgetfulness where our voices banish any contour, many absent fragrances.”
—Umberto Eco
“Do we decide questions at all? We decide answers, no doubt, but surely the questions decide us.”
—Lewis Carroll
A Preview
Of course, back in those days we had no sounds for kisses. You know that shy little wink of sound between you two when you pull apart? It’s so satisfying, sometimes it’s difficult to believe we ever made do without it. But we did, your mother and I – we did for a long time before we met each other, actually. So did everyone. People kissed, sure – it’s absurd to think there was ever a world where people didn’t. But it was a silent kind of touch back then, something soft and sweet and wet – the wetter the better, as a precautionary measure: without a bit of your lover’s saliva to linger on your lips, you ran the risk of forgetting you’d kissed at all. Without some proof to pin down the memory the kiss might fly from your mind, if you were the careless sort like me. Then you’d just be left with the uncomfortable suspicion that you’d just lost something special, never knowing quite what.
“If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the sufferings of his characters… He must be able to accompany his characters, even into smoke and fire, and bear witness to what they thought and felt even when they themselves no longer knew.”
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (via libraryland)
“My first novel was rejected by seven agents before I found someone willing to take it on. Then it was rejected by six publishers. Then my agent fell ill, and I had to find a new one. Three agents never responded at all. The fourth I sent it to took a chance on the book. And the chance paid off.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer (via fernandofrench)
