All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife--second class--and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.
He thought, for the first time in a long time, of the house on Egypt Street and of Abilene winding his watch and then bending toward him and placing it on his left leg, saying: I will come home to you.
from The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Dicamillo, pg. 192
"It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes." William Faulkner, Light in August, page 163 (Vintage 1990 edition)
It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times, and the lonliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in this lonely southern town--far from her mother and sisters in New York, unable to speak English, a disabled Polish immigrant whose husband had no love for her and whose dreams of seeing her children grow up in America vanished as her life drained out of her at the age of forty-six--suddenly rose up in my blood and wasged over me in waves.
"When they spoke, which was not often, it was to maintain the pretense that they were in control of their lives, that their problems were soluble, that in time the world would become a happier place"
"I sent a contribution to the Gideons the very next day, with a note urging them to spread the range of their activity to all places where worn and weary travellers might lay down their heads, not just to hotel rooms, and that they should leave not only Bibles, but other sacred writings as well."(Pages 207-208)
The sharpest memory I have of that show, a memory that was reinforced by the two other shows she gave me before I left for Europe and that returns to haunt me more and more frequently these days, is the memory of standing in that gallery and seeing the faces of my world on their walls- paintings of my people and my street, paintings of my mother and me walking together, paintings of Yudel Krinsky and Mrs. Rackover, paintings of old ladies on the parkway benches- all the years of my life summed up on the walls of a gallery, and then seeing some empty spaces when the show was older; Yudel Krinsky was gone; Mrs. Rackover was gone; my mother and I were gone; some of the old ladies on the park benches were gone. My Name Is Asher Lev-Chaim Potok pg 289
"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star shaped-hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaed, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward like a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was slightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him.”
from The Things They Carried by Tim Obrien, pg 124
"In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crwod, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky."
The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde
"While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour." William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair. p. 1
11 comments:
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife--second class--and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.
from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, pg 4
He thought, for the first time in a long time, of the house on Egypt Street and of Abilene winding his watch and then bending toward him and placing it on his left leg, saying: I will come home to you.
from The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Dicamillo, pg. 192
"It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes." William Faulkner, Light in August, page 163 (Vintage 1990 edition)
It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times, and the lonliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in this lonely southern town--far from her mother and sisters in New York, unable to speak English, a disabled Polish immigrant whose husband had no love for her and whose dreams of seeing her children grow up in America vanished as her life drained out of her at the age of forty-six--suddenly rose up in my blood and wasged over me in waves.
James McBride
The Color of Water
"When they spoke, which was not often, it was to maintain the pretense that they were in control of their lives, that their problems were soluble, that in time the world would become a happier place"
In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O'Brien, Pg.16.
"I sent a contribution to the Gideons the very next day, with a note urging them to spread the range of their activity to all places where worn and weary travellers might lay down their heads, not just to hotel rooms, and that they should leave not only Bibles, but other sacred writings as well."(Pages 207-208)
Yann Martel: Life of Pi
The sharpest memory I have of that show, a memory that was reinforced by the two other shows she gave me before I left for Europe and that returns to haunt me more and more frequently these days, is the memory of standing in that gallery and seeing the faces of my world on their walls- paintings of my people and my street, paintings of my mother and me walking together, paintings of Yudel Krinsky and Mrs. Rackover, paintings of old ladies on the parkway benches- all the years of my life summed up on the walls of a gallery, and then seeing some empty spaces when the show was older; Yudel Krinsky was gone; Mrs. Rackover was gone; my mother and I were gone; some of the old ladies on the park benches were gone.
My Name Is Asher Lev-Chaim Potok
pg 289
"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star shaped-hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaed, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward like a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was slightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him.”
from The Things They Carried by Tim Obrien, pg 124
"In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crwod, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky."
Lucky, pg. 0 (before pg 1)
The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare.
--Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde
"While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour." William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair. p. 1
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