or, Why I Don’t Write
Ivan Turgenev, Rudin:
“Everything is drenched in poetry—everything breathes beauty and vitality.” (Rudin) p. 77
Ivan Turgenev
John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire:
“[He] was a young man who imagined he could do anything he could imagine.” p. 21
“She was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating.” p. 156
John Irving, The Cider House Rules:
“How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.” p. 543
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway:
“To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy.”
“moments like this are buds on the tree of life” p. 29
“Beauty was behind a pane of glass” p. 86
George Elliot, Middlemarch:
“a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to a comedy.” p. 387
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye:
“And I’m standing at the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff” (Holden)
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” (Holden)
Don Delillo, Underworld:
“The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously” (collector) p.323
“The lobby crowd loved the mural…amber mists, a cloaked old man with a staff, a cluster of flamingos standing in the alpenglow–a vision so steeped in kitsch you could die just by buying the postcard” (Radio City Music Hall) p. 423
Douglas Coupland, Life After God, “Little Creatures”:
“The sky had a lavender glaze and the mists on the top of the mountain peaks were like a world that was still only at the idea stage.” p. 16
Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev:
“‘Every trade has them,’ Jacob Kahn said. ‘They are called whores.'” p. 244
Myla Goldberg, Bee Season:
“Home is a place where her eccentricities have a clear source.” p. 120
“…the weight of unexplored conversations too much for the moment to bear.” p. 192
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren:
“the paralysis of wonder” p. 15
“to wound the autumnal city” p. 1 & 32
“a mulling ‘no'” p. 35
“How else are we to retain the inflationary coinage and cheap paper money of sanity and solipsism?” p. 481
“A memory of rustling italicized the silence” p. 617