Now, just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder, like a child, to evoke the spirits, perhaps to chase them away, and the more energy I put into it, the sharper the whistle became. I burst into laughter, alone, seeing myself like that, a thirty-eight-yar-old woman in …
Continue reading The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante – Quotes
In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. [...] with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we …
[...] ageing is nothing to be ashamed of especially when the entire human race is in it together although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older because it's such a privilege not to die prematurely (on living in a squat): the Marxists demanded they set up a Central …
Continue reading Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo – Quotes
Our final moments in this life aren't generally an appropriate time for clear-eyed reflection; indeed, they always find us at our most sentimental. A silent funeral is a funeral stripped of all its awe, Bolbol thought. Rites and rituals meant nothing now. For the first time, everyone was truly equal in death. [...]it allowed him …
Continue reading Death is Hard Work – Khaled Khalifa – Quotes
I remember the morning, long ago, hen the landlord called. [...]he said that of course we were aware that our lease was up? I said well, no, we hadn't really known that our lease was up. So he said well, he supposed that we hadn't looked at the lease recently and I (wondering if that …
Continue reading Life Among the Savages – Shirley Jackson – Quotes
Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing got campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity …
The doctor's surgery is full of men and women who do not know why they are unhappy. 'Take this,' says the Doctor, 'you'll soon feel better.' They do feel better because, little by little, they cease to feel at all. Of course we have romance. Everyone can see how useful romance is. Even the newspaper …
So I didn't expect to come upon a new kind of place, that is, a place that demanded unknown rules of behavior, not twenty miles from my house, and certainly not in a shopping mall. This encounter happened in the 1970s. - regarding food courts The title of this collection [A Sense of Place, A Sense …
Continue reading Mysteries of the Mall and Other Essays – Witold Rybczynski – Quotes
For food was then our most pressing problem, and the progress of the regeneration schemes, and the advance of the cultivation lines on the maps, was followed with almost as much attention as an earlier generation had paid to battle fronts. In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save …
Continue reading The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham – Quotes
I managed to move from the country to the city. I made the great journey between worlds. It kills some people, and drives some of us mad. [...]the red-tulip-flowered trees called kabakanjagala which means ‘the King loves me’. (King Ronald still loves us, though he does not really rule us. Now we are ruled by …
