A great story well told may be the finest art.
Deep in the heart of Texas
Joined August 2010
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While drinking three glasses of cold water which made my chest and head ache I had a craving for books that I hadn't had in thirty years when I still believed that books might save my life. That was before I quit teaching and had decided that if I read one more book such as Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, my head would blow apart like John Kennedy's.
JIM HARRISON, The English Major
Grainier had also once seen a wonder horse and a wolf-boy, and he'd flown in the air in a biplane in 1927. He'd started his life story on a train ride he couldn't remember and ended up standing around outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.
DENIS JOHNSON, Train Dreams
They stepped toward the bench. He waited for her to sit first, and then they sat, angled slightly toward each other. The fountain exhaled a silver mist, like fairy dust, as the first bestowal began.
The first of many.
ALLEN LEVI, Theo of Golden
Her mother was her best friend and had put every last possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Spears was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night
#TolstoyReadalong RESURRECTION (P2, C13)
She had come to hate the thought of a man. After sitting for a while on a bench in the passage she went back to her room and, making no response to her companion's talk, Maslova wept for a long time over her ruined life.
We did not tell Pavel's secret to anyone, but guarded it jealously—as if the woves of the Ukraine had gathered that night long ago, and the wedding party sacrificed, to give us a painful and peculiar pleasure.
WILLA CATHER, My Ántonia
No one thought it was unusual that Henry Laines should be screaming my name instead of [his bride's] at his wedding reception on the dance floor, because everyone was too drunk to care. That is what it is like at parties where everyone is drunk.
NANCY LEMANN, Lives of the Saints
By the standards of his time, his descriptions of Indigenous peoples were tolerant and often quite sympathetic. cook never attempted to convert Native people to Christianity and rarely moralized on the supposed shortcomings of their customs and beliefs. In his writing, he was neutral, objective, agnostic.
HAMPTON SIDES, The Wide Wide Sea
Joseph Conrad
From the first chapter of THE SHADOW LINE by Joseph Conrad:
"Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness--and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn't because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation--a bit of one's own.
One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessors, excited, amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together--the kicks and the half-pence, as the saying is--the picturesque common lot that holds so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on--till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind."
Powerful, vivid, come to life prose.
Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times. There was red lipstick on his beard. He opened one eye, saw the brilliant colors of the quilt and closed his eye quickly. But after a while he looked again. His eye went past the quilt to the floor, to the broken plate in the corner, to the glasses standing on the table turned over on the floor, to the spilled wine and the books like heavy fallen butterflies.
JOHN STEINBECK, Cannery Row
#TolstoyReadalong RESURRECTION (P2, C12)
Nekhlyudov felt like a man with a bruise which always seems to get knocked, as if on purpose; yet it is only because the place is tender that the knock is noticed.
She was ashamed to realise how completely she had taken Shelley's friendship for granted, all the more because a source of private guilt for her was the fact – never openly acknowledged – that deep down, she preferred the company of men. Her favoured style of conversation was impassioned argument that bordered on seduction, and although it was distasteful, not to mention tactically unwise to admit that one enjoyed flirtation, she never felt freer, or funnier, or more imaginatively potent that when she was the only woman in the room.
ELEANOR CATTON, Birnam Wood
Considering he was neither priest or scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful—the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.
IAIN PEARS, The Dream of Scipio
That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that night in the roadster, Anne Stanton had done her trick very well. It was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn't need words or hands. She had rolled her head on the leather seat back, and touched her finger to her lips to say, "Sh, Sh," and smiled. And had sunk her harpoon deeper than ever Queequeg sunk it, through four feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn't really known it until the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And might continue to think I was.
Anne Stanton was the nights, all right. And the days, too, but in the days she was not the total substance, rather the flavor, the distillate, the climate, the breath, without which the rest wouldn't be anything at all.
ROBERT PENN WARREN, All the King's Men
When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham. You drop it by the house. You go to the funeral. If the family is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keen or in any other way demand the attention of the family. In the end Emily Post's 1922 etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read. I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
JOAN DIDION, The Year of Magical Thinking
He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not bankrupt in life.
JOSEPH CONRAD, Nostromo
The mummied dead were everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like prilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.
CORMAC McCARTHY, The Road
Just as blue pigment spread on canvas may help a painter accurately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid melancholy cast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities of heavenly love, so our blue colors come in several shades and explanations. Both Christ and the Virgin wear mantles of blue because as the clouds depart the Truth appears.
WILLIAM H. GASS, On Being Blue
