May 12, 2013
"…and wasn’t life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy—he was nearly seventy!—and if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever."

— from The Middlesteinsby Jami Attenberg

12:17pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZykqMOo3
Filed under: the middlesteins jami attenberg books reading 
May 4, 2013
"Time advanced in two ways at once: while the passage of years was profligate and mysterious, flattening their own youth from behind as insensibly as some great flaming wheel, still somehow those years were composed of days that could seem endless in themselves, that dripped capriciously like some torment of the damned."

— from The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

1:00pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZykCwSqB
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April 29, 2013
"There were days, not too long past, days since Lizzie died, when he’d woken in the morning and had to decide, before he could speak to anybody, who he was and why. There were days when he’d woken from dreams of the dead and searching for them. When his waking self trembled, at the threshold of deliverance from his dreams."

— from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

10:17pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyjsZJ7H
(Notes: 7)
  
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April 26, 2013
"We are allowed to have more than one feeling at once,” said Kenneth. “We are human beings, not ants."

— from The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

1:41pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyjbEL5S
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April 22, 2013
"It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation."

— from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

7:41pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyjK1Igm
(Notes: 3)
  
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April 10, 2013
"He never sees [Thomas] More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too."

— from “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel.

8:42pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyiPBea5
(Notes: 2)
  
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March 18, 2012
"Yes, of course were were pretentious—what else is youth for?"

— from “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes

11:47am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyIBP7xf
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: julian barnes sense of an ending literature quotes books lit 
February 28, 2012
Now reading. My NF to F ratio this year is about 4 to 1, oddly, in favor of NF. What is happening?

Now reading. My NF to F ratio this year is about 4 to 1, oddly, in favor of NF. What is happening?

7:39pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyHCtWl_
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February 25, 2012
landlessness: I’m not here because I’m a novelist. I just managed to sneak in. I haven’t read a novel in years. Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute N.B.: I wish I were there. “The sound of his old typewriter keys clacking is sometimes audible in the common areas…”

landlessness:

I’m not here because I’m a novelist. I just managed to sneak in. I haven’t read a novel in years.

Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute

N.B.: I wish I were there. “The sound of his old typewriter keys clacking is sometimes audible in the common areas…”


(Source: morethandefunct, via libraryland)

6:37pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyH1jCLQ
(Notes: 81)
  
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February 21, 2012
February 21, 1962

‘Have you ever only found out you cared about somebody when they’re not around and you’re like Oh my God, they’re not around, now what am I going to do?’

 ‘Not really.’

 ‘Well anyway, but it made an impression.’ 

-from “The Pale King,” §46 by David Foster Wallace. 

7:31pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnUKZyGpU07G
(Notes: 2)
  
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