p. 114 Building on a parallel structure, Chris Cooper writes, “Was big boy, now little man.”
p. 126 Remember Donald Murray’s advice, “Brevity comes from selection and not compression.” And mine: “First prune the big limbs, then shake out the dead leaves.”
p. 144 “Share attention is the first essential ingredient” of empathy, writes the psychologist Daniel Goleman. “As two people attend to what the other says and does, they generate a sense of mutual interest, a joint focus that amounts to perceptual glue.” As a writer, I want to create that glue, but before I can get you to stick to me as a reader, I must gain your attention. One way to keep your attention is to promise you something short and valuable. In effect, I tell the reader: This will not waste your time. It will have a power disproportionate to its modest length. You will be better off having read it.”
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Monday, July 8, 2019
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming, r. Jul. 2019
p. 95 The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline.
p. 246 There was no sound except the hollow iron clang as the great train tore through the Simplon Tunnel - through the heart of the Wasenhorn and Monte Leone. The toothglass tinkled. The woodwork creaked comfortably. For a hundred yards on both sides of the little death cell rows of people were sleeping, or lying awake, thinking of their lives and loves, making little plans, wondering who would meet them at the Gare de Lyon. And, all the while, just along the corridor, death was riding with them down some dark hole, behind the same great Diesel, on the same hot rails.
p. 246 There was no sound except the hollow iron clang as the great train tore through the Simplon Tunnel - through the heart of the Wasenhorn and Monte Leone. The toothglass tinkled. The woodwork creaked comfortably. For a hundred yards on both sides of the little death cell rows of people were sleeping, or lying awake, thinking of their lives and loves, making little plans, wondering who would meet them at the Gare de Lyon. And, all the while, just along the corridor, death was riding with them down some dark hole, behind the same great Diesel, on the same hot rails.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
50 Great Short Stories, r. May 2019
p. 50 One had taken it for granted at the time, for anything that is supremely good produces more acceptance than surprise. (Brooksmith by Henry James)
p. 196 "It's one of the best riddles I've heard, though," I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two." (For Esmé with Love and Splendor by J. D. Salinger)
p. 221 He had managed to accomplish all this without ever giving people the impression that he was particularly interested in the business; yet he had always followed everything done with a keen and remorseless attention that masked itself under an appearance of impassivity. (The Man Who Shot Sleeping Turtles by Edmund Wilson)
p. 248 What was happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears; he wanted so passionately to live. "Just to be alive." Poor Emily had wished it too, he remembered: "Just to be alive." There were still so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the Tucsan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet southern wines - Tears of Christ and Blood of Judas - others would drink them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all. (The Giaconda Smile by Aldous Huxley)
p. 374 "One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands, looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it - the taste of primitive passion - the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one's hand - the direct call and the straight response. Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matter with the world." (The Tale by Joseph Conrad)
p. 379 "The master met him on the after-deck, looming up in the fog amongst the blurred shapes of the usual ship's fittings. He was a robust Northman, bearded, and in the force of his age." (The Tale by Joseph Conrad)
p. 397 His father's teeth - ninety dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age. (Main Currents of American Thought by Irwin Shaw)
p. 196 "It's one of the best riddles I've heard, though," I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two." (For Esmé with Love and Splendor by J. D. Salinger)
p. 221 He had managed to accomplish all this without ever giving people the impression that he was particularly interested in the business; yet he had always followed everything done with a keen and remorseless attention that masked itself under an appearance of impassivity. (The Man Who Shot Sleeping Turtles by Edmund Wilson)
p. 248 What was happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears; he wanted so passionately to live. "Just to be alive." Poor Emily had wished it too, he remembered: "Just to be alive." There were still so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the Tucsan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet southern wines - Tears of Christ and Blood of Judas - others would drink them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all. (The Giaconda Smile by Aldous Huxley)
p. 374 "One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands, looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it - the taste of primitive passion - the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one's hand - the direct call and the straight response. Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matter with the world." (The Tale by Joseph Conrad)
p. 379 "The master met him on the after-deck, looming up in the fog amongst the blurred shapes of the usual ship's fittings. He was a robust Northman, bearded, and in the force of his age." (The Tale by Joseph Conrad)
p. 397 His father's teeth - ninety dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age. (Main Currents of American Thought by Irwin Shaw)
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
An E.B. White Reader by E.B. White and edited by W.W. Watt and R.W. Bradford, r. Jan 2019
p. 23 Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading – the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the respondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
p. 71 Trexler walked dizzily through the empty waiting room and the doctor followed along to let him out. It was late; the secretary had shut up shop and gone home. Another day over the dam.
p. 87 A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction that comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off – even before political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.
p. 99 [editor’s note] In the swirl of language that is modern life, no one can afford to forget that ignorant and evil people use abstractions with powerful connotation to obscure thinking rather than clarify meaning. Anyone can nod his head in agreement when a large abstraction like justice or extremism is dropped like an olive into an oratorical cocktail, while at the same moment never noticing that he is agreeing with his own meaning of the word, not the speaker’s.
p. 107 I know that quite frequently in the course of delivering himself of a poem a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble – a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy.
p. 159 The dinner date seemed a familiar conflict: I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody’s house to dinner or anyone’s coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up (an hour or two in advance) to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate. I have come to believe that there is in hostesses a special power of divination, and that they deliberately arrange dinners to coincide with pig failure or some other sort of failure.
p. 166 I noticed that although [my dachshund Fred] weighed far less than the pig, he was harder to drag, being possessed of the vital spark.
p. 182 I discovered by test that fully ninety per cent of whatever was on my desk at any given moment were IN things. Only ten per cent were OUT things – almost too few to warrant a special container. This, in general, must be true of other people’s lives too. It is the reason lives get so cluttered up – so many things (except money) filtering in, so few things (except strength) draining out.
p. 185 I think the best writing is often done by persons who are snatching the time from something else – from an occupation, or from a profession, or from a jail term – something that is either burning them up, as religion, or love, or politics, or that is boring them to tears, as prison, or a brokerage house, or an advertising firm.
p. 187 Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming, because farming takes great strength and endurance. Intellectually I am better fitted for farming than writing.
p. 223 Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.
p. 231 On the porch was a distorting mirror, to give the traveler a comical image of himself, who had miraculously learned to gaze in an ordinary glass without smiling.
p. 269 Living things are always harder to lift, somehow, than inanimate objects, and I think any mover would rather walk up three flights with a heavy bureau than go into a waltz with a rubber plant. There is really no way for a man to put his arms around a big house plant and still remain a gentleman.
p. 289 Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative.
p. 297 It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.
p. 71 Trexler walked dizzily through the empty waiting room and the doctor followed along to let him out. It was late; the secretary had shut up shop and gone home. Another day over the dam.
p. 87 A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction that comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off – even before political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.
p. 99 [editor’s note] In the swirl of language that is modern life, no one can afford to forget that ignorant and evil people use abstractions with powerful connotation to obscure thinking rather than clarify meaning. Anyone can nod his head in agreement when a large abstraction like justice or extremism is dropped like an olive into an oratorical cocktail, while at the same moment never noticing that he is agreeing with his own meaning of the word, not the speaker’s.
p. 107 I know that quite frequently in the course of delivering himself of a poem a poet will find himself in possession of a lyric bauble – a line as smooth as velvet to the ear, as pretty as a feather to the eye, yet a line definitely out of plumb with the frame of the poem. What to do with a trinket like this is always troubling to a poet, who is naturally grateful to his Muse for small favors. Usually he just drops the shining object into the body of the poem somewhere and hopes it won’t look too giddy.
p. 159 The dinner date seemed a familiar conflict: I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody’s house to dinner or anyone’s coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up (an hour or two in advance) to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate. I have come to believe that there is in hostesses a special power of divination, and that they deliberately arrange dinners to coincide with pig failure or some other sort of failure.
p. 166 I noticed that although [my dachshund Fred] weighed far less than the pig, he was harder to drag, being possessed of the vital spark.
p. 182 I discovered by test that fully ninety per cent of whatever was on my desk at any given moment were IN things. Only ten per cent were OUT things – almost too few to warrant a special container. This, in general, must be true of other people’s lives too. It is the reason lives get so cluttered up – so many things (except money) filtering in, so few things (except strength) draining out.
p. 185 I think the best writing is often done by persons who are snatching the time from something else – from an occupation, or from a profession, or from a jail term – something that is either burning them up, as religion, or love, or politics, or that is boring them to tears, as prison, or a brokerage house, or an advertising firm.
p. 187 Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming, because farming takes great strength and endurance. Intellectually I am better fitted for farming than writing.
p. 223 Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.
p. 231 On the porch was a distorting mirror, to give the traveler a comical image of himself, who had miraculously learned to gaze in an ordinary glass without smiling.
p. 269 Living things are always harder to lift, somehow, than inanimate objects, and I think any mover would rather walk up three flights with a heavy bureau than go into a waltz with a rubber plant. There is really no way for a man to put his arms around a big house plant and still remain a gentleman.
p. 289 Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative.
p. 297 It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.
Monday, January 14, 2019
The Simple Path to Wealth by J. L. Collins, r. Jan. 2019
p. viii Creating this book has been a long and sometimes stressful process. The emotional rollercoaster had me at times depressed, at times foaming-at-the-mouth raving and at times giddy with delight. My wife, Jane, endured it all without stabbing me in my sleep. That there is not an award for this is one of the great shortcomings of our civilization.
p. 12 So now I'm (again) retired and it feels great. I love not having to keep regular hours. I can stay up till 4 am and sleep till noon. Or I can get up at 4:30 and watch the sun rise. I can ride my motorbike any time the weather or my pals beckon. I can hang around New Hampshire or disappear for months at a time to South America. I post on my blog when the spirit moves me and I might even get another book or two written. Or I can just sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and read the books others have written.
p. 12 One of my few regrets is that I spent far too much time worrying about how things might work out. It's a huge waste, but it is a bit hardwired into me. Don't do it.
p. 162 The bottom line is that anyone using a high-deductible insurance plan should fund an HSA. The benefits are simply too good to ignore.
p. 241 Finally, while giving is a fine and pleasant thing, no one has an obligation to do so. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something - most likely the idea of giving to them and / or their pet projects.
p. 241 As individuals we only have one obligation to society: To ensure we, and our children, are not a burden to others. The rest is our personal choice. Make your own and make the world a far more interesting place.
p. 12 So now I'm (again) retired and it feels great. I love not having to keep regular hours. I can stay up till 4 am and sleep till noon. Or I can get up at 4:30 and watch the sun rise. I can ride my motorbike any time the weather or my pals beckon. I can hang around New Hampshire or disappear for months at a time to South America. I post on my blog when the spirit moves me and I might even get another book or two written. Or I can just sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and read the books others have written.
p. 12 One of my few regrets is that I spent far too much time worrying about how things might work out. It's a huge waste, but it is a bit hardwired into me. Don't do it.
p. 162 The bottom line is that anyone using a high-deductible insurance plan should fund an HSA. The benefits are simply too good to ignore.
p. 241 Finally, while giving is a fine and pleasant thing, no one has an obligation to do so. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something - most likely the idea of giving to them and / or their pet projects.
p. 241 As individuals we only have one obligation to society: To ensure we, and our children, are not a burden to others. The rest is our personal choice. Make your own and make the world a far more interesting place.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Tartuffe by Molière, r. Nov. 2018
p. 3 The most forceful lines of a serious moral statement are usually less powerful than those of satire; and nothing will reform most men better than the depiction of their faults. It is a vigorous blow to vices to expose them to public laughter. Criticism is taken lightly, but men will not tolerate satire. They are quite willing to be mean, but they never like to be ridiculed.
p. 5 I admit that there have been times when comedy became corrupt. And what do men not corrupt every day? There is nothing so innocent that men cannot turn it to crime; nothing so good in itself that it cannot be put to bad uses.
p. 24 There are pretenders to devotion as well as to courage; and as those who are truly brave in battle are not they who make the most noise, so those who are truly devout, who ought to be imitated, are not those who make the most outward show.
p. 24 How strangely are most men made! They are never at one with nature. Reason's bounds are too small for them. They exceed its limits in every way, and often ruin the noblest of things in trying to go too far.
p. 71 DAMIS: I'll knock his brains out. CLEANTE: You talk just like a young man. If you please, moderate these outbursts of passion. We live under a reign and in an age in which violence does only harm to one's cause.
p. 5 I admit that there have been times when comedy became corrupt. And what do men not corrupt every day? There is nothing so innocent that men cannot turn it to crime; nothing so good in itself that it cannot be put to bad uses.
p. 24 There are pretenders to devotion as well as to courage; and as those who are truly brave in battle are not they who make the most noise, so those who are truly devout, who ought to be imitated, are not those who make the most outward show.
p. 24 How strangely are most men made! They are never at one with nature. Reason's bounds are too small for them. They exceed its limits in every way, and often ruin the noblest of things in trying to go too far.
p. 71 DAMIS: I'll knock his brains out. CLEANTE: You talk just like a young man. If you please, moderate these outbursts of passion. We live under a reign and in an age in which violence does only harm to one's cause.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, r. Nov. 2018
p. 16 "I hardly suspected that I was boring you. After all, that bus ride was one of the more formative experiences of my life. As a mother, you should be more interested in the traumas that have created my worldview."
p. 106 Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.
p. 110 I am going to pray to St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mullatoes, for our cause in the factory. Because he is also invoked against rats, he will perhaps aid us in the office, too.
p. 110 As a lecturer Dr. Talk was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily digested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular.
p. 127 After having fought with his father for almost thirty-five years, Mr. Levy had decided that he would spend the rest of his life trying not to be bothered. But he was bothered every day that he was at Levy's Lodge by his wife simply because she resented his not wanting to be bothered by Levy Pants. And in staying away from Levy Pants, he was bothered even more by the company because something was always going wrong there. It would all be simpler and less bothersome if he would have really operated Levy Pants and put in an eight hour day as manager. But just the name "Levy Pants" gave him heartburn.
p. 159 Mrs. Levy was a woman of interests and ideals. Over the years she had given herself freely to bridge, African violets, Susan and Sandra, golf, Miami, Fanny Hurst and Hemingway, correspondence courses, hairdressers, the sun, gourmet foods, ballroom dancing, and, in recent years, Miss Trixie.
p. 185 Ignatius, a very bad crack-up is on the way. You must do something. Even volunteer work at a hospital would snap you out of your apathy, and it would probably be non-taxing on your valve and other things. Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart, Ignatius, and you will open your valve.
p. 331 Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna mink from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.
p. 106 Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.
p. 110 I am going to pray to St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mullatoes, for our cause in the factory. Because he is also invoked against rats, he will perhaps aid us in the office, too.
p. 110 As a lecturer Dr. Talk was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily digested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular.
p. 127 After having fought with his father for almost thirty-five years, Mr. Levy had decided that he would spend the rest of his life trying not to be bothered. But he was bothered every day that he was at Levy's Lodge by his wife simply because she resented his not wanting to be bothered by Levy Pants. And in staying away from Levy Pants, he was bothered even more by the company because something was always going wrong there. It would all be simpler and less bothersome if he would have really operated Levy Pants and put in an eight hour day as manager. But just the name "Levy Pants" gave him heartburn.
p. 159 Mrs. Levy was a woman of interests and ideals. Over the years she had given herself freely to bridge, African violets, Susan and Sandra, golf, Miami, Fanny Hurst and Hemingway, correspondence courses, hairdressers, the sun, gourmet foods, ballroom dancing, and, in recent years, Miss Trixie.
p. 185 Ignatius, a very bad crack-up is on the way. You must do something. Even volunteer work at a hospital would snap you out of your apathy, and it would probably be non-taxing on your valve and other things. Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart, Ignatius, and you will open your valve.
p. 331 Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna mink from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.
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