"I wanted so badly to live in my life, wanted to meet it head on, wanted above all for something to happen, for this terrible yearning to be quenched."
"The word text descends from a Latin verb meaning "to weave," and I often wish I could craft sentences from a language I could hold in my hands, as if I could write an essay or a poem as beautiful and useful as my mother's socks."
"As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted" (Hilary Mantel).
"On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch." -- from José Saramago's 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', trans. Giovanni Pontiero
"We could recognize her in an instant, even though we’ve never seen her up close. She’s always with us, a whisper on the wind, a shadow passing over our eyes when we’re looking away." - from the story Last Tour Into the Hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste in the anthology of Baba Yaga stories, Into the Forest
"Feel where the wood wants to go, and if you need it to resist it can do that too, challenges to the natural movement are good, it'll keep your boat alive."
"I cannot write in any other way, and if I have thrown myself into this writing, it was precisely in order to give myself sufficient time to think, to think with time." - from José Saramago's first novel 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', translated by Giovanni Pontiero #SundaySentence#BookQuote#quotes#reading@bookstodon
"The rich man never sees or notices, he simply looks and lights a cigarette with the air of someone expecting it to arrive already lit." - from 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy' by José Saramago (tr. Giovanni Pontiero)
"Not only was nothing human alien to her, but she assumed that if she had ever thought or felt something, well, then it was extremely unlikely that she was the only one to have ever done so."
“This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world, cheese so good it inspired a line every first Saturday of the month”
A cheesy #SundaySentence from Deacon King Kong by James McBride
“Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw - what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps on you.”
“The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks.”
Rebecca Solnit, “A Short History of Silence” (The Mother of All Questions, p. 66)
SimoneWeil, in 1934: “everything that seems normally to constitute a reason for living dwindles away, when one must … call everything in question…. The triumph of authoritarian and nationalist movements should blast almost everywhere the hopes that well-meaning people had placed in democracy… We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.” Hope lives in 2023, somehow. @bookstodon#SundaySentence cluster
Claire Messud: "Each of us is made up of our lived experiences, of course; but also, both consciously and unconsciously, of all the stories that we have heard, read, or watched. Without realizing it, we come to understand what a story is and how it means by the accretion of narratives in our heads" ('Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I write,' p. 65).
"Paschal loved my growing up and he was always on my side, and sometimes the thought of his smile gets me up to walk, close to dawn, which is the only time I leave the house now, and I come back with the daylight an expanding pain in my chest, like I am trying to open without cracking."