Archive for the ‘Literary Excerpts’ Category
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
“The truth is that in every way, I am squandering the treasure of my life. It’s not that I don’t take enough pictures, though I don’t, or that I don’t keep a diary, though iCal and my monthly Visa bill are the closest I come to a thoughtful prose record of events. Every day is like a kid’s drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. Bust most o of them you just ball up and throw away.”
Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs. Techniques of Betrayal. “The Memory Hole.”
Tags: books, literature, Manhood For Amateurs, michael chabon, techniques of betrayal, the memory hole
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
“The baby popped off the breast, and sighed, and considered one of the anemone wisps of drifting smoke, like the aftermath of a bursting skyrocket, that I imagined his thoughts to resemble. At seven days he gave evidence of a melancholy or even mournful nature. He sighed again, and so I sighed, thinking that we were about to confirm, in the worst possible way, all the lugubrious ideas about the world that he already seemed to have formed. Then he burrowed back in for another go at his mother.”
“Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs. Techniques of Betrayal. “The Cut.”
Tags: books, literary excerpt, literature, maichael chabon, Manhood For Amateurs, techniques of betrayal, the cut
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
“The woman hesitated, then urged her son toward me, figuring or hoping, I suppose, that something could be salvaged, some kind of club business transacted. But the boy pushed back. That multipurpose room was not anywhere he wanted to be. God knows what kind of Araby he had erected, what fabulous tents he had ptiched, in his own imagination of the event. A wordless argument followed, conducted by the bones of his shoulders and the fingers of her hands. At last she gave in to the force of his disappointment or to the barrage of failure rays that were pouring from the kid across the room.”
Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs. Secret Handshake. “Loser’s Club.”
Tags: books, chapter one, literary excerpt, literature, losers club, Manhood For Amateurs, michale chabon, secret handshake, silent argument
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
“This is the point to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city- in every cranium- in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.”
Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs. Secret Handshake. “Loser’s Club.”
Tags: art and fandom, books, literary excerpt, literature, losers club, Manhood For Amateurs, michael chabon, secret handshake
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
“By pretending to have friends, maybe I could invent some.”
Chabon, Michael. Manhood for Amateurs. Secret Handshake. “Loser’s Club.”
Tags: art and fandom, books, literary excerpt, literature, losers club, Manhood For Amateurs, michael chabon, secret handshake
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
“There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have said enough to indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into happy, healthy development. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to me, for the sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all her awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and believes in the listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated sooner or later. But the poet’s sensibility without his voice — the poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human eye — this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one’s fellow-men. My least solitary moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me….”
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Monday, October 26th, 2009
“My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future was as impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held me on her knee — her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.”
Elliot, George (Evans, Mary Anne). The Lifted Veil. Chapter One.
Tags: fiction, George elliot, literature, Mary Anne Evans, pen name, The Lifted Veil
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Monday, October 26th, 2009
“I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven – the living only from whom men’s indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it – it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition – make haste – oppress it with your ill considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by-and-by be still – ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.”
Elliot, George (Evans, Mary Anne). The Lifted Veil. “Chapter One.”
Tags: fiction, George elliot, life, literature, Mary Anne Evans, pen name, The Lifted Veil
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Sunday, October 25th, 2009
“Hunger presently raised its insistent voice, darkening Doyle’s mood. Yes, Sparks had pulled his fat out of the fire on more than one occasion. Nothing in his actions suggested he was anything other than what he represented himself to be, but he remained impenetrable, and the cloaking of royal secrecy around his true purpose rang discordantly. Doyle was in no position to reject the man’s assistance, no more than he was of a mind to forfeit his surprisingly welcome company, but common sense prevented the full conferring of his trust. It was as if he were traveling with an exotic jungle cat, its defensive abilities beyond reproach but whose very nature demanded of its keeper a tireless, wary scrutiny.
“Perhaps if he questioned Sparks more cleverly, he’d inadvertently yield up details from which the astute observer could assemble a more telling portrait of the man.”
Frost, Mark. “By Land and Sea.” The List of Seven.
Tags: By Land and Sea, fear, Mark Frost, The List of Seven, trust
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Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
“There is scarcely anything when a man is in difficulties that he is more disposed to look upon with abhorrence than a right-about retrograde movement – a systematic going over of the already trodden ground; and especially if he has a love of adventure, such a course appears indescribably repulsive, so long as there remains the least hope to be derived from braving untried difficulties.”
Melville, Herman. ”Chapter Eight.” Typee.
Tags: herman melville, Typee
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