Beds always have to be remade

Why was there nothing to sleep on but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed?

- John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick: p.70

 

Pipes

Celeste woke up Sunday morning thinking about pipes – the network of them that coursed through homes and restaurants, movie multiplexes and shopping malls, and dropped in great skeletal sections from the tops of forty-storey office buildings, floor by giant floor, plunging toward an even grander network of sewers and aqueducts that ran beneath cities and towns, connecting people more viably than language, with the sole purpose of flushing the things that we’d consumed and rejected from our bodies, our lives, our dishes and crisper trays.

Where did it all go?

- Dennish Lehane, Mystic River : 101.

 

A certain blindness to make society tolerable

‘We cannot shrink in disgust from our neighbour’s touch because his hands, that are clean now, were once dirty. We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.’

- J.M. Coetzee, Foe: 106.

http://nathanhobby.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/review-of-jm-coetzees-foe/

 

Watching the news

To calm myself I turned to that evening clinic of referred pain, the TV news. Tonight, a mass grave in a wood in central Bosnia, a cancerous government minister with a love-nest, the second day of a murder trial. What soothed me was the format’s familiarity: the war-beat music, the smooth and urgent tones of the presenter, the easeful truth that all misery was relative, then the final opiate, the weather.

(46)

 

The disappointment of anything actual

That was the problem. I had been awaiting something large and amorphous, a vast big thing so marvelous that I could not even imagine it. The party she threw was all too imaginable. For that matter, had she brought in a brass band and magicians I’d still have been crestfallen. There was no extravagence that would not have fallen short, because it would be finite and fixed, one thing and not another. It would only be what it was.

- Lionel Shriver, We need to talk about Kevin : p. 80.

(Eva is remembering how disappointed she was by a surprise party as a child.)

 

A man whose actions are without consequences

He reflected about it with the equanimity of a man who believes his actions have been mere experiments without consequences in the real world.

- Milan Kundera, The farewell party: 169

[as an example of unexistentialism, and the type of disconnection one can sometimes feel.]

 

Truth is often muddled

I recognised that the truth is often muddled, a tangle of mishaps and blunders that converge to appear unlikely…

- Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

 

Urge

When I looked into Lucille’s clear blue eyes, I found their cold steadiness both fascinating and irritating, and all of a sudden I felt like slapping her. Or kissing her. Either one would have satisfied the urge that came over me, an intense desire to smash the brittle surface of her impassive face.

- Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved : p. 231