quiet timeliterature

“What it came down to was this: they loved each other, but they couldn’t get along. Did that make any sense to him?

No, it made no sense to him at all. The boy was utterly confused by then, but he was too afraid to admit it to his father, who was making every effort to treat him as an adult, but he wasn’t up to the job that day, the world of adults was unfathomable to him at that point in his life, and he couldn’t grasp the paradox of love and discord coexisting in equal measure. It had to be one or the other, love or not-love, but not love and not-love at the same time.”

- Paul Auster, Sunset Park

∞07:32 pm, by quiet-time ∩1

He stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else - the cold, and where he’d go in it - was outside, for a while anyway.

Raymond Carver, “Everything Stuck To Him”

∞02:55 pm, by quiet-time

[carver] [short stories] [literature]

Katri had borrowed books for Mats in town, everything the library had on boats and boat construction and stories of great adventure at sea, mostly boys’ books. And at the same time, Katri had tried to get him to read what she called literature.

‘I read them, I do,’ Mats said, ‘but I don’t get anything out of them. Nothing much happens. I understand they’re very good, but they just make me sad. They’re almost always about people with problems.’

‘But your seamen, your shipwrecked seamen? Don’t they have problems?’

Mats shook his head and smiled. ‘That’s different,’ he explained. ‘And anyway, they don’t talk about it so much.’

Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver

∞02:26 am, by quiet-time ∩1

[tove jansson] [literature]

She watched him, his eminently intelligent wife. He pulled her closer to make the scrutiny stop, and feeling her head on his shoulder was reassuring. He was doomed to ambivalence and desire. A braver man, or a more cowardly one, would simply flee. A happier or more complacent man would stay and revel in the familiar, wrap it around him like an old bathrobe. He seemed to be none of those things, and could only deceive the people he loved, and then disappoint and worry them when they saw through him. There was a poem Meg had brought home from college, with the line ‘Both ways is the only way I want it.’ The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool only wanted it one way?

Maile Meloy, “The Children”, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

∞01:09 am, by quiet-time ∩1

[quote] [literature]

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (via crepusculoestelar)

∞09:32 pm, reblogged by quiet-time ∩29

[literature] [Eugenides]

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes (via smellslikesunshine)

∞09:15 pm, reblogged by quiet-time ∩9

[don quixote] [quote] [literature]

“There was nothing in reality that I could give her, so I told her instead about Nabokov’s ‘other world.’ I asked her if she had noticed how in most of Nabokov’s novels - Invitation to a a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin - there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is consistently brutal.”

- Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

∞05:02 pm, by quiet-time

[literature]

“It intrigues Bill to belong to academe, with its international hodgepodge and asexual attire, a place where to think and speak as if one has lived is always preferable to the alternatives. Such a value cuts down on regrets. And Bill is cutting down. He is determined to cut down.”

- Lorrie Moore, “Beautiful Grade”, Birds of America

∞04:58 pm, by quiet-time

[literature] [academia] [lorrie moore]

She was holding the wheel, she felt self-confident and beautiful, and it occurred to her: Was it really love that bound her to Klima - or only the fear of losing him? And even if at the beginning that fear had been an anxious form of love, had not love (overworked and exhausted) faded, leaving but an empty form? Perhaps all she had left was fear itself, fear without love? And what would remain if she ever lost that fear?

Milan Kundera, The Farewell Party

∞02:22 am, by quiet-time

[kundera] [Milan Kundera] [literature] [love] [the end of my relationship]

Reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.

Lorrie Moore, “What You Want to Do Fine”, Birds of America

∞11:54 pm, by quiet-time ∩2

[literature] [lorrie moore]