Rick Barry 📚

She was ashamed to realise how completely she had taken Shelley's friendship for granted, all the more because a source of private guilt for her was the fact – never openly acknowledged – that deep down, she preferred the company of men. Her favoured style of conversation was impassioned argument that bordered on seduction, and although it was distasteful, not to mention tactically unwise to admit that one enjoyed flirtation, she never felt freer, or funnier, or more imaginatively potent that when she was the only woman in the room. ELEANOR CATTON, Birnam Wood

Considering he was neither priest or scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful—the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious. IAIN PEARS, The Dream of Scipio

That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that night in the roadster, Anne Stanton had done her trick very well. It was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn't need words or hands. She had rolled her head on the leather seat back, and touched her finger to her lips to say, "Sh, Sh," and smiled. And had sunk her harpoon deeper than ever Queequeg sunk it, through four feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn't really known it until the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And might continue to think I was. Anne Stanton was the nights, all right. And the days, too, but in the days she was not the total substance, rather the flavor, the distillate, the climate, the breath, without which the rest wouldn't be anything at all. ROBERT PENN WARREN, All the King's Men

When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham. You drop it by the house. You go to the funeral. If the family is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keen or in any other way demand the attention of the family. In the end Emily Post's 1922 etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read. I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat. JOAN DIDION, The Year of Magical Thinking

He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not bankrupt in life. JOSEPH CONRAD, Nostromo

#TolstoyReadalong RESURRECTION (P2, C11)

The mummied dead were everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like prilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen. CORMAC McCARTHY, The Road

Just as blue pigment spread on canvas may help a painter accurately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid melancholy cast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities of heavenly love, so our blue colors come in several shades and explanations. Both Christ and the Virgin wear mantles of blue because as the clouds depart the Truth appears. WILLIAM H. GASS, On Being Blue

She ignored the white afternoon sun which was creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an intruder and cast her gaze down the red clay road that turned off the highway. FLANNERY O'CONNOR, "The Displaced Person"

Aljaz found his fear overwhelmed by a feeling of enchantment as he watched her emerge from that treacherous surf. There was something so desolate in her that it was akin to a magnificence, and he was filled with awe at her wildness. RICHARD FLANAGAN, Death of a River Guide

The myth of the cowboy grew purer every year because there were so few actual cowboys left to contradict it. LARRY McMURTRY, "A Preface," In a Narrow Grave

#WhitmanWednesday In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. WALT WHITMAN, Democratic Vistas

#TolstoyReadalong RESURRECTION (P2, C10) His [Nekhlyudov's] thoughts were full of the peasants in the country – women, children, old men – and the poverty and suffering which he seemed to have for the first time, especially the smiling baby like a little old man, kicking with its skinny legs what had no calves, and he could not help comparing their lot with that of the townsfolk. As he passed the butchers', fishmongers', and ready-made clothiers' he was struck again, as though he saw it for the first time, by the well-fed appearance of such an immense number of clean, fat shopkeepers, the like of whom simply did not exist in the country. These people were obviously firmly convinced that their efforts to cheat the ignorant who knew nothing about the quality of their wares was a very useful occupation, certainly not an idle one.

The obsession of putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists. YANN MARTEL, Life of Pi

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night

I'd like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advice the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we'll know everything. IAN McEWAN, What We Can Know.

#TolstoyReadalong RESURRECTION (P2, C9) Next day the peasants did not go to work but spent their time discussing the master's offer. The village was split into two factions: those who saw the offer as a profitable one which could do them no harm, and those who thought there was a catch in it, which they could not detect and therefore feared all the more. By the third day, however, they all agreed to accept the proposal made to them and came to Nekhlyudov to announce their decision. The village had been much influenced by the opinion of an aged woman, which the old men accepted and which did away with all fear that they were being cheated, that the master was acting so because he had begun to be anxious about his soul and was doing this in the hope of salvation. This explanation was further confirmed by the generous alms which Nekhyludov had distributed whild in Panovo.