‘He is recovering; in a sense he's spent his whole life in a state of recovery, but has only begun, at age forty-five, to breathe in the vital foreknowledge of what will become of the sovereign self inside him, that luxurious ornament. He'd like that self to be more musical and better lit, he'd like to possess a more meticulous sense of curiosity, and mostly he'd like to possess a more meticulous sense of curiosity, and mostly he'd like someone, some thing to love. He's getting close. He feels it. He's halfway awake now, and about to wake up fully.’
Carol Shields, ‘Larry's Party’, p. 284
‘"But, Beth, wouldn't you be, well, lonely in a new city?"
"I'd have Larry."
"Oh."
Larry is surprised how loud that "oh" sounds. And surprised he'd been the one to utter it. It rolls like a small marble across the sudden silence at the table and falls among the scattered plates and breadcrumbs, the half-eaten leg of lamb on its pool of dull-glazed jus, then bumps against the bent sleeping head of Marcia McCord, with her tide-line of make-up snaking across the side of her long, thin, elegant neck.’
This, Larry thinks, is a party in ruins. An idea that should never have come into being. If this party were a play the curtain would come down. If this were a movie there'd be a fade-out. Right this minute. Now.’
Carol Shields, ‘Larry's Party’, p. 327
‘The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he's telling you something about the two of you. Ninety percent of the time it doesn't happen, and probably it's as well it doesn't, though if you can't get a level of candor on sex and you choose to behave instead as if this isn't ever on your mind, the male friendship is incomplete. Most men never find such a friend. It's not common. But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential part of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results.’
Philip Roth, ‘The Human Stain’, p. 27
‘Nothing lasts, and yet nothings passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.’
Philip Roth, ‘The Human Stain’, p. 52
‘to be no longer circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and that there was no way of knowing what time it was. Down to the day he arrived in Washington and entered Howard, it was, like it or not, his father who had been making up Coleman's story for him; now he would have to make it up himself, and the prospect was terrifying. And then it wasn't. Three terrible, terrifying days passed, a terrible week, two terrible weeks, until, out of nowhere, it was exhilarating’
Philip Roth, ‘The Human Stain’, p. 107
‘He thought the same useless thoughts - useless to a man of no great talent like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made ... or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable.’
Philip Roth, ‘The Human Stain’, p. 127
‘since my visits to Elstir, it was to certain tapestries, to certain modern paintings that I had transferred the inner allegiance I had formerly given to the acting and the tragic art of La Berma; since my allegiance and my enthusiasm no longer came to pay incessant worship to the diction and the stage presence of La Berma, the 'double' I possessed of them in my heart had gradually shrivelled away like those other 'doubles' of the deceased in ancient Egypt which needed to be nourished continually in order to ensure the life of their souls.’
Marcel Proust, 'The Guermantes Way', trans. Mark Treharne, p. 34
‘I was very conscious of the fact that what they were doing was only a game, and that as prelude to the acts of their real life (the important part of which they presumably did not conduct here) it was appropriate, in accordance with rituals of which I knew nothing, that they should pretend to offer and decline bonbons, a gesture stripped of its normal significance and decided beforehand like the steps of a ballerina who alternately dances on points or circles around a scarf. For all I knew, perhaps as she offered him bonbons, the goddess was saying, with that irony in her voice (for I saw her smile): 'Will you have a bonbon?' What did it matter to me? I should have found a delicious refinement in the deliberate dryness, in the style of Mérimée or Meilhac, of these thoughts addressed by a goddess to a demi-god who knew what sublime thoughts they both held in their minds, reserved no doubt for the moment when they would resume their real life, and who played along with the game by answering her with the same mysterious roguish connivance: "Thank you. I should rather like a cherry bonbon." ’
Marcel Proust, 'The Guermantes Way', trans. Mark Treharne, p. 40
‘by suggesting that our moral intuition is to be the judge of Scripture rather than the other way around, this approach goes against the theological approach ... traditionally accepted by the Church of England. Taken to its logical conclusion it would mean that the Bible would cease to have a normative function in our ethics and would merely be used to affirm what we already believe on other grounds.’
‘Some Issues In Human Sexuality’, Church House Publications, para. 4.4. 70, (p. 167)
‘The day will arrive in his life when work - devotion to work, work's steady pressure and application - will be all that stands between himself and the bankruptcy of his soul. "At least you have your work," his worried, kind-hearted friends will murmur’
Carol Shields, ‘Larry's Party’, p. 77
‘A tube of flesh, purplish in hue, veined, hooded, hanging there. Shaft and glans. A nozzle. A rounded snout. A cylinder wrapped like a wonton in transparent skin. Hanging there, always there, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. Trunk, stalk, drainpipe, pickle. A wagging horn strung between the legs, sewn into the body on a network of nerves and blood and cushiony scrotum. Lightning rod, rattlesnake, bum splitter. A knob, a swelling, pinky-blue, blood-filled, wormy white, its tip an open hole, leaking. A duct, a conduit, ribbed, fibrous. Dick, dink, ding-dong-bell. The family jewels. Tender, tight. A boner. A jackhammer, a probe, a woodie. A banana in the pocket - now who said that? - someone famous, wasn't it? Mae West? The cow in the barn, and the barn door open. (Holy embarrassment, Robin!) Cock, pendulum. Phallus. Prick. Engine. Sword, breadstick, crank and hammer. Your Henry, your Johnson, your John Thomas, your Ralph, your Charlie. Your pecker, Peter, your billy-boy, your one-eyed-monster in his turtleneck sweater’
Carol Shields, ‘Larry's Party’, pp. 123-124
‘Well, he thinks, maybe this is how it goes between forty-five-year-old lovers. At this age the body needs every available encouragement. Attention to diet and exercise. Recipes for relaxation. Forty-five-year-olds aren't out rolling in the autumn leaves, for God's sake, they aren't making impromptu snow angels in the park or frugging the night away. No. They're concentrating on improvements to their domestic arrangements; it was time, for instance, that Larry went shopping for some comfortable furniture.’
Carol Shields, ‘Larry's Party’, p. 278
‘Last summer, when Larry Weller lay unconscious in a deep coma, a coma that was possibly irreversible - the doctors would make no predictions - his body received meticulous care and almost constant surveillance. He slept his dreamless sleep and never knew - never felt, sensed, registered - that the integrity of his bodily organs was being maintained. He was fed intravenously during this period since his gagging and swallowing reflexes were non-operational. Frequent suctioning was required in order to remove the secretions of the mouth and throat and keep his airway open. Of course, his oral hygiene was attended to, his gums and teeth swabbed twice daily with lemon-glycerine.
Every two hours he was turned so that the pressure on his skin was relieved and his lungs aerated. It required a male nurse to move a body as heavy as Larry's, or two female nurses working together. He had to be carefully placed, his spine aligned, in order to avoid future orthopedic deformities. The function of his joints was maintained by daily motion exercises. An indwelling catheter handled the urine which he continued to produce in his unconscious state, and the digital removal of his stools from his rectum was regularly performed ...
His feet were bound to an L-shaped plastic board in order to provide support. Without this foot board his feet would have "dropped" to a plantar flexion position, permanently shortening the muscles and tendons at the back of his ankles, so that, should he survive, he would be unable to stand upright.
Hundreds of hands had touched him during the twenty-two-day period of his unconsciousness. The hands of professionals, doing their job, ticked off items on his chart, keeping his blook-filled tissues alive and elastic. His most private orifices, his nostrils, his anus, were kept free and clean. The faces of the strangers who performed these acts are utterly unknown to him.’
Carol Shields, ‘Larry's Party’, pp. 282-283
‘There are five Love Won Out conferences every year in the US and, although they are church-based, their message is expressed not in scripture but in the language of science. If you want to be saved, find a therapist.
"There is no such thing as a homosexual," the chief speaker, a clinical psychologist called Dr Joseph Nicolosi, assures his audience. "Everyone is heterosexual. Some of you may have a homosexual problem. But you are still a heterosexual. ‘Homosexual’ is simply a description of a psychological disorder, prompted by an inner sense of emptiness. This", he reminds them, "by the way, is non-religious, non-political information. This is scientific information." ’
Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian, April 3, 2004. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘We see that the boundary between God and creation is not a line between two bits of territory but the difference between the composer and the symphony, between the cloud and the rain. We recognize that God is equally close to each of us, so that the distance between person and person is dramatically telescoped as a result; yet this generates in us a greater reticence and humility before the mystery of a human other, not an assumption of sameness or a desire to absorb.’
Rowan Williams, ‘Ponder These Things’, p. 36.
‘God makes us precisely not to be God because he loves what is other; yet he loves what is other as if it were God - because the other can only be by the unrestrained outpouring of his own act of love at the foundation of creation's life. God cannot bear to be separated from us because God cannot be parted from the divine action and the divine joy.’
Rowan Williams, ‘Ponder These Things’, pp. 38-39.
‘Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 26
‘I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, pp. 84-85
‘A natural principle was being demonstrated, that of divestment. We must lighten ourselves to survive. We must not cling. Safety lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new to enter. Only folly dares those leaps that give life. This dark man on his island was possibility.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 101
‘Alexandra began to cry, thinking of her lost babies, babies swallowed by the children they had become, babies sliced into bits and fed to the days, the years.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 120
‘These frightful fluctuations a woman must endure on the stock exchange of male minds, up and down from minute to minute, as their ids and superegos haggle.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 142
‘Night after night the heavens were the same; Clyde was like a photographic plate exposed again and again; the stars had bored themselves into him like bullet holes in a tin roof.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 148
‘The winter passed. In the darkroom of overnight blizzards, New England picture postcards were developed; the morning's sunshine displayed them in colour.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 206
‘We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. Into the nether world. Before plumbing, in the old outhouses, in winter, the accreted shit of the family would mount up in a spiky frozen stalagmite, and such phenomena help us to believe that there is more to life than the airbrushed ads at the front of magazines, the Platonic forms of perfume bottles and nylon nightgowns and Rolls-Royce fenders. Perhaps in the passage ways of our dreams we meet, more than we know: one white lamplit face astonished by another. Certainly the fact of witchcraft hung in the consciousness of Eastwick; a lump, a cloudy density generated by a thousand translucent overlays, a sort of heavenly body, it was rarely breathed of and, though dreadful, offered the consolation of completeness, of rounding out the picture, like the gas mains underneath Oak Street and the television aerials scraping Kojak and Pepsi commercials out of the sky. It had the uncertain outlines of something seen through a shower door and was viscid, slow to evaporate: for years after the events gropingly and even reluctantly related here, the rumor of witchcraft stained this corner of Rhode Island, so that a prickliness of embarrassment and unease entered the atmosphere with the most innocent mention of Eastwick.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, pp. 216-217
‘It did not surprise Alexandra that for all her spite Jane should be the weak sister when it came to casting the spell; for magic is fuelled by love, not hate: hate wields scissors only and is impotent to weave the threads of sympathy whereby the mind and spirit do move matter.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, p. 254
‘In the Second Suite, there was a theme - a melodic succession of rising thirds and a descent in whole tones - announced in the prelude and then given an affecting twist in the allemande, a momentary reversal (up a third) of the descent; this a pognance was inserted in the onrolling (moderato) melody, which returned and returned, the matter under discussion coming to a head of dissonance in the forte d#-a chord between a trilled b natural and a finger-stinging run, piano, of thirty-second notes ... The sarabande, largo, was magnificent, inarguable, its slow skipping marked by many trills, a ghost of that dainty theme reappearing after a huge incomplete dominant ninth had fallen across the music crushingly.’
John Updike, ‘The Witches of Eastwick’, pp. 283-284
‘because of the excitement generated in me by a new pleasure, and having crossed the line which anything exceptional makes us cross after it has severed the thread, patiently woven over so many days, which was leading us towards a more sensible way of living - as though no tomorrow would ever come, as though the worthier achievements were of no importance, the whole careful arrangement of wiser precautions, the whole point of which was to make those achievements possible, would disappear.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 389.
‘I had already drunk a great deal of port; and when I asked for more, it was less because I was hoping the next glasses would give a feeling of well-being than because the previous ones had already given it.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 392.
‘If one wants a republic or a sect to live a long time, it is necessary to bring it back often to its beginnings ...
We can see how necessary this renovation is by the example of our religion, which, if it had not been returned to its origins by Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, would have been completely exhausted, since with poverty and the example of the life of Christ, they brought it back to the mind of men, where it was already exhausted.’
Machiavelli, 'Discorsi', Book 3. Quoted, Charles Rosen, New York Review, 6 November 2003
‘Every subculture has its own language and its own inflection. Even, sometimes, it's the emphasis of a syllable in a word, or you could have one word out of order, and instantly you recognize someone from your own subculture. And the evangelical subculture is no different. When G.W. meets with evangelical Christians, they know within minutes that he's one of theirs.’
Doug Weed in PBS's 'Frontline'. Full text at PBS website.
‘in the endless series of imagined Albertines who occupied my head one after the other, for hours on end, the real Albertine, the one glimpsed down at the esplanade, was merely the forerunner, like an actress, the star who, having created a part, hands it over after the very first performances to others.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 437.
‘Wisdom cannot be inherited - one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course which no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare you that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 442.
‘All of this had given me pleasure, but it was a pleasure which had remained hidden from me; it was one of those visitors who do not approach us till all the others have gone, and we can be alone together; that is when we notice them, when we can say, 'I'm all yours' and give them our full attention. Sometimes, between the moment when such pleasures have entered our mind and the moment when we too can withdraw into it, so many hours have elapsed, and we have seen so many people in the meantime, that we fear they may not have waited. But they are patient, they do not weary, and when the last visitor has gone, there they are looking at us. And sometimes it is we who are so tired out that we feel we cannot find the strength in our weary mind to entertain these memories, these impressions for which our feeble self is the only habitable place, the sole medium of their realization. But this we would regret, for almost the only interest in existence lies in those days when a pinch of magic sand is mixed with the dust of reality, when a trite incident can become the spur of romance.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, pp. 443-4.
‘Since seeing such things in the water-colours of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the bell-tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, but glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylihgt; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, green to blue, blue to gold, in the fruit dish already half plundered; the wandering of the old-fashioned chairs, which twice a day take their places again about the cloth draping the table as though it is an altar for the celebration of the sanctity of appetite, with a few drops of lustral water left in oyster-shells like little stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things, in the profound life of 'still life'.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, pp. 447-8..
‘Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark-room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 450.
‘To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them which we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 452.
‘Those of us whose law of growth is one of purely internal growth, and who cannot escape the impression of boredom inseparable from the presence of a friend, an impression which comes from having to stay at the surface of self, instead of sounding our depths for the discoveries which await us, can only be tempted by friendship, once we are alone, to disbelieve this impression, to let ourselves be retrospectively moved by the words spoken by our friend, to see them as the sharing of something valuable; whereas we are not like a building to which a brick or a stone can be added on the outside, but rather like a tree which distils from its own sap each new knot in its trunk and the next layer of its foliage. I lied to myself, I stunted my growth in the very direction which could lead me to genuine progress and happiness, each time I took pride in being liked and admired by a person as kind, as intelligent, as sought after as Saint-Loup, by adapting my mind not to my own confused impressions, which it should have been my duty to decipher, but to the words spoken by my friend.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, p. 484.
‘In the corridor, I was only a few paces away from the bedroom inside which lay the precious substance of her pink body - the room which, however delightful the acts to take place in it, would go on being its unchanging self, would continue to seem, for the eyes of any unsuspecting passer-by, identical to all the other rooms, which is the way things have of becoming the stubbornly unconfessing witnesses, the conscientious confidants, the inviolable trustees of our pleasure.’
Marcel Proust, 'In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower', trans. James Grieve, pp. 508-9.
‘We're hunters, that's what we are, always stalking, tracking the missing thing, the missing part of our lives.’
Graham Swift, 'The Light of Day', p. 105.
‘They let you out. You can get away now: a sunshine cruise, a cottage by the sea. All the time in the world. But it doesn't work like that. Something nags, something grates under your skin. You wake up every morning as if something's still unsolved.’
Graham Swift, 'The Light of Day', p. 223.
‘A beginning is an artifice, and what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows.’
Ian McEwan, 'Enduring Love', pp. 17-18.
‘That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, 'foreplay'. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me which I didn't say out loud because they sounded so banal - Here we are, or, This again, or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again.’
Ian McEwan, 'Enduring Love', p. 34.
‘It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word.’
Ian McEwan, 'Enduring Love', p. 43.
‘we are led by faith both to live in the world, fully flesh and blood in it, and at the same time to be aware of the utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar - as if the world were always on the edge of some total revolution, pregnant with a different kind of life, and we were always trying to catch the blinding momentary light of its changing.’
Rowan Williams, 'Ponder These Things', p. xvii
‘in the icon, we are ... talking about ... the journey the eye has to take around the entire complex image: wherever you start, you are guided by a flow of lines, and the path travelled itself makes the 'point' - though 'point' is quite the wrong word, suggesting as it does that the icon has one simple message to get across, rather than being an invitation to a continuing action of contemplating.’
Rowan Williams, 'Ponder These Things', p. 4
‘The way to life is the path away from self-contemplation and self-presentation, from putting oneself before the world as an isolated unit, a solid lump of human material, sufficient to itself.’
Rowan Williams, 'Ponder These Things', p. 7
‘Throughout the biblical story, God accepts identification in terms of those he works with - the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Lord God of Israel, the one whose 'body' is the community of Christian believers.’
Rowan Williams, 'Ponder These Things', p. 12
‘love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of the concierge, passers-by or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities which would make it necessary for him to leave the house.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve, p. 370.
‘Cafe Rio. A big stencilled mural on one wall: Sugar Loaf Mountain, parrots, palm trees, beach girls. It's what you need in Wimbledon at the thin end of October. And they play samba music, smoochy and soft ...
I look at the palm trees on the wall, the beach girls. As if everywhere's a prison and we need to peer out at a different world. In Rio de Janeiro, maybe, there's a Cafe Wimbledon where they think of cool green lawns.’
Graham Swift, ‘The Light of Day’, p. 30
‘Weber, picking up a theme from Schiller, talks of the ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung) of the world. The world, from being a locus of ‘magic’, or the sacred, or the Ideas, comes simply to be seen as a neutral domain of potential means to our purposes.’
Charles Taylor, ‘Sources of the Self’, p. 500
‘a tradition is often most successfully sustained by those who appear to be trying to attack or to destroy it. It was Wagner, Debussy, and Stravinsky who gave new life to the Western musical tradition while seeming to undermine its very foundations. As Proust wrote, "The great innovators are the only true classics and form a continuous series. The imitators of the classics, in their finest moments, only procure for us a pleasure of erudition and taste that has no great value.’
Charles Rosen, New York Review, 6 November 2003.
‘In human experience, intrusive or invasive love is an attempt to destroy something, the essential distance between person and person that makes human love a joyful and risky exploration of another's mysteriousness. Trying to annihilate the boundary is trying to get to the end of a process that is not meant to end, trying to consume another and absorb them. There is a sense in which our love for God has to be like this too; there are no short cuts; there is no absolute possession; and we shall never arrive at a point where we have come to ‘contain’ God. But God's love for us does not face that kind of boundary, since God is not in any way another individual in competition with us.’
Rowan Williams, 'Ponder These Things', p. 33