Tag: words

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

… Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come back to life.

Page 85

So I finished this book. It’s like all human flaws were crammed into a few characters and you watched it play out like a slow train crash. The most logical-seeming person was also the worst. The most convoluted narrative was the most innocent character. The character that seemed to have something going for him, whose life looked like it was just beginning… Well, I’m not going to spoil it. The whole book is just tragic.

Question of the week from Jared Diamond

If we succeed in examining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn’t it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore be futile to try to change the outcome today?

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies

I picked this book up 10 years ago but got too busy to read the whole thing. Here’s to another try.

The Emporer of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter

Depression is seductive: it offend and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it… Or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pressures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you… To be depressed is to be half in love with disaster. P. 152-153

We live so much of our lives in chaos. Human history can be viewed as an endless search for greater order: everything from language to religion to law to science tries to impose a framework on classic existence. P. 229

We look at our bodies, our energies, and we think we own them: we do not recognize, with Emerson, that they are a part of the world to be husbanded with care, to be respected, not to be misused; we think they are ours to do with what we will. And so, thinking we have been liberated, we joyfully pave the paths to our destruction. P. 583

But guilt comes in more than one variety. And so does punishment. P. 648

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

We think time cannot touch the dead, but it touches their monuments… P. 10

Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you. P. 136

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumor, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door. P. 159

… Don’t pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up? P. 165

… If a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. Page 348

If what someone wants from you is an admission, it is never in your interest to give it. Page 353

Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything. P. 370

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantell

“Beneath every history, another history.” – p. 61

“It matters what name we choose, what name we make.” – 165

“There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible… The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were before.” – 189

“A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hands and the unguessed-at expression of his face.” – 331

The fate of people is made like this, two men in small rooms… This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase… ” – 566

Books I’ve Finished or Read Since January 1, 2022

Circe by Madeline Miller
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Piranesi by Susanna Clark
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Stars are Not Yet Bells by Hannah Lilith Assandt
Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephensen
Light by John M Harrison
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
The Impossible Climb by Mark Synnot

Momentary

I’m on page 3 and I already want to weep.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

–Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino