"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?"

"Out of this house" ‚ said rider to reader,
"Yours never will" ‚ said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you" ‚ said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and passed in a flash and I woke to read again- the lost joys of reading returned to me."

--from "The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield

When you were very small, perhaps someone read to you the insipid story — the word insipid here means not worth reading to someone — of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. A very dull boy, you may remember, cried Wolf! when there was no wolf, and the gullible villagers ran to rescue him only to find the whole thing was a joke. Then he cried Wolf! when it wasn't a joke, and the villagers didn't come running, and the boy was eaten and the story, thank goodness, was over. The story's moral, of course, ought to be Never live somewhere where wolves are running around loose, but whoever read you the story probably told you that the moral was not to lie. This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie.

--"The Reptile Room" from 'A Series of Unfortunate Events', Lemony Snicket

(I love his wit. Gah.)

"...you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal."
Hey Nostradamus!

"And then...and then I felt truly old for the first time—old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing someting radical or bold to change the course of my life...I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal."
Hey Nostradamus!

"And anyway, a few decades after your first kiss and your first cigarette, I don't care if you're rich or poor, life leaves the same number of bruises on you."
Hey Nostradamus!

"I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room."
Life After God

"I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are."
Life After God

"Now here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words...My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and I can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me to give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."
Life After God

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time--the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes--when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feelings that she's gone, forever--there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

John Irving, A Prayer For Owen Meany

So for those have you fallen in love
Keep it kind, keep it good, keep it right
Throw yourself in the mist of danger
But keep an eye open at night




*i thought it was a beautiful video to share.

( and if you're interested in hearing the actual song )

I used to be your little secret, and you were mine.
we wouldn't tell our parents or our friends,
or your girlfriend.
you disappeared, I think because you were sick of hiding.
or because she found out.
you reappeared eventually;
more like, I found you and you didn't run.
Now you're gone again,
and the only thing that I keep secret is pancake mountain.

"Hi there, what's your name?"

"Elly Higginbottom."

The sailor fell into step beside me, and I smiled.

I thought there must be as many sailors on the Common as there were pigeons. They seemed to come out a dun-colored recruiting house on the far side, with blue and white "Join the Navy" posters stuck up on billboards round it and all over the inner walls.

"Where do you come from, Elly?"

"Chicago."

I had never been to Chicago, but I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.

"You sure are a long way from home."

The sailor put his around my waist, and for a long time we walked around the Commons like that, the sailor stroking my hip through the green dirndl skirt, and me smiling mysteriously and trying not to say anything that would show I was from Boston and might at any moment meet Mrs. Willard, or one of my mother's other friends, crossing the Common after tea on Beacon Hill or shopping in Filene's Basement,

I thought if I ever did get to Chicago, I might change my name to Elly Higginbottom for good. Then nobody would know I had thrown up a scholarship at a big eastern women's college and mucked up a month in New York and refused a perfectly solid medical student for a husband who would one day be a member of the AMA and earn pots of money.

In Chicago, people would take me for who I was.


-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Beloved
You are my sister
You are my daughter
You are my face; you are me
I have found you again; you have come back to me
You are my Beloved
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine

-- Beloved, Toni Morrison

Publisher: Five Star, 2007
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Swords and sorcery



Read the full (spoiler-free) review here!

Alright, let's be honest. This cover has all the clichéd aspects of fantasy in one overly dark picture. Creepy-looking tyrant dude? Check. Swords and a rider on horseback? Check. Medieval-style clothing? Check. Even shiny magical bits glittering in the background! Basically, this cover tells me "there is nothing new to see here. Move along."

For me, reading this book was an excellent example of why it's so important to "show" instead of "tell." The whole book is written with a great distance from the characters, and more often than not events feel like they're being told as part of a story, rather than playing out for the reader to experience. As a result, I just couldn't find it in myself to care about any of the characters or what was happening. Sometimes the character motivations or logic didn't seem to make any sense, although they might have had we been more in their heads.

There were a few occasions I felt like I'd missed entire scenes, too, and at least twice went back to make sure I hadn't missed something. In one scene, Aeolia asks the guy she's mad about if they can get married, and then tells him not to reply so she won't have to hear him refuse. Next we see them, they're already married. I don't necessarily need a big elaborate wedding scene, but it'd be nice to hear something more definite than "No, don't talk... because I couldn't bear it if you turned me down. Here, what's this? I see you want to speak. I will kiss you lest you refuse me."

The dialogue was stilted, the characters seemed to move through as dictated by plot instead of making their own rational decisions, and in general the book just couldn't keep my attention. The thing took me far too long to finish. I will admit to liking the magic system presented here, with each culture having its own particular talent, and the scenes near the beginning where Aeolia was forced to serve her ogre master had some potential. Actually, I kind of wish this had been the story of Aeolia the slavegirl, rather than Aeolia the girl who escaped slavery to randomly plod through until she makes her way to King Sinther the tyrant.

Note to self: on occasion, it's ok to judge a book by its cover. Sometimes it's just truth in advertising.

"However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly — therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness."

Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

What she felt was more like homesickness, though there was no source for it, no home. But she was sad to leave her sister. It was her sister she missed-or more precisely, it was her sister with Robbie. Their love. Neither Briony nor the war had destroyed it. This was what soothed her as she sank deeper under the city. How Cecilia had drawn him to her with her eyes. That tenderness in her voice when she called him back from his memories, from Dunkirk, or from the roads that led to it. She used to speak like that to her sometimes, when Cecilia was sixteen and she was a child of six and thing went impossibly wrong. Or in the night when Cecilia came to rescue her from a nightmare and take her into her own bed. Those were the words she used. Come back. It was only a bad dream. Briony, came back. How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
~ Atonement by Ian McEwan

everything feels like it's falling into place. but i've felt like this before. it's only temporary, i know. but i want it to last for as long as possible. sometimes i forget how happy i can be.

"Would you tell me please which way I ought to walk from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where-" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way to walk," said the Cat. 
-Alice in Wonderland

"We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left.  All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies.  It's a breed - selected out by accident.  And so we're overbrave and overfearful - we're kind and cruel as children.  We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers.  We boast and are impressed.  We're oversentimental and realistic.  We are mundane and materialistic - and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals?  We eat too much.  We have no taste, no sense of proportion.  We throw our energy about like waste.  In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.  Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?"
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me." - Cleopatra, from Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra

 

I love East of Eden, so I'll probably be back with more quotes from that amazing book.

As Dawn rose up in her golden robe from the Ocean's tides,
bringing light to immortal gods and mortal men,
Thetis sped Hephaestus' gifts to the ships.
She found her beloved son lying facedown,
embracing Patroclus' body. sobbing, wailing,
and round him crowded troops of mourning comrades.
And the glistening goddess moved among them now,
seized Achilles' hand and urged him, spoke his name:
"My child, leave your friend to lie there dead-
we must, though it breaks our hearts...
The will of the gods has crushed him once for all.
But here, Achilles, accept this glorious armor, look,
a gift from the god of fire-burnished bright, finer
than any mortal has ever borne across his back"

(translated by Robert Fagles)

You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.
- Anna Karenina

In historical events great men—so-called—are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
- War and Peace


It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
- The Kreutzer Sonata  (this is one of my favorites)