how to write the great american novel, abridged.

[hollyslowly]

In the interests of uncluttering my desktop, a collection of quotes that I have saved in a thousand various .rtf files.

Comments

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

What idiocies has he uttered, in the course of these nightly debauches? He can hardly remember. Words of passion and burning love, of how he cannot resist her, which - strange to say - he himself actually believes at the time. During the day, Rachel is a burden, an encumbrance, and he wishes to be rid of her; but at night she's an altogether different person, and so is he. He too says no when he means yes. He means more, he means further, he means deeper. He would like to make an incision in her - just a small one - so he can taste her blood, which in the shadowy darkness of the bedroom seems to him like a normal wish to have. He's driven by what feels like uncontrollable desire; but apart from that - apart from himself, at these times, as the sheets toss like waves and he tumbles and wallows and gasps - another part of himself stands with folded arms, fully clothed, merely curious, merely observing. How far, exactly, will he go? How far in.

Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.

Choke, Chuck Palahniuk.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

All of them?

Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

I believe you make your own breaks, and you just work hard, and you shut the fuck up. I think you put your head down when things are getting hard, and you work more. Take the trash out if you feel sorry for yourself. Do some dishes, do your own laundry. I don’t think you necessarily have to do artistic work in that moment. What you need to do is work your way through it.

Josh Homme.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Crabtree I spotted right away, in the front row, slouched, in shirtsleeves, watching Walter with a very sleepy and complacent look on his face. If he were a cat he would have been licking the blood and feathers from his whiskers. He had dressed James for the assembly, I saw, in his own mushroom-colored sport jacket, worn over my old flannel shirt. James was sitting right there beside him, spine erect, hands folded politely in his lap, his earnest Adam’s apple working its way up and down as he drank in the urbane good counsel of his queer old dean—the standard Walter Gaskell homily, in that room full of agents and editors, to go forth and work hard at one’s craft, always without regard to such vulgar concerns as finding an agent or an editor.

When someone at the end of their row coughed, James turned, and happened to look up, and spotted me in my corner. I was startled: I’d felt almost safe, lurking there like John Wilkes Booth behind the dusty velour drape and the scrim of my own loneliness. James’s eyes got very wide, and he was about to turn and give Crabtree a poke in the ribs, but I put a finger to my lips and drew a pleat of dusty velour sideways across my face. Although he looked doubtful, he nodded, solemnly, and turned back to the stage. At the sight of James in Crabtree’s jacket I experienced a sharp pang of abandonment, out of all proportion to the unremarkable circumstance of male lovers sharing clothes. I felt suddenly bereft not only of Crabtree and his love but of my earliest bright image of myself, of my trajectory across the world. It’s not fashionable, I know, in this unromantic age, for a reasonably straight man to think of finding his destiny in the love of another man, but that was how I’d always thought of Crabtree. I guess you could say that in a strange sort of way I’d always believed that Crabtree was my man, and I was his. It was only proper, I supposed, for the first thing in my life that had ever felt right to be the last one to be proven wrong.

Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

She came after me. That has never happened. All those times when I hoped she might come or follow, she never came, unless I begged, or cajoled her for her own good. But when I walk to escape her, she comes running after, hurrying a little without wishing to be seen to hurry, in her great cape and hood, with the silly umbrella flapping and creaking in and out in the wind and of no particular use at all. That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

Possession, A.S. Byatt.

ain't no forgettin' you

[ticketsonmyself.livejournal.com]

The only reason I'm not falling back into my VAT OF TEARS at this quote is that I know #KELLERMAN SHIPS IT 4EVER.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.

[fallen-woman.livejournal.com]

jadkf;alfjaslk Blood Meridian i have a lot of issues with pacing & gratuitiousness in that novel but the sentences in isolation are such blood-flecked glory yanked squalling from the earth

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Skip was looking at me seriously, and maybe there was something in his eyes. I can’t say for sure. Time goes by, Atlantis sinks deeper and deeper into the ocean, and you have a tendency to romanticize. To mythologize. Maybe I saw that he had given up, that he intended to stay here and play cards and then go on to whatever was next; maybe he was giving me permission to go in my own direction. But I was eighteen, and more like Nate in many ways than I liked to admit. I had also never had a friend like Skip. Skip was fearless, Skip said fuck every other word, when Skip was eating at the Palace the girls couldn’t keep their eyes off him. He was the kind of babe magnet Ronnie could be only in his dampest dreams. But Skip also had something adrift inside of him, something like a bit of bone which may, after years of harmless wandering, pierce the heart or clog the brain. He knew it, too. Even then, with high school still sticking all over him like afterbirth, even then when he still thought he’d somehow wind up teaching school and coaching baseball, he knew it. And I loved him. The look of him, the smile of him, the walk and talk of him. I loved him and I would not leave him.

Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
“What are you thinking? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in the rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

The autumn leaves are falling like rain.
Though my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups at my table.

Tang dynasty poem.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Others because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.

W.B. Yeats.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Boaz looked shocked, then stern. "Just because something feels better than anything else," he said in his thoughts, "that don't mean it's good for you."

Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk. Now, we stand by each other always.

William T. Sherman.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

HORATIO Here, sweet lord, at your service.
HAMLET Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
As e'er my conversation coped withal.
HORATIO O, my dear lord,--
HAMLET Nay, do not think I flatter;
For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits,
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter'd?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.--Something too much of this.--

Hamlet, III.ii.53-75, Shakespeare.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

A short silence. Prior said, 'I wish I could go out. No, it's all right, I'm not asking. I'm just saying I wish I could. The nightmares get worse when I'm stuck indoors.' He waited. 'This is where you ask about the nightmares and I say I don't remember.'
'I know.'
Prior smiled. 'You never believed me, did you?'
'Should I have done?'
'No.'
'Do you want to talk about them just now?'
'I can't. Look, they're just. . . ' He laughed. '"Standard issue battle nightmares. Potty officers for the use of." Nothing you won't have heard a hundred times before.'
'Except?'
'Except nothing.'
A long silence.
'Except that sometimes they get muddled up with sex. So I wake up, and. . .' He risked a glance at Rivers. When he spoke again, his voice was casual. 'It makes it really quite impossible to like oneself. I've actually woken up once or twice and wondered whether there was any point going on.'

Regeneration, Pat Barker.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

rargh.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

There was a short silence. 'I'm sorry too,' Prior said. 'You're right, of course. Class prejudice isn't any more admirable for being directed upwards.' Just more fucking justified.

The Eye in the Door, Pat Barker.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

QUITE BILLY. QUITE.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Was this the surpressed memory? He didn't know. Was it trivial? Well, yes, in a way, compared with Prior's lurid imaginings. A smack on the leg, a lesson in manliness from an over-conscientious but loving father. It's a long way from sadistic beatings or sexual assault. And yet it wasn't as trivial as it seemed at first. That silence - for him now that was the centre of the picture - not the blood, not the knife, but the resolutely clenched mouth. Every day of his working life he looked at twitching mouths that had once been clenched. Go on, he said, though rarely in so many words, cry. It's all right to grieve. Breakdown's nothing to be ashamed of - the pressures were intolerable. But, also, stop crying. Get up on your feet. Walk. He both distrusted that silence and endorsed it, as he was bound to do, he thought, being his father's son.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I think what I love about this is that no matter what you find in the centre of the pearl of repression is never going to live up to what you were afraid it was.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

One of my problems with the baths is that I'm always dressed. Officers bathe separately. And. . . Well, it's odd. One of the things I like sexually, one of the things I fantasize about, is simply being fully dressed with a naked lover, holding him or her from behind. And what I feel (apart from the obvious) is a great tenderness - the sort of tenderness that depends on being more powerful, and that is really, I suppose, just the acceptable face of sadism.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

IF YOU HAD ANY IDEA OF THE DISCUSSION I JUST HAD A BOUT THIS QUOTE

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

This is for my friend Dominic, who's at home listening, or I guess I wish he was at home listening. And, uh, just wanna let you know that we're all with you and at one time or another everybody's gotta drive through the darkness on the edge of town. I know you're gonna make it.

"Darkness on the Edge of Town (Live 1978)," Bruce Springsteen.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

Ita durus eras ut neque amore neque precibus molliri posses.

Terence.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon.

[formanymiles.livejournal.com]

There’s a part in the movie
where you can see right through the acting,
where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears,
right before I burst into tears
and flee to the slimy moonlit riverbed
canopied with devastated clouds.
We’re shouting the scene where
I swallow your heart and you make me
spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls
right out of my mouth.
You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.

"Dirty Valentine," Richard Siken.

[fallen-woman.livejournal.com]

why am i shockingly unsurprised at your appreciation of Siken allll the Siken alllll the broken reconfigured shards