Category: quotes

Cut and Color

Karen2 Comments

So I made a hair appointment Saturday, which reminded me of this (fairly long) passage from The Long Goodbye. “Kingpin racketeers”–long live Raymond Chandler.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home…

There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable kind. She is very languid and very shadowy and speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal…

And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

This Is Why I Love Literature

Karen

There’s something so satisfying about hearing something and immediately recognizing its truth and beauty, even if it’s something you’ve never thought of before. I picked up The Hours again last night, and found this:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book… What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Salinger, Part III

Karen1 Comment

“I find it magnificent how beautiful loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with decent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength.”

Let’s hope this is proved correct. We have a huge site that has to go up Monday morning, and it’s still being built. I hope our blind strength will be enough. It’s a little sleep-deprived at this point.

Salinger, Part II

Karen

From the same story as yesterday:

While the food itself is not atrocious, it is cooked without a morsel of affection or inspiration, each string bean and simple carrot arriving on the camper’s plate quite stripped if its tiny vegetal soul…A nameless inertia hangs over these two [the cooks], alternating with fits of unreasonable wrath, stripping them of any will or desire to prepare creditable, affectionate food or even to keep the bent silverware on the tables spotless and clean as a whistle. The sight of the forks alone often whips Buddy into a raw fury. He is working on this tendency, but a revolting fork is a revolting fork.

Word, Salinger

Karen

I have to admit that last week I had a moment of doubt and thought, “Is Salinger still alive?” He is, and I discovered lots of his uncollected stories have been put online. While this is not expressly against his wishes (they were published once, after all), it’s probably entering the murky waters of copyright infringement. But in the spirit of the Internet, here’s a link to the story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” written by a precocious 7-year-old Seymour Glass. (It’s a long story, so be warned.) It had such gems as this in it:

Few of these magnificent, healthy, sometimes remarkably handsome boys will mature. The majority, I will give you my heartbreaking opinion, will merely senesce. Is that a picture to tolerate in one’s heart? On the contrary, it is a picture to rip the heart to pieces.

That’s just so satisfying to hear.

Happy Belated Vernal Equinox

Karen


I never had a chance to post yesterday, so I’ll make up for it today with some real highbrow literature. This is Virginia Woolf, from the middle section of To The Lighthouse, titled, appropriately enough, “Time Passes.” I think of it whenever, well, time passes.

But what, after all, is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of a wave.

Never made it to the demolition derrby over the weekend. However, there will be chariot races this Saturday and Sunday, at the same arena (Golden Spike). Why we don’t all move to Ogden, I don’t know–they have derbys, chariot races, refineries, trains.

Dombey & Son

Karen

I was in a Dickens mood about three weeks ago, went to the main library, and came home with Dombey and Son, which is a later one. I’m about 200 pages into it and getting my Dickens fix (there are lots of descriptions of somber parlors, a “flaxen-haired” little girl, and someone young has just died), but most people I’ve talked to (okay, only three people, but that’s most of my accquaintance) have never heard of Dombey and Son. I had, distantly, and realized last night it was mentioned by Salinger in Franny and Zooey. I love the italics, so it’s the quote for the day. (A quote from literature, about literature! It’s a good day.) This is Franny speaking, near the end:

“He said he was–this is exactly what he said–he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading ‘Dombey and Son,’ and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you–that’s exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he’s perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff!”

So every time I think or read “Dombey and Son,” it comes out Dombey.