“all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert: Books aren’t made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there on the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. I was eight when I jotted down that quote, but even then, the part I enjoyed the most was the delightful “Continue this comparison.” And even then, I understood at once that the pissing jackals were critics.”
― A Winter Haunting
― A Winter Haunting
“We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final and so dull -- love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the flourescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist.”
―
―
“We theorize that if these disruptions continue to happen, eventually the separate realities will begin to compete with our primary reality for dominance, and there will end up being no safe reality to live in.”
― The Balance of Time
― The Balance of Time
“Attest:”
― The United States Constitution
― The United States Constitution
“Mead.
O sweet elixir,
Ye bless the lips and steal the wits.
”
― Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master
O sweet elixir,
Ye bless the lips and steal the wits.
”
― Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master
Johnson’s 2025 Year in Books
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