Shalin > Recent Status Updates

“ Perhaps it was that—the loss of belief—that constituted his yearning for the old life… he and his wife had built things that had flourished…expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them abundantly, and this…had given him the confidence to break it all…with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more.”

“when I look back on that race now I can see that I had a lot of meaning for me as a runner. I don’t know what sort of general significance running 62 miles by yourself has, but as an action that deviates from the ordinary yet doesn’t violate basic values, you’d expected to afford you a special sort of self-awareness. It should add a few new elements to your inventory and understanding who you are.”

“ it must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt such inexplicable desolation, then, such sludge in the heart, felt the season’s mockery, all that chartreuse humidity in her throat like a gag. how else to explain such a feeling?”

“ with the two of them kissing like this—exculpatory, specificity, rubric— words are foreign money. There is only the soft punch in the mouth, the shrinking and feeding both, which fills Mack’s ears with light. This, he thinks, this is how a blind man sees. This is how a fish walks. This is how rocks sing. There is nothing at all like a man’s strong kiss: apologies to the women of Kentucky.”

I really eat up lorrie moores dark humor and human observation.. “ these days, however, he seems anxious and elderly. There is a pain in his eyes, something sad and unfocused that sometimes stabs at them— the fear of a misspent life, or an uncertainty as to where he’s left the keys.”

“ it was part of their effort, not to become their parents, their marriage, they knew, held that hazard. The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that look like quotation marks— as if everything she said had already been said before.”

“ I am thinking of the dancing bodies magnificent in ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed— this body, these bodies, that body— so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?”

Finished the first two short stories.. I love slightly glum depictions of women and all their idiosyncrasies.

“ From the beginning of history, the two antagonist have stood face-to-face: the creator and the secondhander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first secondhander responded. He invented altruism.”

Really great monologue by toohey

“ The independent man kills them— because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man they know. They’re afraid. You’re a reproach.”

“They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring … not to grass, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop … from wooden scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of glass rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose, fulfillment.”

283-288 such great tactical banter between toohey and Dominique

One of the most underratedly, unobvious intimate scenes I’ve ever read. I love this book!!

This sums it up so far…
“ I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”
“You call that freedom?”
“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

Really reminds me of My Year of Rest and Relaxation the way Selin is so lost and the days her existence blur together.