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"She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove."

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I lifted the loop and set off across the meadow.

Standing up there on the platform before a great work of art, feeling kinship with its creator, cosily knowing that I was a sort of impresario conjuring and teasing back his work after four hundred years of darkness. But that wasn't all of it. There was this weather, this landscape, thick woods, roadsides deep in grass and wild flowers. And to south and north of the Vale, low hills, frontiers of a mysterious country.

But mercifully it wasn't Baghdad, so he couldn't drape her in a yasmak and other men could still cast an admiring eye on his doe-eyed bride.

In large numbers everything gets much too threatened, a quantity needs to remain something abstract, has to be the postulate of a theory, has to remain operable, it has to have the purity of mathematics, only mathematics allows billions to be beautiful, a billion apples, on the other hand, is unpalatable, a ton of coffee in itself testifies to countless crimes, a billion people is inconceivably depraved, pitiful [..]

sitting in their countries, they’re the ones who are behind the times, because they lack a language, for always, in all ages, those without a language rule. I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt. (Signs of exhaustion in Herr Mühlbauer. Signs of my own exhaustion.)

[....] but when you’re drinking coffee with me or when we’re drinking wine and playing chess, then where are all the wars and where is humanity starving to death, and are you really sorry about all that or just sorry about the fact that you’re losing, or because I’m about to be so hungry I could eat a horse and why are you laughing right now, does humanity have a lot to laugh about right this minute?

"This little piece of side street is my greatest security, during the day I run up the stairs, at night I fall upon the outside door armed with the key, and once again that blissful moment returns, when the key twists, the locks unlock, the doors open and that feeling of having come home overwhelms me in the spray of traffic and people."

"Meanwhile I did everything to help the transition—lent him money to ease his conscience, introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier’s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he’d spread it out over Lord knows how many hundred pages."

"It had a quality she had never been aware of in any other silence, as though it were not merely an absence of sound, a thin barrier between the ear and the surging murmur of life just beyond, but an impenetrable substance made out of the worldwide cessation of all life and all movement. Yes, that was what laid a chill on her: the feeling that there was no limit to this silence, no outer margin, nothing beyond it."

"My bargaining letter, my please-proceed-without-me letter. My whole life I felt like I could never give you the right thing, give you enough; I was perpetually failing. But in these pages, I had articulated something of worth. Here I had let you know me. And now the question was, Would you understand? Would you be convinced that true love can be, despite what we’re told, a forgetting?"

'But she cut in. “You’d never cheat on your husband, right?” She didn’t care about breastfeeding. “I don’t have the energy even if I wanted to.” “See, that’s the kind of stability I’m looking for.” I hadn’t said much about my husband to her yet. I wondered what made her assume stability. A part of me was proud, though. It’s what I’d been after all these years.'

"Had he also been disturbed by the recent famous woman who lost her case against her more famous husband? Had he been stirred by this injustice and then thought of me, his old girlfriend and all her baggage? All she had confessed to him? Maybe he was in a twelve-step program and had reached that pesky ninth step where you upended other people’s lives under the guise of making *amends.*"

"You told me most women, if they possessed even a shred of intuition, could tell when a man wanted them, that one day I would be wanted and I’d have to ask myself if I really wanted the man back, or if I was just in love with the fact of his wanting. How the two could look remarkably alike but were in fact different. I told you it seemed like the wrong question to ask. You threw your head back and laughed."

"According to publicity to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict."

"The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour."

"The entry on the Virgin of the Rocks is one of the longest entries [..] They do not deal with the meaning of the image. They deal with who commissioned the painting, legal squabbles, who owned it, its likely date, the families of its owners. Behind this information lie years of research. The aim of the research is to prove beyond any shadow of doubt that the painting is a genuine Leonardo."

"But I hadn’t thought about the kids. If I failed them, where would they go? Somewhere bad, that was for sure. Somewhere worse than this life. Carl was ready to send them there. For all I knew, Jasper and Madison would be ready to send them there if I slipped up just a little bit. I remembered that feeling, driving down to the valley, no longer welcome at Iron Mountain. It had felt like my life was over."

“Can I eat it at the counter?” I asked, and Mary shrugged. Of course, of course, it was the best sandwich I’d ever eaten. I first thought it was just because someone had made it for me, but my mom had made some sorry sandwiches for me in my life, so maybe it was the atmosphere. I tried not to overthink it. “This is so good,” I told Mary, who just nodded.

"But once teachers started to tell me about Iron Mountain and the scholarship [...] I redirected my efforts. I didn’t know that the school was just some ribbon that rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. I thought it was a training ground for Amazons. I made other students cry at the spelling bee. I plagiarized scientific studies and dumbed them down just enough to win county science fairs."

"Delving, never such delving... The Irish and the Czech segments of the Czgowchwz life fused once and for all. Day upon day the vigilants came back to Magwyck to meet this Mawrdew Czgowchwz. She began to write—page after page of new-found English, reflective and interpretive, lucid and analytical. It read like the Book of Life."

A small drop of hot silver wax slipped off the spent match onto a star sapphire adorning the left forefinger, recalling her to the swirl of the moment. “What was it you were saying, Cassia?” Cassia, gathering dismay, turned fully around to face Dame Sybil for emphasis. “I merely said, my dear, that I LOATHE and DETEST the idea of being LATE! Even among friends, my dear, tongues will WAG, you know, tongues WILL WAG!"

"When Ralph left, at noon, the pact had been drawn up, sealed in tears, and taped: FIND MARDU GORGEOUS!!! (Despairing of ever knowing their heroine’s name, which the dozy DJ had spelled but had not dared attempt pronouncing, they called her “Gorgeous,” a name the way she sounded demanded [..] Time has not changed it. Ralph settled the issue, for all time, with his authoritative transliteration: MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ.)"

*cackles

"[...] in merciless bulbs ablaze, and heap upon music a variety of disguises, none of which could ever hope to equal or to obscure what she was in her immutable self. So many times Czgowchwz, or Czgowchwz to this or that root or power, was still Czgowchwz, as is the number one; and Czgowchwz over Czgowchwz, like Czgowchwz in an infinite hall of electric Czgowchwz mirrors, was but Czgowchwz."

"Do you really mean that?" she asked. I said of course I did. "Mama, you're contemptible!" she burst out. I began to suspect I'd enjoyed offending her, and had somewhat exaggerated my true feelings. "You think you're a model wife," she went on, with a cold, derisive smile. "Is that it?" Apparently she couldn't understand her father's motives, either.

FEBRUARY 18 Last night makes the fourth time that I have heard my wife call out Kimura's name. By now it's obvious that she is shamming. Why should she do such a thing? Perhaps she means to inform me that she is not really asleep-but how should I interpret that? Is it: "I want to think my partner is Kimura-san so that I can become really passionate. After all, it's to your benefit"? [...]

"long enough for them to count the instruments and compresses, [...] long enough for the team to break up, [..] to take off their O.R. clothes and get dressed again, to splash water on their faces and wash their hands, then leave the hospital to go catch the first metro, long enough for Alice to regain her colour and venture a smile while Harfang whispers in her ear, so, little Harfanguette, what do you think?"

Should have been home instead of out blinking back tears reading this passage...

"out of his pocket, puts them in Simon’s ears, turns on the MP3 player, track seven, and the last wave forms on the horizon [...] it uncovers fossils and tips over treasure chests, reveals invertebrates that deepen the thickness of time, hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old shelled ammonites and beer bottles, plane carcasses and handguns"

"he lists the symptoms of angina one by one – constrictive chest pain, sensation of being crushed across the span of the chest, of being squeezed in a vise, [...] but you don’t collapse; then he details the symptoms of cardiac arrest – heartbeat shoots up to more than three hundred beats per minute, a ventricular fibrillation that causes the breath to stop, which causes a blackout, all in less than a minute –"