Excerpts from Gilead
...
It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over.
...
There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.
...
You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
...
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity.
...
I got pretty good at pretending I understood more than I did, a skill which has served me through life.
...
It’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.
...
I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don’t know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings.
...
In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I’d think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark.
...
I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings.
...
The worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.
...
I have thought about that very often—how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.
...
In every important way we are such secrets from each other.
...
He said, “When I was young I thought a settled life was what happened to you if you weren’t careful.”
She said, “I always knew better than that. It was the one thing I wanted. I used to look in people’s windows at night and wonder what it was like.”
...
All that time he was looking at me as if to say, let’s just be honest with each other for five minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!