A Year in the Words of Others (iv)

August

These stalemates do not so much resolve themselves as dissipate like weather. Usually, someone tires of the impasse and through a set of diplomatic signals standardized through many years of a kind of cable traffic, back-channel mediation and treaty-making, yields or agrees to a cease-fire. Sometimes it is Edward who yields and sometimes it is Virginia, and Edward yields because he wants to be steady and wise, like Solomon, and Virginia because she wants to yield as Mary yielded, not in passivity but in affirmation of what is great and good. But essentially, harmony is restored because on balance, it is better to be together than apart, and that impulse–which may be a fair definition of married love–triumphs over anger and pain and injustice.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

I had no plans. All I wanted was to be there and do nothing, to live the life of a stone.
Paul Auster, "Book of Illusions"

No: I’d picked up all the options, held each one like a child holding a cheap and crappy toy for a few seconds until, realizing that it’s not going to spin, make music, or in any way enchant him, he puts it down again. So I was bored–by people, ideas, the world: everything.
Tom McCarthy, "Remainder"

Her face was eclipsed by the brim of a top hat (only a white sliver of chin and red mouth was visible) but I knew it was she, due to the oil and vinegar reaction her presence had with all backdrops, atmospheres and given conditions. The young, the old, the pretty and plain merged to composed some standard room of talking people, but Hannah was permanently separate and distinctive, as if there was always an unmistakable, thin black line drawn around her, or a YOU ARE HERE arrow discreetly floated in her wake reading, SHE IS HERE. Or perhaps, due to a certain relationship she had with incandescence, her face exerted a gravitational pull on 50 percent of all the light in the room.
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

He rather enjoyed conversing with this woman–not bantering, but just standing there with a faintly incredulous but amused expression, almost needling her, gently teasing her about her worldliness, her earnest immersion in human tragedy, and her own self. He sensed that she rather liked it too; that they were sharing a private joke, invisible to others, and that although it was a little at her expense, their amusement was more or less congruent; that it arose from knowing each other a very long time, although they had scarcely met.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

But under what curse did I labor? Nothing other than the inability to form happy relationships, the greatest misfortune known. Exiled from the shaded grove of love, I would be compelled to wander the earth till the day of my death, unable to shake off my compulsion to make those I loved flee from me.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

I did this because I wanted to be alone to think about Alex for a while. I didn’t want everybody coming at me–everybody telling me how they felt and asking how I feel and telling me what to do and distracting me from the very important task of remembering.
Beth Goldner, "The Number We End Up With"

Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.
Dean Koontz, "Life Expectancy"

Eve: Time changes everything.
House: That’s what people say. It’s not true. Doing things changes things. Not doing things leaves things exactly as they were.
House, "One Day, One Room"

The truth was I’d given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we had led shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.
Nicole Krauss, "The History of Love"

House: They’re out there, doctors, lawyers postal workers, some of them doing great, some of them doing lousy. Are you going to base your whole life on who you got stuck in a room with?
Eve: I’m going to base this moment on who I’m stuck in a room with. It’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms and who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are.
House, "One Day, One Room"

In her experience, hard knowledge, painful knowledge, was a gift. God’s way of pushing aside the distractions, the self-centeredness, leaving the right way clear, open, marked for travel.
Julia Spencer-Fleming, "In the Bleak Midwinter"

I am fiercely loyal, even to the wrong people. Even to my father. He is not dead to me. I never doubted that I would speak to him again. I knew I would. I was watching. I have a freakish level of patience when it comes to getting answers or collecting data. Liz calls this trait of mine Anjou’s Wall of Steel. Stella calls it denial. I prefer to call it patience. I once left twelve e-mails in my inbox, unread, for eight months when I had a falling out with my friend Joan, a friendship that died in a fiery crash over some perceived injustice on both our parts, whether real or not, each of us pointing the finger at the other. I ignored the e-mails, ultimately deleting them, unread.
Beth Goldner, "The Number We End Up With"

I was standing in the hallway. This was the only reason. In the years in which I will look back at this moment and trace back why it happened and how it happened like it did, I will think: I answered the door, not because it was my party, but because I was standing in the hall. I won’t be able to remember why I was standing in the hall. I just was. There are always points of collision–moments in which it is possible to say, yes, if I had done that differently or I had been standing slightly to the right or I had left the house two minutes earlier or if I hadn’t crossed the road just then my life would have taken a completely different course.
Maggie O’Farrell, "My Lover’s Lover"<br style="font-weight: bold;” />
She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact you’d only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

More, she had remembered who I was. That alone–which in other circumstances might not be calming in the least, since my name or Alatriste’s on the lips of the niece of Luis de Alquezar was more a promise of danger than cause for satisfaction–seemed to me completely adorable, making me happier than the gift of a new doublet and breeches of Castile woolen. Angelica remembered my name. And with it, a portion of the life that I was resolved to place at her feet, sacrificing it to her without so much as blinking. I felt, and I wonder if you will truly know what I mean, like a man run through with a dagger: that I would live as long as it was not pulled out, and that removing it would kill me.
Arturo Perez-Reverte, Purity of Blood

September

"Well," Jane said. "I suppose you need to be going." That was true enough, but Edward did not particularly want to stop. He enjoyed what they were doing, even as he was aware that it made him a little uneasy; that it refused to declare its destination or purpose, the category of relation into which it might be put and thence filed away. It was as if, whether he said goodbye and walked away or not, this conversation would continue; as if it could not be brought to a close with the handing over of a sample or a pen and pencil set or a handshake or even a kiss on the cheek. The truth was, they needed to find something to talk to each other about, a subject that might be brought to a conclusion, agreement, or stalemate, some content to give a beginning, a middle, and an end to their interaction. As it stood, it was pure form, pure process, and it might as well go on indefinitely.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

The camel became lighter and lighter as it walked through time. It kept shaking memories and photos off its back, scattering them over the desert floor and letting the wind bury them in the sand, and gradually the camel became so light that it could trot and even gallop in its own curious way–until one day, in a small oasis that called itself the present, the exhausted creature finally caught up with the rest of me.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

…A man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs to get or to take. He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone’s goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an ax to something, Manhattan. And when it came to looking at things, Dad was something of a Compound Microscope, one who viewed life through an adjustable eyepiece lens and thus expected all things to be in focus. He had no tolerance for The Murky, The Blurry, The Hazy, or The Soiled.
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

Marianne, I said, it’s nice to make ends meet, but it’s even nicer if you can tie a bow.
Philip Kerr, "Berlin Noir"

The past is history, the future is a mystery, and this moment is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.
Hex, "With A Little Help From My Friends"

So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

–but still, these small successes did not add up to greatness. No, I thought as I stood in the quadrangle, if I had come close to greatness in my life, it was in loving the woman who was my wife. I knew that few men of my acquaintance would have said that greatness could be had simply in loving another: it was too easy, too common, to uxorious, they would doubtless have argued. Indeed, I had seldom heard a man speak of love; it was understood to be a discourse reserved exclusively for women and poets. Yet I knew, as I stood there, that I had, in loving Etna, touched something extraordinary in myself. It was the one occupation that had engaged all of me: my senses, my intellect, and my emotions.
Anita Shreve, "All He Ever Wanted"

The pavilion in the square was glowing with Christmas lights and the shining windows of the last stores open, and for a moment he could have been back in 1962, when everything in his world was safe and understandable. Where businesses never closed and marriages were forever and no one ever died.
Julia Spencer-Fleming, "In the Bleak Midwinter"

"…I could see that she never had been less than what I’d figured her to be. If anything, she was always better than I remembered. And that’s what I think love is," Chris said quietly. "When your hindsight’s twenty-twenty and you still wouldn’t change a thing."
Jodi Picoult, "The Pact"

October

And then something just kind of changed in me. Over the next few days, I became all right, safe in my own skin. It happened just like that. One morning I woke up, and I really did want to live, really looked forward to greeting the day, imagined errands to run, phone calls to return, and it was not with a feeling of great dread, not with the sense that the first person who stepped on my toe as I walked through the square may well have driven me to suicide. It was as if the miasma of depression had lifted off me, gone smoothly about its business, in the same way that the fog in San Francisco rises as the day wears on. . . Just as I always said that I went down gradually and then suddenly, I also got up that way.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

It was ifthe whole summer–his whole life–had been imperceptibly narrowing down to this very moment, the slight widening of her eyes, the little catch in his breath, the sudden realization that they’d crossed a line so big and bright it was hard to believe he hadn’t seen it coming.
Tom Perrotta, "Little Children"

When our excavator, our clarifying biographer, comes for us–as we all certainly hope he will–when he chronicles our life and simplifies it enough for the dimmest reader to grasp and remember forever, how can we have helped him ahead of time? How can we help him know when to stop digging and start writing? Where is the centre of our life, the core of our character, with all extraneous detail eroded? Under one layer is another and another, under each silk veil more silk, under dust more dust, behind one door another and then a sepulchre and an outer sarcophagus and an inner and the cartonnage and the golden head mask and the linen wraps and then. . .a black skeleton in tight, crispy skin, intact but with no brain, liver, lungs, intestine, stomach. Is this the truth? Or did we, in our rush to get this "answer", pass right by the humble truth, knock it down, cover it with the dust of our hurried burrowing?
Arthur Phillips, "The Egyptologist"

When we fail to see the eccentricities in ourselves and to be amused by them, we become monsters of self-regard.
Dean Koontz, "Life Expectancy"

Maybe this is what life feels like for happy people, he thought, the obstacles falling down in front of you before you even get close enough to give them a push.
Tom Perrotta, "Little Children"

I am likely to miss the main event
If I stop to cry or complain again
So I will keep a deliberate pace
Let the damned breeze dry my face
Fiona Apple – Better Version of Me

Here it is 17 October, at 11.36 P.M. How I wish I had a device that allowed me to peer at you right now, a telescope of the most powerful kind. I would watch you ceaselessly, my love.
Arthur Phillips, "The Egyptologist"