The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

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Quotes of the Day!

The following quotes are from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. (The last book club book.)

 

And you can tell from the way she’s moving: she is heading towards. Maman just went by in the direction of the front door, she’s going out shopping and in fact she already is outside, her movement anticipating itself. I don’t really know how to explain it, but when we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement towards something: we are both here and at the same time not here because we’re already in the process of going somewhere else, if you see what I mean.

 

(Let me say, before this quote, that the book club is all female except for myself … But I still like this quote.)

Let me explain: if, thus far, you have imagined that the ugliness of ageing and conciergely widowhood have made a pitiful wretch of me, resigned to the lowliness of her fate – then you are truly lacking in imagination. I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept. I may be indigent in name, position and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess.

 

Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

 

True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time.

 

They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.

 

And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that’s like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it’s a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood …

 

Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where – even though tomorrow we will die – we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now?

 

For art is emotion without desire.

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Quotes of the Day!

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Quotes of the Day!

Today’s quotes are from The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. It’s one of the best known crime novels, and the reason I picked it up was because it inspired a classic film noir. Who can resist that?

With that in mind, I picked quotes from the book that I thought go well with the film noir type.

 

‘As the fellow said when he fell out of the airplane, it was a swell ride but we lit kind of hard.’

 

He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake, and a kind of a lump came up in my throat. It was like the sweet chariot had swung low and was going to pick me up.

 

‘Oh yes. I fell for you because you were smart. And now I find out you’re smart. Ain’t that funny? You fall for a guy because he’s smart and then you find out he’s smart.’

 

‘So God kissed us on the brow, did he? Then the devil went to bed with us, and believe you me, kid, he sleeps pretty good.’

 

‘Because maybe it’s a stall, what he says about her, and maybe it’s not, see? But if I’m here, neither one of them can skip, you get it?’

 

***

Too much fun! How can you read that last quote and not do it in your best noir voice? Here, a movie clip for you.

 

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Quotes of the Day!

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Quotes of the Day!

All of these quotes come from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

 

evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.

 

and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don’t mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.

 

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations … I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.

 

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

 

I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a coupe of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water.
These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, ‘I guess so.’

 

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

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