Showing posts with label Knopf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knopf. Show all posts


"How sweet it was when one could undo the lethargy of time by chatting with someone about the little things. You could always find a person to converse with over the larger matters—a government scandal, the delayed monsoon—but it was the tiny concerns, the moment's observations, that you couldn't save up to tell, for you didn't even recognize their full potential to add meaning to life unless you articulated their humour, tragedy, menace or charm." 

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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

 

"When you want something for a long time, it's very difficult to stop wanting it, I mean, to admit or realize that you no longer desire it or that you would prefer something else. Waiting feeds and fosters that desire, waiting is accumulative as regards the thing awaited, it solidifies desire and turns it to stone and then to resist acknowledging that we have wasted years expecting a signal, which, when it finally comes, no longer tempts us, or else we simply can't be bothered to answer a belated call that we no longer trust, perhaps because it doesn't now suit us to move. One grows accustomed to waiting for an opportunity that never comes, feeling deep down rather calm and safe and passive, unable quite to believe that it never will present itself."

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The Infatuations by Javier Marías

 

"If I had created Patrick Bateman I would now write a story in which he was uncreated and his world was erased."

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Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

 

"When you fall in love young, you imagine that the object of your desire is both finite and infinite, a magical and unfathomable creature who you will also be able to know completely. I wanted to crack Alice open like a geode, to expose all her crystals, her stars. It was hard to accept that she had anything in her life that didn't concern me; it made no difference that I was hiding parts of my life from her."

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Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

 

"It was like desire/entering and possessing you quietly."

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A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann

 

"It seems that there exists a curiously unexplained belief that the conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation -- and that to suggest otherwise is condescending and superior, like mansplaining. But what if the conditions don't generate the solution? What if we're waiting for nothing, and all these people are suffering without the tools to end their own suffering...in my defence I'm very tired and I don't have any good ideas. Really my problem is that I'm annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none."

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Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney


"Scientists are still working to sort out the remarkable details of the magnetic sense of birds. There is evidence that songbirds have two different systems for detecting the orientation of the magnetic field as well as the slope of the field (which varies with latitude from horizontal at the equator to vertical at the poles). They can also detect polarized light, which gives valuable clues to the position of the sun even when the sun itself is not visible."
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What It's Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley

 

"'I realized that in real life, no matter what' --she shook her head--'people get up in the morning and wash their faces and make themselves breakfast. They tell jokes and they read to their kids and they go on dates and they fall in love and they fuck and they have to wash the dishes and deal with the electric company. What I'm trying to say is, after I left--I mean it was hard, mostly because I didn't know how to talk about it, how to explain what I'd done, what I felt, what I didn't feel. But every morning I got up and I washed my face and I brushed my teeth and I ate my cereal and I went to the office. I went shopping and to the movies, and out to dinner. I dropped clothes off at the drycleaner. On a certain level, it's grotesque.'" 

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Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

"A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, 'Are you sure you're my mother? Sometimes you don't seem like a good enough person.' He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don't know, once or twice a day."

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Weather by Jenny Offill

"I come back to C.S. Lewis's advice: Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

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Chemistry by Weike Wang

"Hunt the Infrathin...[Marcel Duchamp] introduced a new term that seemed important to his work...The term was infrathin. Here's one example...the warmth of a seat that has just been vacated by someone else...'a state between states'...It seems to name something that defies naming, artifacts of our perception that fall outside our usual categories of perception."
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The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker

"When I discover a different way to express something, I feel a kind of ecstasy. Unknown words present a dizzying yet fertile abyss. An abyss containing everything that escapes me, everything possible."

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In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri


"A book this sad shouldn't be so much fun to read. But contradictions are what you might expect from an author whose first novel was called Last Things. Fifteen years later, this is her second, and it was worth the wait. Dept. of Speculation is a riposte to the notion that domestic fiction is humdrum and unambitious. From the point of view of an unnamed American woman, it gives us the hurrahs and boos of daily life, of marriage and of parenthood, with exceptional originality, intensity and sweetness."


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Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

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