“A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 390
“Love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the […]
Several chapters from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were instrumental in my undergraduate thesis, but I never got around to reading the whole book until now. This is a grand and fascinating journey through the history of ethics, fueled by MacIntyre’s argument for a modern renaissance of Aristotelian thought. He begins with this assertion: The language […]
“For the Vinny Costellos of the world, love is bullshit they murmur into your ear to get sex. For girls––me, anyway––sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book.” ––The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, pg. 70 “‘Power is lost or won, never created […]
“‘What if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or…’ Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bars sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, ‘Sleep tight don’t let the bedbugs […]
Any novel should be cut a little slack to adjust for the historical context in which it was written. Even knowing this, I failed utterly in my attempt to give Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a fair reading. Try as I might, I couldn’t dispense with my modern viewpoint enough to enjoy Kesey’s classic, […]
“You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.” ––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, pg. 212 “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. […]
“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.” ––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, pg. 117 “Practices must not be confused with institutions. Chess, physics and […]
“I still hear the sounds of the falls on the Columbia, always will––always––hear the whoop of Charley Bear Belly stabbed himself a big chinook, hear the slap of the fish in the water, laughing naked kids on the bank, the women at the racks…from a long time ago.” ––One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by […]
“There’s something strange about a place where men won’t let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs. And he thinks he’ll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new […]