"But Munro is an entirely different case, and she may be a singular author in that category for me: the time spent not reading her is as essential to my understanding of her work as the time spent immersed in her words."
"They say a house comes into its own when the weather gets rough; a house under siege from water, wind, snow, ice, becomes a poetry, the very thing that confirms your place in this world, despite what the world throws at you."
"The armchairs were exhausted, worn out by life, and during the night they liked to stretch out their arms, legs, and backs, creaking and groaning." -- from 'Memories' by Teffi; trans. Robert Chandler & others #SundaySentence#books#memoirs#BookQuote@bookstodon
"I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you're standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning."
"A great many books are firmly closed despite the general impression that they’re wide open—they’ll jovially present their back cover as page one and be baffled that you thought there’d be more." -- from 'Parasol Against the Axe' by Helen Oyeyemi
"Leaving Lamb in his top-floor office, its soft light softened further by a veil of cigarette smoke, so that any observer of a sentimental nature might imagine him a grubby Santa, putting the grot into grotto." -- from Mick Herron's 'Standing By the Wall'
"Whatever their country of origin, all kites are born in the popular imagination, which is what gives them their slightly naive look; Ambrose Fleury's kites were no exception, even the final pieces he made in his old age bear that stamp of innocence and that freshness of soul." -- from Romain Gary's 'The Kites', tr. Miranda Richmond Mouillot
"There's a catfish under the islands of Japan. That's what shakes everything up: the catfish twisting and turning in the mud beneath us. It rolls and the ground trembles, water crashes, time cracks and breaks." -- from 'Catfish Rolling' by Clara Kumagal
"All the time I was in Kinbuckie there was a whistling east wind, a bursting grey sea, and exactly one half-hour’s blink of sunshine; and with such a climate and such whiskies, why everybody in Scotland doesn’t die of drink is a mystery to me." -- from J. Storer Clouston's story A Medical Crime in the British Library Crime Classics collection The Edinburgh Mystery edited by Martin Edwards
"... a highly refined error is likely to keep us permanently estranged from truth, and will do so all the more readily in proportion as we find it difficult to realise that it is an error. One who thinks of conveying to mankind truths masked and rouged, may be truth’s pimp, but has never been truth’s lover" (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, quoted by Rosa Luxemburg, 'Socialism or Barbarism,' p. 250. @bookstodon#SundaySentence
"It was the first time I had wielded my imagination as a weapon of defense, and nothing ever turned out to be more beneficial to me in this life." -- from 'The Kites' by Romain Gary; tr. by Miranda Richmond Mouillot
"She won't buy into every complaint either; people simply like to whine, they like to overstate the dimensions of the crosses they bear so as to be taken seriously, and she can tell in a second if they're telling the truth or merely following the logic that a person just needs to be frustrated and penniless to seem honest."
"He looks up to the high windows and the light, at the dust motes swimming aimlessly in the warm air above their heads, and imagines that each speck is an iota of faith leaving a person in the room." -- from 'Three Fires' by Denise Mina
"It was good to chat, as people had done before the world grew so dire, and all contact had the quality of risk, and all the concatenated sorrows of the world seemed to drain away the pleasure of conversation from young people."
#SundaySentence is again from Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
"... an image formed in Kit's mind of this huge smiling crowd that occupied all of Ontario, millions moving in unison, their eyes fixed on a brilliant future, children raised in those efficient government-built habitats ..."
#SundaySentence@bookstodon “Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.”
Fyodor #Dostoevsky, ‘The Idiot’ (Part IV, Chapter 3)
"Harris prefers poetry above all else, for how it sets like concrete in his mind, as opposed to the short-acting fireworks of the novel, long, agonizing yarns concerning people and families he'll never know."