Posts Tagged ‘Memorable Lines’
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally, and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light—windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars—lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which—She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?
—from “Street Haunting”
Tags: Memorable Lines, Women and Writing
Posted in Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines, Women and Writing | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Photo: Jill Krementz
“I’m eight years old. My mother and I come out of our apartment onto the second-floor landing. Mrs. Drucker is standing in the open doorway of the apartment next door, smoking a cigarette. My mother locks the door and says to her, “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Drucker jerks her head backward toward her own apartment. “He wants to lay me. I told him he’s gotta take a shower before he can touch me.” I know that “he” is her husband. “He” is always the husband. “Why? He’s so dirty?” my mother says. “He feels dirty to me,” Mrs. Drucker says. “Drucker, you’re a whore,” my mother says. Mrs. Drucker shrugs her shoulder. “I can’t ride the subway,” she says. In the Bronx, “ride the subway” was a euphemism for going to work.
I lived in that tenement between the ages of six and twenty-one. There were twenty apartments, four to a floor, and all I remember is a building full of women. I hardly remember the men at all. They were everywhere, of course - husbands, fathers, brothers – but I remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs. Drucker or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as thought they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I – the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image – I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.”
- from Fierce Attachments
Vivian Gornick, critic, essayist, memoirist, feminist. Her latest book is The Men in My Life.
Her revelation that she had made up some of the conversations in Fierce Attachments created a stir on Salon. Her response is at NPR.
Tags: Memoir, Memorable Lines
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Drawing by Janani Sreenivasan, 2006
2000
I think essayists write for the sake of preservation; in order to find solutions to problems, in order to remain intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually awake amidst the full rumbling fury of the world. “An essay that becomes a lyric,” Plutarch once wrote, presumably about his own formally wayward work, “is an essay that has killed itself.” A prose line can stave off this death for as long as the seams of its syntax hold. And when they fail to hold, a run-on can seem less a sloppy piece of grammar than a desperate act to stay alive.
from The Next American Essay, John D’Agata
John D’Agata is the author of Halls of Fame, a collection of essays published by Graywolf Press in 2001, and the editor ofThe Next American Essay, an anthology of innovative modern American nonfiction. His forthcoming books include The Lifespan of a Fact, a meditation on the Yucca Mountain Project in southwest Nevada, and two historical companions to The Next American Essay. He has taught at Colgate University, Columbia, and the California Institute of the Arts and is the editor of lyric essays for Seneca Review.
Tags: Anthologies, Creative Nonfiction, Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Portrait by Vanessa Bell
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
From “On Being Ill,” by Virginia Woolf. First published by the Hogarth Press in 1930, now available in a facsimile edition from the Paris Press, with an introduction by Hermione Lee.
And here (thanks to Andris Taskans via Penn Kemp) is the only recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice:
Virginia Woolf on YouTube
Last but not least, some images of titles up for auction, should you have an extra $10,000 or so to spare. , Thanks to Nigel Beale for this.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines, Virginia Woolf
Posted in Covers, Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines, Women and Writing | 3 Comments »
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
“Good-bye,” Bingo’s parting smile seemed to say; “it’s not worth quarrelling now. You haven’t made much of a success of your time at Crossgates, have you? And I don’t suppose you’ll get on awfully well at a public school either. We made a mistake, really, in wasting our time and money on you. This kind of education hasn’t much to offer to a boy with your background and outlook. Oh, don’t think we don’t understand you! We know all about those ideas you have at the back of your head, we know you disbelieve in everything we’ve taught you, and we know you aren’t in the least grateful for all we’ve done for you. But there’s no use in bringing it all up now. We aren’t responsible for you any longer, and we shan’t be seeing you again. Let’s just admit that you’re one of our failures and part without ill feeling. And so, good-bye.”
That at least was what I read into her face. And yet how happy I was, that winter morning, as the train bore me away with the gleaming new silk tie round my neck! The world was opening before me, just a little, like a grey sky which exhibits a narrow crack of blue. A public school would be better fun than Crossgates but at bottom equally alien. In a world where the prime necessitities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good. All I had gained was breathing-space. A little quietude, a little self-indulgence, a little respite from cramming – and then, ruin. What kind of ruin I did not know: perhaps the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an early death. But first a year or two in which one could “slack off” and get the benefit of one’s sins, like Doctor Faustus. It is the advantage of being thirteen that you can not only live in the moment, but do so with full consciousness, foreseeing the future and yet not caring about it.
– George Orwell, from “Such, Such Were the Joys.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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