Reif Larsen · 375 pages
Rating: (7.4K votes)
“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. ”
“I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.”
“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.”
“I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.”
“Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside of your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?”
“Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions.”
“Dr. Clair looked at Layton. The mancala pieces were still in her hand.
If Angela Ashforth ever says anything like that to you again, you tell her that just because she's insecure about being a little girl in a society that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on little girls to live up to certain physical, emotional and ideological standards -- many of which are improper, unhealthy and self-perpetuating -- doesn't mean she has to take her misplaced self-loathing out on a nice boy like you. You may be inherently a part of the problem but that doesn't mean you aren't a nice boy with nice manners and it certainly doesn't mean you have AIDS."
I'm not sure I can remember all that," Layton said.
Well then, tell Angela that her mother is a white trash drunk from Butte.”
“I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later. ”
“I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.”
“Did the true, umbilical love that bound people together for the length of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?”
“I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room.”
“Изведнъж се замислих как възрастните можеха да задържат чувствата си дълго след като събитието е отминало, много след като са изпратили писмо с извинения и всички останали са продължили нататък. Възрастните бяха събирачи на стари ненужни чувства.”
“What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.”
“The sun was crouched on its haunches over the Pioneers. The mountains were both purple and brown, the angle of light hitting the moiré of pine and fir and bleeding out a smoky mirage that made the valley seem to tremble. It was a sight. We both looked.”
“One cannot spend one's entire life running into bathrooms when danger calls!”
“A novel is a tricky thing to map.”
“A text is evolutionary by its very nature.”
“. . . the mountains sighed with the weight of the heavens on their backs.”
“Whenever I smelled the same perfume on other women, no matter where I was, I was instantly transported back to that feeling of discovery. The sensation of fingertips against old paper, whose surface was powdery and fragile, like the membrane of a moth’s wing.”
“Доктор Клер беше от майките, които ще те научат на Менделеевата таблица, докато тикат лъжица с каша в бебешката ти уста, но - в ерата на глобалния тероризъм и отвличания на деца - няма да попитат кой те търси по телефона.”
“Навън ме посрещна обичайната за миговете преди зазоряване кристална чистота, когато инерцията на живота все още не е завладяла деня. Въздухът не беше изпълнен с разговори, мисли, смях и намръщени погледи. Хората спяха и всичките им идеи, надежди и тайни помисли бяха омотани в света на сънищата, а този тук беше останал чист, свеж и хладен като бутилка мляко от хладилника.”
“Колко много снимки в целия свят запечатваха последвалия миг, не успявах да уловят онова, предизвикало фотографа да натисне копчето, а вместо това хващаха последвалите руини, смеха, реакцията, разплискалите се кръгове във водата.”
“Doodles were fertile ground; they were the visual evidence of heavy cognitive lifting. Although this was not always true: Ricky Lepardo was a doodler and he was not a heavy cognitive lifter.”
“I suppose he represented the worst of what rural life can do to a man: he was racist, uneducated, and badly in need of dental work.”
“Може би смисълът на четенето на романи се криеше именно в балансирането на насладата от бягството от реалността със съзнанието за измислица, но аз така и не успявах да поддържам едновременно реалното и фантазното. Може би просто трябваше да си възрастен, за да осъществиш този изумително сложен акт на едновременно вярване и невярване.”
“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
“Let's run away to Venice, and hide out in an old movie theater. We can dye our hair blonde, so no one will ever find us!”
“He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.”
“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.”
“I spiraled slowly down the steps, the soft way a milkweed seed sometimes twirls to earth. I wanted time for any vague thought to come to mind that mind should want. No new ones came, but the pace seemed a meditative winding, and what I was winding was like yarn on an oblong skein, softly enfolding a quiet center that was myself.”
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