Fiction

From "Gilead" - Marilynne Robinson

“…I lay there against my father’s side with my head pillowed on his arm, hearing the wind, and feeling a pity that was far too deep to have any particular object. I pitied my mother, who might have to come looking for us and would never, never find us. I pitied the bats and the mice. I pitied the earth and the moon. I pitied the Lord.”

Marilynne Robinson, from Gilead

“As I have said, I think she experienced a good deal of sorrow in those years. I have never asked, but one thing I have learned in my life is what settled, habitual sadness looks like, and when I saw her I thought, Where have you come from, my dear child? She came in during the first prayer and sat in the last pew and looked up at me, and from that moment hers was the only face I saw. I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it’s fair to say that. There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say.”

Marilynne Robinson, from "Gilead"

Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon. My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”

From "The Cure" - John Cheever

“I took a train home, but I was too tired to go to Orpheo’s and then sit through a movie. I drove from the station to the house and put the car in the garage. From there I heard the telephone ringing, and I waited in the garden until the ringing had stopped. As soon as I stepped into the living room, I noticed on the wall some dirty handprints that had been made by the children before they went away. They were near the baseboard and I had to get down on my knees to kiss them.”

John Cheever, from "The Bus to St. James's"

“Lois Bruce, like a great many women in New York, spent a formidable amount of time shopping along Fifth Avenue. She read the advertisements in the newspapers more intently than her husband read the financial section. Shopping was her principal occupation. She would get up from a sickbed to go shopping. The atmosphere of the department stores had a restorative effect on her disposition. She would begin her afternoon at Altman’s—buy a pair of gloves on the first floor, and then travel up on the escalator and look at andirons. She would buy a purse and some face cream at Lord & Taylor’s, and price coffee tables, upholstery fabrics, and cocktail glasses. “Down?” she would ask the elevator operator when the doors rolled open, and if the operator said “Up,” Lois would board the car anyhow, deciding suddenly that whatever it was that she wanted might be in the furniture or the linen department. She would buy a pair of shoes and a slip at Saks, send her mother some napkins from Mosse’s, buy a bunch of cloth flowers at De Pinna’s, some hand lotion at Bonwit’s, and a dress at Bendel’s. By then, her feet and her head would be pleasantly tired, the porter at Tiffany’s would be taking in the flag, the lamps on the carriages by the Plaza would be lighted. She would buy a cake at Dean’s, her last stop, and walk home through the early dark like an honest workman, contented and weary.”

On Madame Psychosis, From "Infinite Jest" - David Foster Wallace

“She’s mostly alone in there when she’s on-air. Every so often there’s a guest, but the guest will usually get introduced and then not say anything. The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares. There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/Bunuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and apres-garde digital cartridges, anticonfluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc. Also highly literate on U.S. sports, football in particular, which fact the student engineer finds dissonant. Madame takes one phone call per show, at random. Mostly she solos. The show kind of flies itself. She could do it in her sleep, behind the screen. Sometimes she seems very sad.”

Marguerite Yourcenar, from "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage.” 

Marguerite Yourcenar, from "Memoirs of Hadrian"

“That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry.”

Herman Hesse, from "Steppenwolf"

“…As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic and earnest endeavor to love them, to be just to them, to do them no harm, for the love of his neighbour was as strongly forced upon him as the hatred of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

From "The Return of Faraz Ali" - Aamina Ahmad

“He walked out into the garden, which was small but well tended. There were new trees, and the lawn was lush and green. Swept up in the celebration of his return, he’d forgotten how foul, how filthy he was from the travel, the camp. He felt it now. He took off his shoes. In the camp, he had spent a long time wondering what he would do when he got home. What is the first thing, the men liked to ask one another. Food, sex. And it was true, in prison you recognized the appetites you were denied; you longed for those things above all because after a time you got used to not having them, your longing declining, and in that decline you recognized you were not the man you were before. You feared you would never be that man again. What had he thought of? The same, yes, of course, but also this: the outline of the trees in the evening, the cool grass against his feet, an open door, and walking through it and back in again as he pleased.”

From Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"

Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at ‘em very often. We all know that something is eternal. Arid it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ...

Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.

You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth ... and the ambitions they had ... and the pleasures they had ... and the things they suffered ... and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it…weaned away.”

- Narrator’s monologue from Act III of “Our Town”, by Thornton Wilder