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Garlands of stars were falling from the black sky above the palm tree and the houses. She ran along the short avenue, now empty, that led the fort. The cold, no longer needing to struggle against the sun, had invaded the night; the icy air burned her lungs. But she ran, half blind, in the darkness. [...] Running had not warmed her, she was still trembling all over. But the cold air she swalloed in gulps soon flowed steadily inside her, and a spark of warmth began to glow amidst her shivers. Her eyes opened at last on the spaces of the night.
pretty passage
[...] they, were not sulking, that they had shut their mouths, it was take it or leave it, and that anger and impotence sometimes caused such pain you couldn't even cry out. They were men, that's all, and they were not about to go around smiling and simpering.
[...] She was well nigh a secular saint who saw no malice in making a gift of herself to suffering humanity. But her husband insisted on being master of his wife's virtues. 'I've had enough,' this Othello said, 'of being cuckolded by the poor.'
kinda funny
I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn't go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane's homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well-orchestrated it seemed quasi-official, like the "Support Our Troops" ribbons that had shown up on half the country's cars overnight. But it seemed to me that helping Katrina's homeless victims ought to be the government's job, not mine. I'd always voted for candidates who wanted to raise my taxes, because I thought paying taxes was patriotic and because my idea of how to be left alone--my libertarian ideal!--was a well-funded, well-managed central government that spared me from having to make a hundred different spending decisions every week. Like, was Katrina as bad as the Pakistan earthquake? As bad as breast cancer? As bad as AIDS in Africa? Not as bad? How much less bad? I wanted my government to figure these things out.
good perspective
For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and re-boarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren't going to waste. I stared at the merry-go-round's chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they'd tried to give me. My mother, ever the dutiful traveler, took pictures of my father and me on our uncomfortably small horses, but beneath her forcible cheer she was angry at me, because she knew she was the one I was getting even with, because of our fight about clothes. My father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse-impaling metal pole, gazed into the distance with a look of resignation that summarized his life. I don't see how either of them bore it. I'd been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously comformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn't want the things they wanted. I didn't value what they valued. And were were all equally sorry to be riding the merry-go-round, and we were all equally at a loss to explain what had happened to us.
while at Disney World with his parents and feeling embarrassed to be seen with them (and in his mother-chosen clothes) as well as alienated from all the other teens. so sad
[...] The script, which I'd written, had a large number of bit parts and one very generous role that I'd created with my own memorization abilities in mind. The action took place on a boat, involved a taciturn villain named Mr. Scuba, and lacked the most rudimentary comedy, point, or moral. Not even I, who got to do most of the talking, enjoyed being in it. [...]
funny cus it reminds me of the motivations behind my own one-act play
[...] If you took away Christ's divinity, you were left with "Kum Ba Ya." You were left with "Let's hold hands and be nice to each other. Jesus' authority as a teacher--and whatever authority Mutton and company had as followers of his teachings--rested on his having had the balls to say, "I am the fulfillment of the prophecies, I am the Jews' gift to mankind, I am the son of Man," and to let Himself be nailed to a cross to back it up. If you couldn't take that step in your own mind, if you couldn't refer to the Bible and celebrate communion, how could you call yourself a Christian?
"That bee that hovers so close to the open window but never actually goes outside but instead just rests behind the curtain buzzing." (Shafik Mandhai on Twitter)
Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is a leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crushed or exalted, even when you're absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you're aware that what's happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You're miserable and ashamed if you don't believe your adolescent troubles matter, but if you're stupid if you do. [...]
"But Kafka's about your life!" Avery said. "Not to take anything away from your admiration of Rilke, but I'll tell you right now, Kafka's a lot more about your life than Rilke is. Kafka was like us. All of these writers, they were human beings trying to make sense of their lives. But Kafka above all! Kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. And he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out. That's what this book is about. That's what all of these books are about. Actual living human beings trying to make sense of death and the modern world and the mess of their lives."
in German class, in a discussion with the prof; Franzen is saying that he doesn't see Kafka's relevance to his life
[...] It was this other side of Avery--the fact that he so visibly had an other side--that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crurically, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.
on seeing his college prof as a real, raw, unfiltered, imperfect human being