“The facade of a grand building rises gracefully, pilastered and crenelated. Stately wings soar on either side, somehow both heavy and light. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing […]
“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” ––All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, pg. 328 “The rise of a popular press and […]
“‘Sublimity,’ Hauptmann says, panting, ‘you know what that is Pfennig?’ He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. ‘It’s the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man.’” ––All the Light We Cannot […]
“A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons and driven to the surface in a volcanic pipe. Someone facets it, someone polishes it. It can harbor a curse no more than a leaf can, or a mirror, or a life. There is […]
“Dr. Geffard teaches her the names of shells––Lambis lambis, Cypraea moneta, Lophiotoma actua––and lets her feel the spines and apertures and whorls of each in turn. He explains the branches of marine evolution and the sequences of the geologic periods; on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of […]
“One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light. The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it […]
“Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene––the homecoming to the mariner’s roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones––a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 544
“I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 486 “‘When I talk about a political revolution, what I am referring to is the need […]
“BLOOM: (In workman’s corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say, he […]
“Sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 387 “The fight for a national health care system today is not basically different than the struggle for universal public education that took place in this […]