A few selections from my life list of interesting passages:
"I also discovered that she considered herself a connoisseur of Modern Art. She blazed with anger at me when I said I doubted that the appreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had
any connection with its definition in a glossy catalogue as 'producing a virtually Oriental atmosphere of spaceless time and timeless space.' She accused me of trying to wreck her entire view of the world by maintaining--in a facetious vein, she hoped--that only a Philistine misled by solemn imbeciles paid to write about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescued from a garbage can and discussed in terms of 'warm splashes of color' and 'good-natured irony.' But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was her honestly believing that painters painted 'what they felt'; that a rather rough and rumpled landscape dashed off in Provence might be gratefully and proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained to them that the advancing thundercloud represented the artist's clash with his father, and the rolling grainfield the early death of his mother in a shipwreck."
--Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins, Pt. 4, Ch. 6"Howard remembered his hours alone playing in the woods when he was a boy; back then he was what Mr. Redfern, the human sciences master, had called an 'animist.' He saw a spirit in every tree, worshipped a local deity at every clearing, ascribed human associations to flowers--the four pure white petals of the bunchberry flower, worthy of a diplomatic sash, each petal mitered like a bishop's hat, the four composing a cross of Malta around the stigmas and anthers clustered at the center like tiny diamonds mounted at varying heights on slender stems."
--Edmund White, "Pyrography," Skinned Alive"Some people have fear but some have confidence instead. Which do you have? You're not confident, I know that. I know that, because actually no one has confidence. The most confident men and women you know--they haven't got confidence. No one has. Everyone has fear instead. (Unless they have that third thing, which men call madness.) They fear they are a secret which other people will one day discover. They fear they are a joke which other people will one day see, which other people will one day
get.
--Martin Amis, Other People, Ch. 10"'"By the time a novelist worth his salt is thirty-six, he's no longer translating experience into fable--he's imposing his fable onto experience."'"
--Philip Roth, Deception"It was not the first time in our mountaineering life that the weather had taken a malicious pleasure in smiling after threatenings. How many defeats have been due to these morning storms that have panicked us and made us retreat, and then dispersed like smoke in the middle of the day! Never is it so fine as when one has given up!"
--Raymond Lambert, "The Longest Day" (1952 Swiss Everest Expedition), from The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Everest, ed. Jon E. Lewis."'I lived in a world of my own imagination. When I grew older I began to notice the people around me. I saw that there were two kinds--the bright and the stupid--and I decided that I would choose the bright ones for my friends. Later on, I was disappointed in them. Clever people are not always kind. Sometimes they are quite cruel. And the stupid ones very often are kind.'"
--William Maxwell, The Chateau
