“Now, if you sit perfectly silent for a long time and look at the sea, or the sky, or the running water of a river, something happens to you – a sort of magic. Not the violent magic that makes the kind of adventures that I have been telling you about, but a kind of gentle but very strong inside magic, that makes things clear, and shows you what things are important, and what are not.”
“Name one hero who was happy.”
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason’s children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus’ back.
“You can’t.” He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
“I can’t.”
“I know. They never let you be famous and happy.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you a secret.”
“Tell me.” I loved it when he was like this.
“I’m going to be the first.”
“I hope you’re having a good time, too. People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, Vivian—squander it.”
“It was days like this, she decided, looking down at the rain-swept street, black days with a black sky and a heaviness in the air, that revealed things about Jane Hoyt—that Jane Hoyt didn’t like. The specifications called for a Jane Hoyt who was more or less one-dimensional, alert, well-educated major in English literature, matter of fact, sense of humor, American society pigeonhole number sixteen, which was located a little below the junior league pigeonhole and a little above the shopgirl pigeonhole… There was no allowance in the pattern for healthy girls, regardless of pigeonhole, who still had a renegade ghost of savage underlying their well-groomed exterior.”
“She’d be top in whatever she did or die in the attempt.”
“‘Do you remember my father’s aviary in Hampshire?’ she said, ‘and how the birds there were well fed, and could fly about their cage? And one day I set a linnet free, and it flew straight out of my hands towards the sun?’
“‘What of it?’ he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
“‘Because I feel like that. Like the linnet before it flew…'”
“I wonder if, when I talk about Dove, people can hear how I love her the way that I can hear his fondness for Corr in his voice. It’s hard for me to imagine loving a monster, though, no matter how beautiful he is. I remember what the old man said in the butcher’s, about Sean Kendrick having one foot on land and one foot in the sea.”
“Often he talked to Mr. Singer. With him he spoke of chemistry and the enigma of the universe. Of the infinitesimal sperm and the cleavage of the ripened egg. Of the complex million-fold division of cells. Of the mystery of living matter and the simplicity of death. And also he spoke with him of race.”
“He turned from her to meet Miss Marlow, and his gloomiest forebodings were realized. She had neither beauty nor countenance, her complexion was poor and her figure worse, her dress was tasteless, and the colourless voice in which she murmured how-do-you-do confirmed him in his instant belief that she was insipid. He wondered how soon he would be able to bring his visit to an end.”
InkPaperDust 
Recent Comments