TOP TEN TUESDAY
[a weekly meme hosted by thatartsyreadergirl]
Favourite Book Quotes
Art and Lies, Jeanette Winterson
There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself.
under the cut, quotes from -
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism by Sigrid Schmalzer Light to Land On by Dionne Brand Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury China in 10 Words by Yu Hua The Children’s Book by AS Byatt On Seeing England for the First Time, Jamaica Kincaid Long Division by Kiese Laymon On The Concept of History by Walter Benjamin
The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt
14 December, 1992
97 days to my birthday.
One interesting thing that happened today is that we took the Tube one way and then we took it the other way and a lady got into an argument with Sibylla. Sibylla said let’s take the example of two men about to be burned at the stake, A dies at time t of heart failure while B burns to death at time t + n, I think we can all agree that B’s life would be better if it were n minutes shorter. The lady said she thought it was rather different and Sibylla said she thought it was exactly the same and the lady said there was no need to shout. Sibylla said she wasn’t shouting she just thought it was barbaric to force people to die at time t + n and she said barbaric so loud that everyone in the train looked around!
Barbaric comes from the Greek word βρβαρος which means a non-Greek but in English it means something completely different.
Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism, Sigrid Schmalzer
A former Red Guard relates, “I believe many little girls and boys of my generation dreamed of being a geological prospector… Propaganda for recruiting young people to work in this area was very effective. When my neighbor’s daughter was accepted by the geology department of a prestigious university, we all envied her for her future prospects of an adventurous life.”
Land to Light On, Dionne Brand
One gleeful headline drives me to the floor, kneeling, and all paint turns to gazette paper and all memory collides into photographs we could not say happened, that is us, that's what we did. When you lose you become ancient but this time no one will rake over these bodies gently collecting their valuables, their pots, their hearts and intestines, their papers and what they could bury. This civilisation will be dug up to burn all its manifestos. No tender archaeologist will mend our furious writings concluding, "They wanted sweat to taste sweet, that is all, some of them played music for nothing, some of them wrote poems to tractors, rough hands, and rough roads, some sang for no reason at all to judge by their condition.
Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury
I cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, “No! It’s not for eating, it’s Palestine.” I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the sitting room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the mouldy fruit, you yelled, “What’s that smell?” And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger. “You should have eaten the oranges,” you told me. “But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland.” “Umm Hassan’s senile,” you answered. “You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to eat, not let it eat us. We have to eat the oranges of Palestine, and we have to eat Palestine and Galilee.” It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with that bunch of decay. “What are you going to do?” you asked. “Bury it,” I said. “Why bury it?” you asked. “I’m not going to throw it away, because it’s from the homeland.” You took the branch and threw it in the rubbish. “What a scandal!” you said. “What are these old women’s superstitions? Before hanging the homeland up on the wall, it’d be better to knock down the wall and leave. We have to eat every orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn’t oranges. The homeland is us.”
China in 10 Words, Yu Hua
China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a huge wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.
On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another -- and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone's arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shot to children from the ages of three through six, it was a difference story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles would snag bigger shreds of flesh than they had from the workers, and the children's wounds bled more profusely. I still remember how the children were all sobbing uncontrollably; the ones who had yet to be inoculated were crying even louder than those who had already had their shots. The pain the children saw others suffering, it seemed to me, affected them even more intensely than the pain they themselves experienced, because it made their fear all the more acute.
That scene left me shocked and shaken. When I got back to the hospital, I did not clean the instruments right away. Instead, I got hold of a grindstone and ground all the needles until they were completely straight and the points were sharp. But these old needles were so prone to metal fatigue that after two or three more uses they would acquire barbs again, so grinding the needles became a regular part of my routine, and the more I sharpened, the shorter they got. That summer it was always dark by the time I left the hospital, with fingers blistered by my labors at the grindstone.
Later, whenever I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I'd had to see the children's reaction to realize how much the factory workers must have suffered. If, before I had given shots to others, I had pricked my own arm with a barbed needle and pulled out a blood-stained shred of my own flesh, then I would have known how painful it was long before I heard the children's wails.
This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China's pain, I am registering my pain too, because China's pain is mine.
The Children's Book, AS Byatt
Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent. When Olive Wellwood found her mind heading in that direction, she was able to move imaginary points on an imaginary rail and shunt her mind away from “there” and back to Todefright, with its penumbra of wild woods and flying elementals.
…
She remembered the tale she had told to herself of the young woman carrying the packet containing the deaths of Pete and Petey, the young woman walking endlessly in grim weather across the moors, with the unopened packet. There was no room in that packet, for this.
She thought of the forest of coeval boys, all eternally present, crowding her room, and the old Olive thought idly, this is a story, there is a story in this.
And then she saw that there was not. There would be no more stories, she thought, dramatically, uncertain whether this too was a story, or a full stop.
On Seeing England for the First Time, Jamaica Kincaid
The moment I wished every sentence, everything I knew, that began with England would end with “and then it all died, we don’t know how, it just all died” was when I saw the white cliffs of Dover. I had sung hymns and recited poems that were about a longing to see the white cliffs of Dover again. At the time I sang the hymns and recited the poems, I could really long to see them again because I had never seen them at all, nor had anyone around me at the time. But there we were, groups of people longing for something we had never seen. And so there they were, the white cliffs, but they were not that pearly majestic thing I used to sing about, that thing that created such a feeling in these people that when they died in the place where I lived they had themselves buried facing a direction that would allow them to see the white cliffs of Dover when they were resurrected, as surely they would be. The white cliffs of Dover, when finally I saw them, were cliffs, but they were not white; you would only call them that if the word “white” meant something special to you; they were dirty and they were steep; they were so steep, the correct height from which all my views of England, starting with the map before me in my classroom and ending with the trip I had just taken, should jump and die and disappear forever.
Long Division, Kiese Laymon
The last time Shalaya Crump and I really talked, she told me, "City, I could love you if you helped me change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.”
[and then later]
“I don’t know if we somehow got stuck in a dumb book or movie. Right now, I feel like we supposed to say, ‘Golly, let’s go save the grandfathers we never knew.’ But like you always say, life ain’t no book. This is real life. In real life, do we really need our granddaddies?”
On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
