Everything I Read

[everythingiread]

"The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats."

--The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler ("I'll Be Waiting")

[everythingiread]

"I was in two worlds at once, everything fine, everything unspeakable."

--"Safety," Joan Silber

[everythingiread]

"Grief hits me then, sudden and piercing, for I must have done something wrong, I must have fumbled this, and all that luxury of time, what once felt like endless swaths of hours during the awe-shot and screaming drudgery of babyhood, has somehow slipped away from me; all that time is gone, and where has it gone?"

--"Mother of Men," Lauren Groff

[everythingiread]

"'I would never have described anything as satisfying at that age. And she seemed to mean the satisfaction of a kind of physical need: while she was watching a flattened image on a screen, all those mouth sounds and little taps and crinkles provoked a low-level somatic response, scratched a kind of itch. It's like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it's made disappear. Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead?'"

--Transcription, Ben Lerner

[everythingiread]

"She was me, and I am she, and together we have come to a moment that never ends for either of us, and is never in the past, and our husband has just shot the wall next to our ear, and now our husband is pushing us in the chest, again, again--and we forget to have an opinion about it. Our minds go blank. Oh yes, my dears. I feel it still."

--Evil Genius, Claire Oshetsky

[everythingiread]

"I decided I liked Helen. A lot. I liked the way her personality was a mix of perspicacity and fantastical conspiratorial thinking. It is is a combo you don't often come across in daily life, and it resembled my own internal landscape to a T."

--Evil Genius, Claire Oshetsky

[everythingiread]

"Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and undersatnd your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after--lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again. Also you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can't explain that, not yet, but I'm putting my mind to it."

--Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich

[everythingiread]

"'The first thing you need to know about being a detective,' Constance explained when she was interviewing me to be her assistant, 'is that no one will ever like you again. You will turn over their stones and solve their crimes and reveal their secrets and they will hate you for it. If you're stupid enough to marry, your husband will never trust you. Your friends will never relax around you. Your family will shut you out. The police, of course, will loathe you. Your clients will never forgive you for telling them the truth. Everyone pretends they want their mysteries solved but no one does.' She leaned toward me. I smelled her violet perfume, her expensive face powder. 'No one except us.'

--Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Sara Gran

[everythingiread]

"Good choices, bad choices. It's like a game we play with ourselves. What is a game if not a shrunken world? To imagine it doesn't all fit in somebody's palm induces terror. It is too open, too cold and imprecise, one wishes to be enclosed. Who could ever hold that their only life is the result of so many impersonal choices, rippling round the river from the bottom to the start? Who could care so little? Verity kept raking his hand through his hair. A nice tremor in his hand. The goal is to say, twenty years later, That was a good choice. That was the right idea. But surely this is the wrong idea. Imagine witnessing a beautiful thing made in blindness and attributing its beauty to undisclosed sight?"

--Television, Lauren Rothery

[everythingiread]

In my darkest moments I suspected that if I never finished about Turner and Rachel nobody would miss them or even be aware that they did not miss them. In my more luminous moments I knew that if I did not etc. etc. nobody would etc. etc. but that the point of writing something was not to find a hole in the ground and fill it. The point was to carefully choose a place, dig a new hole there, and fill it so beautifully that a stranger passing by should think, Thank God for whoever filled that hole, it was certainly empty for a long, long time.

Television, Lauren Rothery

[everythingiread]

In Los Angeles, I thought frequently about how I would age in comparison to other women. When I watched a movie, if I was alone, I paused on close-ups of the actresses. I compared the lines around their eyes to mine and checked whether they had one, two, or zero commas around their mouths (I had one and a half). I looked up how old they were when the movie was released and subtracted a year to account for postproduction. Jeanne Moreau was thirty-three in Jules et Jim. Meryl Streep was twenty-nine in Manhattan. I looked at photos of them ten, twenty years later, tracking their progression into the future. It was ritualistic and solemn. What began as a vague energy quickly assumed the form of an impulse, which I allowed to happen. I craved dignity. The most obviously dignified people I knew had a quality of languor I admired. They didn't look like they were counting up your mouth commas. Of course, their languor may have been fear based. Sheep stand very still. Who really knows about the private lives of dignified people?

Television, Lauren Rothery

[everythingiread]

There is something dreamlike about the way that she makes a sandwich. As if she is really making something that isn't a sandwich at all; as if she's making something far more meaningful and mysterious. Or as if soon he will wake up and realize that there are no such things as sandwiches.

Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link ("Magic for Beginners")

[everythingiread]

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

[everythingiread]

She wished it was summer, so she could figure out what to do next. In the winter, her brain moved slow, trundling and rooting, wanting poundcake, sex, thick beers.

"Making It Last," Sam Dunnington

[everythingiread]

It's true my family does many things known as normal. The density and hue of their front lawn can give one the feeling that imperialism hasn't been so bad. My getting married had given them all the sense that I too might one day maintain such a lawn. It was all a huge misunderstanding, my being in this family.

Certain American States, Catherine Lacey ("Family Physics")

[everythingiread]

Everyone was talking about having less--picking up everything you owned and asking, Does this bring me joy? And if it didn't you had to get rid of it. Everyone was doing this, asking themselves about joy. It felt incredibly dangerous. I was afraid for the world.

Certain American States, Catherine Lacey ("Please Take")

[everythingiread]

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler