Lit Quote Book

Quotes from things I'm reading.

[ymutate]

Toyen, Objekt-fantom, 1937

[mesportraitsfavoris]

Frances McDormand by Annie Leibovitz

[litquotebook]

"No matter. The place where you're going now is a model prison; it has a library stocked with all the latest books." "What about the banned books?" "Where should banned books be found if not in prison?" —If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

If an infidel were allowed to excogitate variants on the legends of the Prophet, I would venture thi sone: Abdullah loses his faith because in writing under dictation he makes a mistake and Mohammed, though he notices it, decides not to correct it, finding the mistaken form preferable. In this case, too, Abdullah would be wrong to be scandalized. It is on the page, not before, that the word, even that of the prophetic raptus, becomes definitive, that is to say, becomes writing. It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible, that is, through the uncertainties of spelling, the occasional lapses, oversights, unchecked leaps of the word and the pen. Otherwise what is outside of us should not insist on communicating through the word, spoken or written: let it send its messages by other paths.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

When you think about it, this total writer could be a very humble person, what in America they call a ghost writer, a professional of recognized usefulness even if not of great prestige: the anonymous editor who gives book form to what other people have to tell but are unable or lack the time to write; he is the writing hand that gives words to existences too busy existing.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

The copyist lived simultaneously in two temporal dimensions, that of reading and that of writing; he could write without the anguish of having the void open before his pen; read without the anguish of having his own act become concrete in some material object.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

...how many times, when the past weighed too heavily on me, had I been seized by that hope of a clean break; to change jobs, wife, city, continent—one continent after the other, until I had made the whole circle—habits, friends, business, customers. It was a mistake, but when I realized that, it was too late.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else. I know that if I cross that boundary, even as an exception, by chance, I risk being mixed up in this advancing tide; that's why I refuse to set food inside a publishing house, even for a few minutes.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

...with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things.

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino

[litquotebook]

White writers, she has pointed out, tend to include black characters in science fiction only to illustrate a problem or as a signpost to advertise the author's distaste for racism; black people in most science fiction are represented as "other." All her fiction stands in quiet resistance to the notion that a black character in a science fiction novel is there _for a reason_. In a Butler novel the black protagonist is there, like the mountain, because she is there.

Robert Crossley, in his introduction to Octavia Butler's Kindred

[litquotebook]

Science fiction has long treated people who might or might not exist--extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.

Octavia Butler, quoted in Robert Crossley's introduction to Kindred

[litquotebook]

Like all good works of fiction, it lies like the truth.

Robert Crossley, in his introduction to Kindred by Octavia Butler

[litquotebook]

The mistake Sethe makes in thinking that Mr. Bodwin, who has done her no harm, is schoolteacher is a carefully cultivated one, the ground well laid. It is also an insightful mistake. As George Lipsitz nicely puts it, "People who appear to be 'mistaken' about another ... sometimes really know things that can not be represented easily because their knowledge is illegitimate by existing standards and paradigms" (1994: 162). At this moment, almost twenty years after the Proclamation, Sethe knows through the powerful mediation of haunting that as a proclaimed fact abolition is not emancipation. She knows that the precarious difference between the kind man and the owning man is secured, always uncertainly, by the sympathetic heart of the liberal abolitionist's morality, its limitations registered by the arbitrariness, the accidental nature of its kindness. She knows that Emancipation was not about whites saving blacks and she knows that real freedom, real emancipation (that which would give the formal Proclamation a genuine meaning) cannot be warranted or secured on the undependable ground of a saving kindness.

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon

[litquotebook]

"The Story of a Hat," which occurred "during the time of the Margaret Garner trial," immediately follows Coffin's description of Margaret Garner and goes on for seven pages. A trivial story, really. In response to the demand by a Kentucky marshal to remove his hat in court, Levi Coffin, as would be his habit as a Quaker, refused. Twice. During Margaret Garner's trial, "the story of my adventure with the marshal, respecting my hat, soon became extensively known. The accounts given of it in the Cincinnati papers were copied by other papers in various parts of the country ... For several days I could not walk the streets without being accosted by some one who would assert that I had whipped the marshal" (C 674). Margaret Garner, wearing one and maybe two scars on her face from a striking (a whipping?) had been pursued by her owners from Kentucky, who crossed the same river she did to claim their property in the name of the Fugitive Slave Act. She "could not walk the streets without being accosted by some one who would assert" that she belonged elsewhere. She was about to be sent back to Kentucky, and then sold, and Levi Coffin goes on for seven pages, full of pride, that he refused a Kentucky marshal's order to remove his hat.

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon

[litquotebook]

Although Coffin has no desire to appear before the public as an overstating author, he authorizes his story with a reputation and a genealogy: the history of his patronymic and his family beginning in 1066. "In...1066 Sir Richard Coffin, knight, accompanied William the Conqueror from Normandy to England, and the manor of Alwington, in the county of Devonshire, was assigned to him" (C 3). Margaret Garner's story is prefaced by his reputation ... an unsmiling image, the history of his father's name, and an acknowledgment of inheritance--his antislavery principles: "Both my parents and grandparents were opposed to slavery, and none of either of the families ever owned slaves; and all were friends of the oppressed, so I claim that I inherited my anti-slavery principles" (C 11). A valuable bequest, this patrimony. Yet Coffin does not notice that it is precisely his genealogy, a lineage of conques and property ownership, that gifts him the possibility of a reputation--to act in behalf of the ones whose lives need rectification and who seemingly cannot act on their own.

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon