Pročitano

This blog is somewhere between a reading diary and a digital garden. I am collecting notes from books I've read over the years to try to make sense of it all...

[procitano]

"I’m thinking of Anne Sexton. Some time before she gassed herself in her own garage, wearing her mother’s fur coat with a tumbler of vodka in hand (it was a glorious October day and she’d just lunched with a friend and proof-read the galley sheets of her last book of poems, poems she sensed weren’t “good enough”), she wrote: “I could admit that I am only a coward crying me me me and not mention the little gnats, the moths, forced by circumstance to suck on the electric bulb.”"

Houdini Heart by Ki Longfellow

[procitano]

"If someone is in my room, they’re looking at my things. I have nothing to steal, but I have everything to hide."

Houdini Heart by Ki Longfellow

[procitano]

"Who are they to me and me to them?"

Houdini Heart by Ki Longfellow

[procitano]

"The river is the Connecticut and it is more beautiful in this place than any river I have ever seen. I’m not yet sure, but I think if I have to die by my own hand, I will die in its waters. Walking along the riverbank in the summer heat, I’ve come across a fish out of water, dead, dried out, its tail frayed and stiff. There are ants in its eye sockets. There are flies crawling on its pried up scales. There is a bee in its mouth. Staring at it, I realize that if I chose drowning, I will have to find a way to avoid being washed up, become something hideous by the edge of the river. Like Virginia Woolf throwing herself in the River Ouse at the bottom of her garden, I might put stones in my pockets to weigh myself down, very big stones. I don’t think I will be able to bear busy ants carrying me away, very tiny piece by very tiny piece, where someone could come by and watch them."

Houdini Heart by Ki Longfellow

[procitano]

"The boy was unattractive and creepy-looking; it made her feel unattractive and creepy just to be talking with him."

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

[procitano]

"The smoke clawing at my lungs was like a living thing."

Almost Transparent Blue by Ryu Murakami

[procitano]

"I told my imagination to fuck off."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"We don’t stay like this forever, nothing stays like this forever."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"(...)coincidence, or what the surrealists used to call ‘objective chance’(...)"

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"I am a banshee, but cannot get comfortable with being one, am always swinging from bansheeism to play-acting sweetness and back. I cannot play nice and don’t want to, but want to want to, some days."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"I saw a large bearded man at the savouries and before he’d even turned towards me I knew this was God himself. For a moment I was afraid to look upon his face. I’d known him by reputation long before we met and what I’d heard hadn’t led me to expect that we’d be friends. Full of himself, was the impression I’d formed. The kind of northern chancer who turns up at parties empty-handed and is drinking the best wine by the end of the night. His real name was Godfrey but he never answered to that. A big lad, with a beard he’d grown to go with the name and talk that he could handle himself in a fight. No one I knew was likely to handle themselves, in a fight."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"I’d taken to scanning the faces in whatever room or street I was passing through as though looking for someone I’d lost when in truth there was no one to lose(...)"

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"Please. I want to. It would be amazing. Like a sun in us. It tastes like, I can taste it burning."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"It’s inside the daylight. Making each other wet. It’s all the way in. In."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"You keep getting them to fall for you, then cutting a swathe."

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"She missed him, she realised. I am here, where are you?"

Sex and Death: Stories

[procitano]

"(...)she didn’t really want to be sharing these details, yet she was so consumed by them that she felt inauthentic in her friendships if she didn’t.

Sex and Death: Stories