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Cabeza de Vaca – Adventures in the unknown interior of America

“We had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we could, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.” (Translated by Cyclone Covey).

Penelope Lively – Moon tiger

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we know not. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.”

Sloan Wilson – The man in the gray flannel suit

“‘I’ve been through one war. Maybe another one’s coming. If one is, I want to be able to look back and figure I spent the time between wars with my family, the way it should have been spent. Regardless of war, I want to get the most out of the years I’ve got left. Maybe that sounds silly. It’s just that if I have to bury myself in a job every minute of my life, I don’t see any point to it’.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez – The ghosts of August

“But on the top floor we saw a room, preserved intact, that time had forgotten to visit – the bedchamber of Ludovico. The moment was magical. There stood the bed, its curtains embroidered in gold thread, the bedspread and its prodigies of passementerie still stiff with the dried blood of his sacrificed lover. There was the fireplace with its icy ashes and its last log turned to stone, the armoire with its weapons primed, and, in a gold frame, the oil portrait of the pensive knight, painted by some Florentine master who did not have the good fortune to survive his time. What affected me most, however, was the unexplainable scent of fresh strawberries that hung over the entire bedroom.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald – Bernice bobs her hair

“There, for example, were Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest, who had been privately engaged for three years. Everyone knew that as soon as Jim managed to hold a job for two months she would marry him. Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.”

In my book bag – June 18th

Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The yellow wallpaper

“I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.”

David Almond – Skellig

“I looked up at her silvery face, her ink-black eyes. I knew that in a dream I would see her as the moon with Skellig flying silently across her.”

In my book bag – June 14th

Jay McInerney – The Queen and I

“A refugee from the western suburbs, I used to skip school and take the bus into the city. I hung out on St Mark’s Place and the Bowery, copping the look and attitude of punk, discovering Bukowski and the Beats in the book shops. Returning to the subdivision of Jersey was an embarrassment. The soil was too thin for art. No poetry could ever grow in the grapefruit rinds of the compost heap.”