Archive for

David Almond – Kit’s Wilderness

“Grandpa died in mid-January. The thaw was starting. Pools of water on the wilderness, snow turning to slush in the lanes, snowdrops peeking through in the gardens and beneath the hawthorne hedges. I was in school. Dobbs was going on about the movements of the earth again. He said that if you could move forward a million years, everything we saw before us would have changed: no Stoneygate, no flowing river, no wilderness, no us [. . .] ‘We are puny little things,’ he said. ‘The beast called time is our greatest predator, and there is no escape from it.’ He smiled again. ‘However. That is not to say there is no need to do our homework’.”

Jean-Dominique Bauby – The diving bell and the butterfly

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

In my book bag – July 14th

Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman

“BIFF: I don’t care what they think! They’ve laughed at Dad for years, and you know why? Because we don’t belong in this nut-house of a city! We should be mixing cement on some open plain, or- or carpenters. A carpenter is allowed to whistle!”

Kazuo Ishiguro – Never let me go

“If someone mentions the Cottages today, I think of easy-going days drifting in and out of each other’s rooms, the languid way the afternoon would fold into evening then into night. I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea. I think about how I read them, lying on my front in the grass on warm afternoons, my hair – which I was growing long then – always falling across my vision. I think about the mornings waking up in my room at the top of the Black Barn to the voices of students outside in the field, arguing about poetry or philosophy; or the long winters, the breakfasts in steamed-up kitchens, meandering discussions about Kafka or Picasso.”

Mary Austin – The land of little rain

“If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and cattlemen, will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing the land and going back to it.”

In my book bag – July 6th

J.D. Salinger – The catcher in the rye

“‘Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them- if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful, reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry’.”