everythingiread - Tumblr blog

[everythingiread]

The feeling of walking down grassy Willesden Lane, early in the morning, plucking wildflowers out of the hedgerows and trying to appreciate them. The happiness of knowing she would soon turn round and walk back to a house of steamed rags and strung-up rabbits, drying linens and chubby baby ankles, small hands with food on them, the smell of bacon, fruit cakes wrapped in cloth, the swampy whiff of pea soup, and the simplest chords of Bach played clumsily but with good humour. All of this warm human sacred business she had almost forgotten existed.

The Fraud, Zadie Smith

[everythingiread]

Now she was thirty-one. The pain had not gone though it had settled: it was the foundations of the house of herself.

The Fraud, Zadie Smith

[everythingiread]

She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! alas! she must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.

Persuasion, Jane Austen

[everythingiread]

There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

[everythingiread]

'All writers are punks and I am one of the punkest.'

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

[everythingiread]

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. The customer was middle-aged, handsomely dressed, and drunk. He wanted to talk and he couldn't have stopped even if he hadn't really wanted to talk. He was polite and friendly and when I heard him he didn't seem to slur his words much, but you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

[everythingiread]

Worry is a straitjacket, and so is love.

"Do You Love Me?", Hila Blum

[everythingiread]

In those days, we read a lot, whatever was around, which was mostly our mother's old paperbacks, whose browned paper crumbled when we turned the pages. We read to get ahead, but not in the way that is meant now when people tell children they ought to read; we read simply to get out of childhood. To read was to arrive at the future more quickly, it was to bypass years, to satisfy a desire for experiences that we were still too young to have, and along the way we learned all sorts of things, both useful and useless.

"Long Island," Nicole Krauss

[everythingiread]

When the Internet came back at the first stop in Manhattan, I Googled the lanternflies the radio had told us all to kill on sight and read: 'The tree of heaven is a preferred host.' When everything is poetry I know I am unwell.

"The Ferry," Ben Lerner

[everythingiread]

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

Emma, Jane Austen

[everythingiread]

Not all things, Rosalie thought, can be swishily wiped away. Mothers rarely murder their own children. More often they are vandals, writing out messages in ink both visible and invisible, which can never be entirely erased.

"Wednesday's Child," Yiyun Li

[everythingiread]

Russell had brought Thora a magazine from town, but she'd seen it already. A page of various celebrities with cellulite blurring their thighs. A different celebrity recording everything she ate in a day. Like all of them, around three p.m. the celebrity ate a handful of almonds as a snack. A cut-up bell pepper with hummus. Living that way seemed to require skills that Thora lacked. The ability to take your own life seriously, believing that you were a solid enough entity to require maintenance, as if any of it would add up to something.

Daddy, Emma Cline ("A/S/L")

[everythingiread]

It was that time of life when any time something bad or strange or sordid happened, she could soothe herself with that thing people always said: it's just that time of life. When you thought of it that way, whatever mess she was in seemed already sanctioned.

Daddy, Emma Cline ("Los Angeles")

[everythingiread]

Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him. The ceaseless questioning of the tide to the shore that I heard from our bedroom window all winter long. Asking, Do you love me? Do you love me?

Thirst for Salt, Madelaine Lucas

[everythingiread]

Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgment.

The Girls, Emma Cline

[everythingiread]

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.

The Girls, Emma Cline

[everythingiread]

All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you--the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.

The Girls, Emma Cline