“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
–Vida Winter, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
[emphasis added]
found here.
I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas.
-from “Little Bee” by Chris Cleave, my new read that is totally sucking me in, in a dangerous “may not accomplish anything else this week” way.
There was a joke he liked. Goes something like this. Two guys meet at the Pearly Gates and get talking. One says to the other: ‘How did you die?’
‘I froze to death,’ he says.
‘What did it feel like?’ says the first one.
‘Well, it’s uncomfortable at first,’ says the second. ‘You shiver, you get the shakes, there’s pain in your fingers and toes, it’s cold as hell, but then it becomes relaxing and you just go numb and fall asleep and that’s it. What about you? How did you die?’
‘I had a heart attack. See, I knew my wife was cheating on me, so I came home early one day, found her in bed, reading. Middle of the afternoon. How suspicious is that? So I ran round the whole house looking for the guy she was fucking. Down to the basement. No one there. Up to the second floor. No one there. Then I ran fast as I could to the attic, I knew he had to be hiding somewhere. Just as I got there – boom. I had a heart attack, and here I am.’
The second man shakes his head.
‘That’s so ironic,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If only you’d stopped to look in the freezer, we’d both be alive.’
-from “Circle of the Dead,” by Ingrid Black
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.
–from “Domestic Violence” (collected in Domestic Violence) by Eavan Boland.
Shyla Bruno was doing a review of Philip Roth’s newest book, and Craig said, “You going with ‘Goodbye, Portnoy’ for the head?”
“No – listen to this – Allen came up with ‘The Gripes of Roth.’ ”
Craig waited a moment and then issued one of his patented, arch, stagey chuckles. “Bingo,” he said.
–from “City of Refuge” by Tom Piazza, which I bought after I read this (I myself am NOT much of a Lahiri fan) and am sooo enjoying. Enjoying in a tearful, maybe won’t read in public because I might start bawlin’, kind-of way.
If you’re going to play what-if — which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism — you have to play it both ways. If you’re going to imagine yourself as an accidental victim, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero.
-“Flesh and Bone” by Jefferson Bass.
I could have asked him what was wrong, pointed out the obvious, but why do that? That might lead to an open, frank discussion about our future, and who wants that with a man you’re about to marry?
–Clare O’Donohue “The Lover’s Knot.
Or with any man, really.
I’ve read and enjoyed quite a bit of Malouf in the last several years and this book was no exception. An officer talking to a convict in the wilds of Australia, feeling a possible connection to something from his past, and reminiscing on the choices he’s made, and his childhood loves, and how his life has taken him away from them, and opportunities to find them again. A quiet slim book that packs quite a punch.
…he had long since given up the belief that the forces that move us have anything to do either with nature or reason, or that the heart moves in anything but the most crooked way.
Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When they were lying. This girl was glancing right so much she was in danger of getting whiplash.
-Lee Child “Nothing to Lose”
In a story, where an environmentally aware son (not young, but still a son) is “borrowing” his dad’s welding equipment to weld shut the pipes of a company dumping into a waterway.
‘They’re pouring emission straight into the water down there, from two pipes hanging out over the bank.’
He tests the chisel, nodding slowly as he works out what I want his welding gear for. ‘They’re pouring human shit straight into the ocean, too,’ he says, pinning me with a glance, ‘but I haven’t noticed you welding your arse shut.’
-Cate Kennedy “Direct Action” (collected in “Dark Roots”)
There is a fine line between a coffee break and a crack house.
-Harlan Coben “One False Move”
In somewhat related news, if you normally order a “tall” but then one day by accident you order a “grand” because you can’t remember what the stupid word they substitute for “small” is, well you may have a problem the next however many days later it is when you without realizing it order a “tall” again and then it comes and it’s gone in two sips and you think what the hell happened to my drink, why was it so SMALL. You know what they say: once you go […in this case “grand”]…