“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.
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”
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”]…