running

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
--James Thurber

brain nutrients

"It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind."
-- Sydney Smith

mrs rochester burns the house down

"I waited a long time after I heard her snore, then I got up, took the keys and unlocked the door. I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the passage."
--Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

the documentary age

"When we say a thing or an event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honor it. But when a thing is made up -- regardless of how true and just it seems -- we turn up our noses. That's the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts. We put on the television set and what we hear is the life cycles of birds. The replaying of wars. Interviews with mass murderers. And the newspapers know nothing else.
--Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

missing the point

"Now there's a woman who made a terrific meatloaf, who knew how to repot a drooping rubber plant, who bid a smart no-trump hand, who wore a hat well, who looked after her personal hygiene, who wrote her thank-you notes promptly, who kept up, who went down, went down and down and down, who missed the point, the point of it all, but was, nevertheless, almost unfailingly courteous to others."
--Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

unexpected delight

A week in Minneapolis, a more delightful city than I expected it to be:

My favorite destination(s):
Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden
This was especially interesting.

Some great meals:
Bellanotte (I will remember this meal for a long time, especially the chocolate lava cake)
Chambers Kitchen
New Delhi (the only meal to slightly disappoint, probably because it was lunch buffet)
Hell's Kitchen (ham and pear grilled sandwich -- yum!)

ticking off

"I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick.' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."
--James Thurber

gems from housekeeping

"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate."
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"It is ... difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows."
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"Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has to look and not to buy."
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"I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort."
-- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

why didn't I think of that?

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
--An English Professor

losing sight

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."
--George Jean Nathan

the sane response

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
-- Philip K. Dick

what will we say? what will we do?

"What shall we say when history asks how such crimes came to be committed in the name of America? Will we say that we stood silently by, shrugging our shoulders, filling our bellies, closing our eyes? Or will we be able to say: We saw. We dissented. We resisted. We condemned."
-- Chris Floyd

reading about reading

So, you think you know how to read?

night is another thing

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."
--Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

and so I become a homeowner

The architect's vision of my new townhouse, done in May. Hooray! Renter no more!

freaks

" ... we have that word normal and we can say we are normal because a psychological, sexual, or spiritual abnormality can -- with a little luck -- be safely hidden from the rest of the world. But if you are less than three feet tall, you have to deal with that fact every second of every day of your life. And everyone witnesses your effort. You go into a bar and you can't get up onto a stool. You whistle down a taxi and you can't open the door. If you're a lady with a beard, every face you meet is a mirror to give you back the disgust and horror and unreasonableness of your predicament. No matter which corner you turn on which street in which city in the world, you can expect to meet the mirror. And I suppose I have never been able to forgive myself the grotesqueries and aberrations I am able to hide with such impunity in my own life. It was a painful and wondrous moment of self-knowledge, one I might never have had if I had not taken the bike on the road, looking for something I knew I'd recognize only when I saw it, looking for the limit -- ultimately, looking for the edge."
-- Harry Crews, Introduction to A Harry Crews Reader

stepping out

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame."
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"Disorientation is the loss of the East. Ask any navigator: the East is what you sail by. Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be, perhaps even your life ... But let's just suppose. What if the whole deal -- orientation, knowing where you are, and so on -- what if it's all a scam? What if all of it -- home, kinship, the whole enchilada -- is just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-oldest piece of brainwashing? Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever: suppose that it's then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of those people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can't be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air.
You won't do it. Most of you won't do it. The world's head laundry is pretty good at washing brains: Don't jump off that cliff don't walk through that door don't step into that waterfall don't take that chance don't step across that line don't ruffle my sensitivities I'm warning you now don't make me mad you're doing it you're making mad. You won't have a chance you haven't got a prayer you're finished you're history you're less than nothing, you're dead to me, dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master's voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you're dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don't even know your name."
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Can you hear in my voice that I'm angry? Good. I've been reading a book about anger. It says that anger is evidence of our idealism. Something has gone wrong, but we 'know,' in our rage, that things could be different. It shouldn't be this way.
--Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

favorites of 2006

Books:
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Ash Wednesday, Ethan Hawke

Movies:
Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus
A Very Long Engagement
Little Miss Sunshine
Capote

And two exceptional TV series, because watching them on DVD was more enjoyable than most of the movies I saw this year:
The West Wing (whole series)
Slings & Arrows (Seasons 1 and 2)

o happy dagger

Ellen: I hate this play. When you watch it, you feel miserable because you don't have that kind of passion in your life. Nobody does ... it's a fantasy. It's irresponsible.
Geoffrey: I think it's painfully accurate. Two idiots meet. They fall in love. They're happy, briefly, then all hell breaks loose. Happens all the time.
--Slings and Arrows, two actors speaking of Romeo and Juliet

and the bad writing award goes to ...

"Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe."
--Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel

More choice metaphors/similes:
"as inviting as a drunken prom queen"
"like she was using it to render tallow from building inspectors' butts"

I'm sure there must be more disastrous attempts at figurative language. I couldn't bear more than 3 pages.