SACRED SUNDAY EXTRACTS

This post mostly consists of some good prose passages I've recently read (this might become a weekly thing or something). Sometimes when writing is so good it feels almost religious. More thoughts on non-religious sensations of the spiritual HERE.


1)

'We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.'

- The collective young adolescent narrator of The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides, on the doomed girls who so entranced them.


2)

'Of course the cunt of it was, Joely was married to Crispin. And the double-cunt of it was, theirs was a marriage of true love, total spiritual bonding and dedicated political union. Fan-fucking-tastic.'

- adolescent, angst-ridden Marcus in Zadie Smith's White Teeth on the terrible jealously he feels about another bloke's bird.


3)

' "Lane!" Franny greeted him pleasurably - and she was not one for emptying her face of expression. She threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss - spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the follow-through, and with somewhat of a forehead-bumping aspect.'

- On the difficulties of snogging at a train station. From Franny, a short story by J.D Salinger, one of the two short stories that form Franny and Zooey, about the two youngest siblings of the wealthy Manhattan Glass Family.


4)

'To get straight to the worst, what I'm about to offer isn't really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie, and those who have seen the footage have strongly advised me against nurturing any elaborate distribution plans for it.'

- From Zooey. This 'prose home movie' is widely regarded as his masterpiece (obs we know what the other option is...). I think J.D. is the fucking shit. He's such a bodacious writer.

[for accurate and entertaining definition of bo-da-cious (b-dshs) or bar·da·cious (bär-) adj. adv. please see video interview below under heading 'and HAPPY CHRISTMAS']


5)

'He says, "I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that."
"You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all."
"But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." '

- Richard, the writer dying of AIDs in Michael Cunningham's The Hours, discussing with life-long friend and part time lover Clarissa why he cannot go on, moments before leaping from his apartment window.


A kind of depressing one to end on - but this book is the most incredible exposition of beauty in or through pain. It really is wonderful. I've been re-reading passages of it this morning instead of writing a couple of articles I've been putting off. I'm bad-ass like that. To-tall-y bo-da-cious.


I've also been re-watching this and realising how it's the best movie ever.