The Essential Human Flaw

Quotes from rom The Human Stain by Philip Roth:

'... that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography - a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.'

'... thereby ensuring that I would do anything I could think of not to bore you, including dropping out of contact, if necessary, so as to avoid the risk of becoming boring.'

'Surprises. Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom. But it's a very narrow, antisocial wisdom. It's savage, too. It's the wisdom of somebody who expects nothing. That's her wisdom, and that's her dignity, but it's negative wisdom ...'

'... that scrappy, I've-seen-it-all laugh - you know, the coarse, easy laugh of the woman with a past ...'

'I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience - or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism - to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.'

'... and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.'

'The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially one's own intensity, is to organize the silence ...'

'Lisa was always morally in over her head, but without either the callousness to disappoint the need of another or the strength to disillusion herself about her strength.'

'Learn, he told himself, before you die, to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame.'

'"Did you kill anyone when you were in Vietnam?" Was there anyone he didn't kill when he was in Vietnam?'

'You're battling now in a world where nobody's ruthlessness bothers to cloak itself in humanitarian rhetoric.'

'Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity ...'

'That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if ... if only such things were understandable.'

'... because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense.'

'Why would things happen as they do and history read as it does if inherent to existence was something called normalcy?'

'... all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested.'

'This was it, the solution, the secret to his secret, flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous - the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life's little contribution to every human decision.'

'Did not see at all what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished.'

'Yes, she's a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks - she seems to have grown up the way you're supposed to be able to.'

'There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color - there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.'

'... she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being.'

'This wonderful language they all have - that they appear to believe - about their 'lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything.'

'Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem'. Hitler lacked self-esteem too.'

'Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms it into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him.'

Yeats

Used to love this half of Yeats's poem, can't remember when I read it (A-Levels?). Anyway, here's the first half of The Second Coming -

' Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. '

Chinua Achebe

Here's what he said before - 'Art is, and always was, at the service of man.'

Ten Rules for Writing (Fiction)

Came across this article on the online Guardian and thought I'd make my own list. So, my ten rules for writing fiction: 

1. Write. 

2. Read. 

3. Write again. 

4. Read what you've written.

5. Take five months off and come back. 

6. Read what you've written again.

7. Take another five months. 

8. Bunk off writing and move to Manchester.

9. Write about Manchester. 

10. Send updated script (with detailed description of industrial Manchester) to an agent. 

(11). Await rejection. 

--> I can be so bored at times.

More Krakauer

More quotes from Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer - 

'Everything had changed suddenly - the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute - life or truth or beauty - of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded.'

'McCandless took life's inequities to heart.'

'For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'

'He could be generous and caring to a fault, but he had a darker side as well, characterized by monomania, impatience, and unwavering self-absorption.'

'... he had been smitten by the vastness of the land, by the ghostly hue of the glaciers, by the pellucid subarctic sky.'

'I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing - to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows - a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.'

'Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.'

'By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything - the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds, to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.'

'I was twenty-three, a year younger than Chris McCandless when he walked into the Alaska bush. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scattershot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzsche, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards ...'

'I had convinced myself for many months that I didn't really mind the absence of intimacy in my life, the lack of real human connection, but the pleasure I'd felt in this woman's company - the ring of her laughter, the innocent touch of a hand on my arm - exposed my self-deceit and left me hollow and aching.'

'It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.' 

Of Chris McCandless

Quotes from Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer -

'At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.'

'The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible.'

'... relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.'

'Over the past 15 years, I've run into several McCandless types out in the country. Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble. McCandless was hardly unique; there's quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike that they're almost a collective cliche.'

'In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more wild adventures than ever before. And what magnificent country I have seen - wild, tremendous wasteland stretches, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from the vermilion sands of the desert, canyons five feet wide at the bottom and hundreds of feet deep, cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons, and hundreds of houses of the cliff dwellers, abandoned a thousand years ago.'

'For two days I couldn't tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling over me, while the poison oozed and crusted on my face and arms and back.'

Quoting Roth

Quotes from Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer -

'I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around ... And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?'

'The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me like a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.'

'But what else was there? If he played the violin or the piano, then he might have had some serious activity other than reading to occupy him when he was not writing. The problem with just listening to music was that if he sat alone with a record in the afternoon, he soon found himself turning the sentences around in his head ... '

'... but mostly it was the drama of that face, combined with the softness and intelligence in her large pale eyes ... '

' "If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you'll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years." Lonoff made "Fantasy" sound like breakfast cereal. '

'... carried away by the idea that if I were a perfidious brute, I at least would be a truthful perfidious brute ...'

'Ordinary human pleasures have nothing to do with it. Ordinary human pleasures be damned. The young man wants to be an artist.'

'I beg of you - I'd rather live and die alone, I'd rather endure that than another moment of your bravery! I cannot take any more moral fiber in the face of life's disappointments!'

'It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.'

'I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement; love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self; love for the artistic mulishness and the suspicion of nearly everything else; and love for the buried charm ...'

'... the writer whose absorption with "the grand human discord" made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling ...'

'We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'

'Oh, what sitting ducks I had for parents! A son of theirs would have had to be a half-wit or a sadist not to make them proud.'

'What set of aesthetic values makes your think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime?'

'Maybe if I were locked up again in a room somewhere and fed on rotten potatoes and clothed in rags and terrified out of my wits, maybe then I could write a decent story for Mr. Lonoff!'

' ... the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews.'

' ... a ceremony lasting about ten minutes - and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing - that was the horror.'

'Let her see how noble and heroic you are by the twenty-seventh draft.'

'There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!'

'But what do I know, other than what I can imagine?'

First Sentence

Something that made me laugh:

'I always forgive my authors their first sentence. First sentences subsume 94.73% of the time an author spends on a book"”give or take. They are the most over-wrought, over-thought, contorted pieces of writing there is.'

- Susan J. Morris, www.blog.shelfari.com -

The Forest

I think I must go to a forest soon and trek among the trees. Not a garden, not a beach, not a poor river that chokes through the city. I must trek through a proper piece of nature with real trees and uncarved barks and roots the size of a man, and sweeps of light filtered green by the overhead leaves.