CHOCOLAT - JOANNE HARRIS

Chocolat - Pg 289

There would be time for grieving later. For the moment, simple wonder; at myself lying naked in the grass, at the silent man beside me, at the immensity above and the immensity within. 

Chocolat - Pg 272

Of course it might have been one of her delusions. There were others, like the snake under the bedclothes and the woman in the mirrors. It could have been make-believe. So much of my mother's life was just that. And besides--after so long, what did it matter? 

Chocolat - Pg 269

I lie awake almost every night now, sugarplums dancing before my eyes. Anouk sleeps in her new attic bedroom, and I dream awake, doze, wake adream, doze, until my eyelids glitter with sleeplessness and the room pitches around me like a rolling ship. 

Chocolat - Pg 235

I tell myself--in the small hours when everything seems possible and my nerves shriek like the unoiled hinges of the weathervane--that my fear is irrational. 

Chocolat - Pg 222

I feel the insidious creeping of doubt in my mind, and my mouth fills at the memory of its perfume, like cream and marshmallow and burnt sugar and the heady mingling of cognac and fresh-ground cocoa beans. It is the scent of a woman's hair, just where the nape joins the skull's tender hollow, the scent of ripe apricots in the sun, of warm brioche and cinnamon rolls, lemon tea and lily of the valley. It is an incense diffused on the wind and unfurling softly like a banner of revolt, this devil's spoor, not sulfurous as we were taught as children but this lightest, most evocative of perfumes, combined essence of a thousand spices, making the head  ring and the spirit soar. I find myself standing outside St. Jérôme's with my head lifted into the wind, straining to catch a trace of that perfume. It suffuses my dreams, and I awake sweating and famished. In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known. 

Chocolat - Pg 207

"Death should be a celebration," she told me. "Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: Ahhhh!"

Chocolat - Pg 185

Armande came in early this morning for gossip and chocolate. 

Chocolat - Pg 179

   "You've seen so much." Her voice was encious and a little awed. "And you're still so young."   "I'm nearly the same age as you."   She shook her head. "I'm a thousand years old." She gave a smile that was both sweet and wistful. "I'd like to be an adventurer," she said. "To follow the sun with nothing but a single suitcase, to have no idea at all of where I might be tomorrow." 

Chocolat - Pg 178

I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and wish I could say: I did this five years ago. I made this mark, this ring caused by a wet coffee cup, this cigarette burn, this ladder of cuts against against the wood's coarse grain. This is where Anouk carved her initials, the year she was six years old, this secret place behind the table leg. I did this on a warm day seven summers ago with the carving knife. Do you remember? Do you remember the summer the river ran dry? Do you remember? 

Chocolat - Pg 172

   "And what--if it isn't an impertinent question--what do you believe?"   Magic carpet rides, rune magic, Ali Baba and visions of the Holy Mother, astral travel and the future in dregs of a glass of red wine...   Florida? Disneyland? The Everglades? What about it, chérie? What about it, hein?   Buddha. Frodo's journey into Mordor. The transubstantiation of the sacrament. Dorothy and Toto. The Easter Bunny. Space aliens. The Thing in the closet. The Resurrection and the Life at the turn of a card... I've believed them all at one time or another. Or pretended to. Or pretended not to.    Whatever you like, Mother. Whatever makes you happy.    And now? What do I believe right now? "I believe that being happy is the only important thing," I told him at last.    Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive. 

Chocolat - Pg 164

Is this temptation, pére? I tell myself that I resisted it, that my inner strength defeated it, that my prayer--please oh please oh please oh please--was one of deliverance, not of desire. 

Chocolat - Pg 163

Her face is open, delighted. The sound of her voice across the water--her laughter mingling with that of the others-- is alluring, vibrant with humor and affection. I find myself wondering what my own voice would sound like among those others, my own laughter meshed with hers, and the night is suddenly very lonely, very cold, very empty. 

Chocolat - Pg 148

The place haunts me. Barely different from the way it was twenty years ago, there is a sly stillness to the place, an air of anticipation. Curtains twitch at grimy windows as I walk by. I seem to hear a low, continuous laughter coming at me across the quiet spaces. 

Chocolat - Pg 147

A fire, you said, mon pére, a fire left untended by the drunkard and his slattern who owned that boat, the flames spreading in the dry electric air until the river was dancing with it. An accident. 

Chocolat - Pg 146

The first green of the spring corn gives the land a mellower look than you and I are used to. At a distance it seems lush--a few early drones stitch the air above its swaying, giving the fields a somnolent appearance. But we know that in two months' time all this will be burned to stubble by the sun, the earth bared and cracked to a red glaze through which even the thistles are reluctant to grow. A hot wind scours what is left of the country, bringing with it drought, and in its wake a stinking stillness. 

Chocolat - Pg 144

I wonder as I listen to the birds--a single craw-craw at first, then a full congregation of them--was this what she fled? Not her own death, but the thousands of tiny intersections of her life with others, the broken connections, the links in spite of themselves, the responsibilities? Did we spend all those years running from our loves, our friendships, the casual words uttered in passing that can alter the course of a lifetime? 

Chocolat - Pg 142

   But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter: that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.   And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark, half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.   How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, chérie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains?   But with Armande there was none of my mother's fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown. With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time. 

Chocolat - Pg 135

For five minutes I stand alone in the square with my arms held out, feeling the wind in my hair. I have forgotten to bring a coat and my red skirt billows out around me. I am a kite, feeling the wind, rising in an instant above the church tower, rising above myself. For a moment I am disoriented, seeing the scarlet figure below in the square, at once here and there.

Chocolat - Pg 110

"Read me your favorite poem," she says.

From the kitchen, as I pour chocolate into two tall glasses, as I stir in cream and kahlua, as I make enough noise with pots and bottles to give the illusion of privacy, I hear his voice raised, stilted at first, then gaining rhythm and confidence. I cannot make out the words, but from a distance it sounds like prayer or invective.

I notice that when he reads the boy does not stutter.  

 

Chocolat - Pg 78

I poured my Sunday libation onto the hydrangeas and felt a definite lifting of the spirit. For now water and coffee will be the only accompaniment to my meals, the coffee to be taken black and sugarless to enhance the bitter taste. Today I had a carrot salad with olives--roots and berries in the wilderness. True, I feel a little light-headed now, but the sensation is not unpleasant. I feel a prick of guilt at the thought that even my deprivation gives me pleasure, and I resolve to place myself in the path of temptation. I shall stand for five minutes at the window of the rôtisserie, watching the chickens on the spit. If Arnauld taunts me, so much the better. In any case, he should be closed for Lent. 

Chocolat - Pg 77

Is this doubt, mon pére? This silence within myself, this inability to pray, to be cleansed, humbled... is it my fault? 

Chocolat - Pg 76

By then Death was on every card, Death and the Black Man, who had begun to mean the same thing. We fled him, and he  followed, packed in sandalwood. 

Chocolat - Pg 73

For a second I saw her close to tears. Then a pause, an effort, a gathering of the will. "Do you know, I think I might manage another of those chocolate specials of yours. How about another?" It was bravado, but I admired it more than I could say. That she can still play the rebel through her misery, the suspicion of a swagger in her movements as she tastes her drink, slurping.

Chocolat - Pg 45

Chocolate curls, white buttons with colored vermicelli, pain d'épices with gilded edging, marzipan fruits in their nests of ruffled paper, peanut brittle, clusters, cracknells, assorted misshapes in half-kilo boxes... I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crash-crash-crashing among the hazels and nougatines. 

Chocolat - Pg 43

Then he is gone, the little packet white in his hand, into the gray rain. I notice that he does not run for shelter but walks with the same measured tread, not indifferent but with the look of one who relishes even that small discomfort. 

Chocolat - Pg 35

Forget yourself if you can, she would have told me. Forget who you are. For as long as you can bear it. But one day, my girl, one day it will catch you. I know. 

Chocolat - Pg 35

And yet... Since I left New York, haven't the winds blown less hard, less often? Hasn't there been a kind of wrench every time we leave a place, a kind of regret? I think there has. 

Chocolat - Pg 29

I have become so accustomed to Pantoufle--and to the rest of the strange menagerie that she trails in her bright wake--that at such times I can almost see him clearly, Pantoufle with his gray-whiskered face and wise eyes, the world suddenly brightening as if by a strange transference I have become Anouk, seeing with her eyes, following where she travels. At such times I feel I could die for love of her, my little stranger, my heart swelling dangerously so that the only release is to run too, my red coat flapping around my shoulders like wings, my hair a comet's tail in the patchy blue sky. 

Chocolat - Pg 23

This languid procession of liars, cheats, gluttons, and pathetic self-deceivers. The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying Will I? Won't I?

Chocolat - Pg 2

Look behind the cracked and blackened paintwork, behind the sadness of things abandoned, and begin to see faint outlines, like the afterimage of a sparkler held in the hand. 

Chocolat - Pg 2

The smell is like daylight trapped for years until it has gone sour and rancid, of mouse droppings and the ghosts of things unremembered and unmourned. It echoes like a cave, the small heat of our presence only serving to accentuate every shadow. Paint and sunlight and soapy water will rid it of the grime, but the sadness is another mater, the forlorn resonance of a house where no one has laughed for years. 

Chocolat - Pg 1

Anouk watches, eyes wide, a yellow balloon in one hand and a toy trumpet in the other, from between a shopping basket and a sad brown dog. 

THE READER - BERNHARD SCHLINK

The Reader - Pg 217

What a sad story, I had thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatsoever. 

The Reader - Pg 216

In the first few years after Hanna's death, I was tormented by the old questions of whether I had denied and betrayed her, whether I owed her something, whether I was guilty for having loved her. Sometimes I asked myself if I was responsible for her death. And sometimes I was in a rage at her and at what she had done to me. Until finally the rage faded and the questions ceased to matter. Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me--it was the path my life had taken. 

The Reader - Pg 197

Her back and arms had no special smell; They smelled of nothing and yet they smelled of her. 

The Reader - Part 3 - Chapter 6

I'm doing something strange here, first of all by commenting myself, secondly by posting a whole chapter. I read this chapter about 5 times and could not find one specific passage that captured exactly what about it I liked so much. I didn't think it deserved to go unshared, though, so, thanks to Schlink's short-chaptered format, here it is in all its glory.

   In the fourth year of our word-driven, wordless contact, a not arrived. "Kid, the last story was especially nice. Thank you. Hanna."
   
   It was lined paper, torn out of a notebook and cut smooth. The message was right up at the top, and filled three lines. it was written in blue smudged ballpoint pen. Hanna had been pressing hard on the pen; the letters went through to the other side. She had also written the address with a great deal of pressure; the imprint was legible on the bottom and top halves of the paper, which was folded in the middle. 
   
   At first glance, one might have taken it for a child's handwriting. But what is clumsy and awkward in children's handwriting was forceful here. You could see the resistance Hanna had had to overcome to make the lines into letters and the letters into words. A child's hand will wander off this way and that, and has to be kept on track. Hanna's hand didn't want to go anywhere and had to be forced. The lines that formed the letters started again each time on the upstroke, the downstroke, and before the curves and loops. And each letter was a victory over a fresh struggle, and had a new slant or slope, and often the wrong height or width. 

   I read the note and was filled with joy and jubilation. "She can write, she can write!" In these years I had read everything I could lay my hands on to do with illiteracy. I knew about the helplessness in everyday activities, finding one's way or finding an address or choosing a meal in a restaurant, about how illiterates anxiously stick to prescribed patterns and familiar routines, about how much energy it takes to conceal one's inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living. Illiteracy is dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.

   Then I looked at Hanna's handwriting and saw how much energy and struggle the writing had cost her. I was proud of her. At the same time, I was sorry for her, sorry for her delayed and failed life, sorry for the delays and failures of life in general. . I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it's too late, ever if it is finally tacked with energy and received with joy. Or is there no such thing as "too late"? Is there only "late," and is "late" always better than "never"? I don't know. 

   After the first note came a steady stream of others. They were always only a few lines, a thank you, a wish to hear more of a particular author or to hear no more, a comment on an author or a poem or a story or a character in a novel, an observation about prison. "The forsythia is already in flower in the yard" or "I like the fact that there have been so many storms this summer" or "From my window I can see the birds flocking to fly south"--often it was Hanna's note that first made me pay attention to the forsythia, the summer storms, or the flocks of birds. Her remarks about literature often landed astonishingly on the mark. "Schnitzler barks, Stefan Zweig is a dead dog" or "Keller needs a woman" or "Goethe's poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames" or "Lenz must write on a typewriter." Because she knew nothing about the authors, she assumed they were contemporaries, unless something indicated this was obviously impossible. I was astonished at how much older literature can actually be read as if it were contemporary; to anyone ignorant of history, it would be easy to see ways of life in earlier times simply as ways of life in foreign countries.  

   I never wrote to Hanna. But I kept reading to her. When I spent a year in America, I sent cassettes from there. When i was on vacation or was particularly busy, it might take longer for me to finish the next cassette; I never established a definite rhythm, but sent cassettes sometimes every week or two weeks, and sometimes only every three or four weeks. I didn't worry that Hanna might not need my cassettes now that she had learned to read by herself. She could read as well. Reading aloud was my way of speaking to her, with her. 

   I kept all her notes. The handwriting changed. At first she forced the letters into the same slant and the right height and width. Once she had managed that, she became lighter and more confident. her handwriting never became fluid, but it acquired something of the severe beauty that characterizes the writing of old people who have written little in their lives. 

The Reader - Pg 183

And because in all my confused half-waking thoughts that swirled in tormenting circles of memories and dreams around my marriage and my daughter and my life, it was always Hanna who predominated, I read to Hanna. 

The Reader - Pg 183

There were many nights when I couldn't sleep for more than a few hours; I would lie awake, and when I switched on the light and picked up a book, my eyes closed, and when I put the book down and turned off the light, I was wide awake again. So I read aloud, and my eyes didn't close. 

The Reader - Pg 168

I don't know what the doctors diagnose when someone isn't freezing even though he should be freezing. My own diagnosis is that the numbness had to overwhelm my body before it would let go of me, before I could let go of it. 

The Reader - Pg 157

I lay there, listening to the wind, feeling relieved every time it weakened and died down, but dreading its renewed assaults and not knowing how I would get out of bed next day, hitchhike back, continue my studies, and one day have a career and a wife and children. 

The Reader - Pg 146

Alongside these images, i saw the others. Hanna pulling on her stockings in the kitchen, standing by the bathtub holding the towel, riding her bicycle with skirts flying, standing in my father's study, dancing in front of the mirror, looking at me at the pool, Hanna listening to me, talking to me, laughing at me, loving me. Hanna loving me with cold eyes and pursed mouth, silently listening to me reading, and at the end banging the wall with her hand, talking to me with her face turning into a mask. 

The Reader - Pg 87

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you? 

The Reader - Pg 87

It took a while before I stopped watching for her everywhere, before I got used to the fact that afternoons had lost their shape, and before I could look at books and open them without asking myself whether they were suitable for reading aloud. 

The Reader - Pg 69

When an airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. Airplanes don't fall out of the sky like stones. They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing. The passengers don't notice a thing. Flying feels the same whether the engines are working or not. It's quieter, but only slightly: the wind drowns out the engines as it buffets the tail and wings. At some point, the earth or sea look dangerously close through the window. But perhaps the movie is on, and the stewards and air hostesses have closed the shades. Maybe the very quietness of the flight is appealing to the passengers. 

The Reader - Pg 67

Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success; every goal I set myself, every recognition I craved made anything I actually did seem paltry by comparison, and whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood. 

The Reader - Pg 63

I would have liked to sleep with her in my bed, but she didn't want to. She felt like an intruder in our house. She didn't say it in so many words, but in the way she stood in the kitchen or in the open double doors, or walked from room to room, inspected my father's books and sat with me at dinner. 

The Reader - Pg 20

Today I can recognize that events back then were part of a life-long pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together--I think, I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. 

The Reader - Pg 18

Through the long hours of the night you have the church clock for company and the rumble of the occasional passing car that throws its headlights across the walls and ceiling. These are hours without sleep, which is not to say that they're sleepless, because on the contrary, they're not about lack of anything, they're rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions, form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again. They are hours when anything is possible, good or bad. 

The Reader - Pg 16

I knew none of this--if indeed I know any of it now  and am not just making patterns in the air. 

The Reader - Pg 16

Then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive--a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body. 

The Reader - Pg 10

No decorative plaster, no mirrors, no runner. Whatever unpretentious beauty the stairwell might once have had, it could never have been comparable to the grandeur of the facade.