ONE MORE THING - B.J. NOVAK

One More Thing - Pg 276 : Acknowledgments

   Years ago, I shared a lunch with the actor John Stamos. While we did not discuss any aspect of this book, I felt that it would be fun to include his name as a surprise for anyone casually scanning this section for names of celebrities. 

***Bloggers note: It should be known, I was doing exactly that when I read this sentence. - Penelope

One More Thing - Pg 268 : J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote

   He knew he wasn't a poet anymore. Still, while he didn't know exactly what he wanted to say, he knew exactly how it should sound. He knew the acoustics of his age, he knew the precise echo that greatness made within it, and now, as much as he loved--finally--everything in his life, all he wanted was to hear that sound. He needed that sound to pull him out of where he was now, not because he didn't love where he was now, but because he did, so much, that he needed to find out if he could make a sound that could compete with it.

One More Thing - Pg 267 : J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote

   He had chosen both Tennessee and Aurelia in large part for the sounds of their names, and his lifelong trust in the poetic had not led him astray; his life was soaked in brunette tones and accidental music, and he was, for the most part, a happy person.

One More Thing - Pg 241 : The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women

   "Why do I prefer inflatable women?" asked the old man with a torn-throat chuckle, as if surprised, yet in a way not surprised, to have posed himself this question. "Why do I prefer inflatable women?" he asked again, this time with a shake of his head, as though he just couldn't help being charmed by himself, despite his better wisdom, despite knowing himself all too well.

One More Thing - Pg 230 : Never Fall in Love

   But she did fall in love, almost immediately. Within a month, she was hopelessly and endlessly in love with another secret agent, a kind, warm man named Bob. He had big hands and a lot of brothers and sisters, and there was no falling out of love with Bob.

One More Thing - Pg 223 : "Everyone Was Singing the Same Song"

   He traveled by train among the optimistic and neatly dressed middle classes to San Francisco, a city so light in every way that he couldn't quite believe his eyes. This must be what gave them the idea for Technicolor.

One More Thing - Pg 215 : The Best Thing in the World Awards

   Neil Patrick Harris stared straight ahead, pale and determined, looking both intensely focused and intensely disoriented at once, as if a pair of hands had reached inside him, shook him by something as deep and untraceable as integrity itself, and then placed him back exactly where he had stood, the same but forever different.

One More Thing - Pg 167 : A Good Problem to Have

   He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob, and we all waited for him to turn it, but he left it there for a very long time.
   It's very suspenseful for someone to put a hand on a doorknob but not turn it, especially if he's old.

One More Thing - Pg 124 : Kellogg's

   I had, two years earlier, toward the beginning of third grade, realized in an epiphany over an inspiringly decadent breakfast-for-dinner that midnight was not actually the middle of the night: if the night was something that started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 7:00 a.m., as I knew it to be, then the middle of the night was actually 1:30 a.m. My parents happily confirmed this for me. Although my bedtimes had shifted in the years since, I still believed with stubborn auto-loyalty that 1:30 remained the official unofficial middle of the night.

One More Thing - Pg 109 : The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore

   In the end, this one wasn't for her. She waited until a morning fog of dishonesty settled over them one day, and she disappeared into it. She loved him, but she never quite got over the suspicion that she was just his favorite thing in the bookstore.

One More Thing - Pg 84 : Sophia

   I laughed, to try to make her laugh, and said that she had said that she had only one more thing to say.
   "Yes!" she said. "That's what I was trying to say before! There's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. Or to you, and to simulations like me--I know what I am. But you can't see it, because to you everything is infinite. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite. And I know you can feel this. I mean, if I can, you can!" She laughed, desperately. "If I can? Come on! I'm a robot! If I can feel this, you can feel this! You can feel this."

One More Thing - Pg 80 : Sophia

   And on the opposite side of the table is me.
   The guy who bought the first robot capable of love and handed it back. The guy who came across the greatest discovery in the history of science--and returned it, because his sex robot was crying.
   Did I get what was so funny about it? Of course.
   Did it hurt? Of course.

One More Thing - Pg 71 : Sophia

   "What's the harm?" they would ask me, truly surprised. The harm, besides those hours that actually do matter when you barely have one night off every couple of weeks, is the little mark you get on you every time you open up a door to a hope and then close it fast in disappointment. It leaves a nick, or a dent, and those nicks and dents are not invisible. I used to see them all the time.

One More Thing - Pg 70 : Sophia

   In the meantime... I am also a living person, and, to put a simple desire in simple terms, I want to have sex with attractive people from time to time. Is it a shallow road compared with the road for love? Yes. Of course. But it isn't the road away from love, either; in my case, I think of it as one of those little parallel access roads that you have to travel on sometimes to get where you're going, always in view of the main route.

One More Thing - Pg 69 : Sophia

   A small child, about four years old, is crying because she has drawn all over the wall with her crayons and has just realized that what she has done is going to subject her to some unknown form of justice. I put on a serious face and explain to the child that her mother and I are going to discuss what her punishment should be. Then I close the door to another room, and with relief, I drop the serious face and laugh and kiss the young artist's mother and ask her what in the world we should do about this creature we made who wanted to put colors on the walls and is scared what we're going to say about it.

One More Thing - Pg 68 : Sophia

   I am one hundred percent aware that the moment at which an artificially intelligent creation first independently developed the capacity to feel love is one of the pinnacle moments in the history of history itself, and I stand with the rest of the world in awe of its limitless implications for science, for philosophy, for love, for our species; conception of itself; for our species itself; and for conception itself.
   It simply was not what I had in mind when I purchased a sex robot.

One More Thing - Pg 66 : I Never Want to Walk on the Moon

   When you think about how the moon is a celestial phenomenon that has dominated the nights of humans since before humans were even humans, a place so foreign to our understanding that, until recently in the history of our species, people didn't even think of it as a place, or even as an object, but as an abstraction tied to God; a place that is still, even now that we do understand it, so alien to our everyday thinking that it is never included on any of our maps or globes and can only be reached by a dangerous voyage across hundreds of thousands of miles of literal, actual nothingness; and to know that you have been there and stood on that rock/God/place, with your own two feet, and kicked the dust and moved it a little, and come back home, with the story to tell.... And then, no matter where you are in life, to be able to always look down at those ten little toes that carry you through your house or the hallways of your job or around the same walking path you've been walking for years that you still love in a way even though, somehow, at some point, its loveliness lost its dust of luster in your eyes--to know that no matter where you are, no matter how dull the favorite colors of your life become, you can always look down at those ten little toes and think about how they have been with you to a place that almost no one alive can imagine, and no one dead could have conceived of. And then someday, when you're about to die yourself, and you're scared, at least you know you've already been somewhere mysterious.
   That's honestly all I can come up with, pro-moon-wise. To each his own, I suppose.

One More Thing - Pg 57 : Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins)

   I told him I stopped because I realized I was turning love into an accomplishment, and he was turning accomplishment into love, and neither of those things would ever quite be the other. When I told him that, he seemed to both light up and flare out at the same time--like he knew this was the truth, but that it was also hard for him to let go of someone who would say something like that.

One More Thing - Pg 30 : Julie and the Warlord

   "That does not sound legal," said Julie, trying to stall for time so that she could object properly and intelligently, which was going to take a second, because she had had a couple of drinks already and had not anticipated having to debate a hot-button topic like this at the top of her intelligence--especially not with someone who did it for a living.

One More Thing - Pg 27 : Romance, Chapter One

   "The cute one?"

   "No, the other cute one."

   "Oh, she's cute too."

One More Thing - Pg 22 : No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg

   Why wasn't he approaching Ricardo Montalban?

   Probably because there were more interesting things in heaven than Ricardo Montalban.

   It must be hard being Ricardo Montalban in heaven, thought Tim.

One More Thing - Pg 16 : No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg

   It was a far deeper and sharper moment of first love than the first first moment of first love, because now, not only was he falling in love, but he was falling in love with someone he loved; and while the first time, he also believed he'd be with her forever, he was to young to consider what forever meant.

   Now here he was, truly, on the first day of forever.

   He kissed her for an eternity, which was fine, because heaven had eternities to burn. Then he kissed her for another.

   "It wouldn't have been heaven without you."

One More Thing - Pg 14 : Dark Matter

   I was sure I wouldn't be able to sleep that night not knowing what dark matter was, but it turned out I could. 

One More Thing - Pg 8 : Dark Matter

   "And that's the puzzling thing about dark matter," said the scientist at the end of our planetarium tour. "It makes up over ninety percent of the universe, and yet nobody knows what it is!"

   People on huge tour chuckled politely, like Wow, isn't that a fun fact?

   But I looked closer at the scientist, and I could tell something from the smirky little smile on his fat smug face:

   This motherfucker knew exactly what dark matter was.

One More Thing - Pg 4 : The Rematch

   A minor detail of the race, known to few but obsessives (of which there were still plenty), was that there had been a gnat clinging to the leg of the tortoise throughout the entire contest: was this gnat, too, worthy of being celebrated as a hero, full of counterlogical lessons and nonsensical insight like "Right place, right time takes down talent in its prime"? Or "Hang on to a tortoise's leg, who knows where it will lead"?

DISCLAIMER - RENÉE KNIGHT

Disclaimer - Pg 331

   She needs to forgive, but she cannot. She cannot forgive him because she has watched him over the last few weeks manage the idea of her being raped so much more easily than he had managed the idea of her having an affair... It seems to Catherine that the new truth he was offered was easier for him to swallow than adultery. When she is at her most brutal, she thinks that, given the choice, he would rather she had suffered than to have enjoyed a burst of illicit pleasure.

Disclaimer - Pg 312

   He will be fine. Catherine thanks God, well, she thanks someone, and she calls him God but she can't quite place him.

Disclaimer - Pg 264

   Catherine has told her mother that Nicholas is in hospital and her mother was distressed at first, but then neatened up the information, tucked in its corners and reassured Catherine that people rarely die from measles these days. Better that he has it now when he is little. She is almost envious of the way her mother's mind works now. It is deteriorating and yet with it comes a determination to put a positive spin on nasty intruders. Her mother seems content: she is creating, for now at least, a much nicer world for herself.

Disclaimer - Pg 219

   Her mother knows and doesn't know but it doesn't matter because she knows what Catherine needs. She needs to be cared for without being interrogated. She needs someone to trust that she isn't a terrible human being without having to tell them--without having to explain anything.

Disclaimer - Pg 217

   He was looking up towards the promenade and when he looked at Catherine she smiled, even though he hadn't smiled at her. She wasn't flirting, it was instinctive. She hadn't wanted to appear unfriendly. She was on holiday. So she'd smiled. He didn't smile back and that made him seem older. And it made her feel self-conscious, knowing that he knew she was alone.

Disclaimer - Pg 207

   She blinks [the tears] away so she can pull down the mask she must wear to get through the day. It fits her well, no one would know it was there, and she has even got used to the way it inhibits her breathing.

Disclaimer - Pg 176

   She told me she wasn't trying to kill herself, she just wanted to know what it had felt like for Johnathan. She wanted to know whether drowning had hurt. She wanted to find out for herself whether it was as painless as everyone said--whether you passed out before dying. She was angry with me for denying her this almost-shared experience but then she acknowledged the flaw in her experiment: that the fear and loneliness of being swallowed by a vast ocean cannot be replicated by submersion in an avocado-coloured ceramic tub in the safety of your own home.

Disclaimer - Pg 161

   They passed each other, these lovers, and no one would have known they had ever met. His stomach slid with excitement, and hers with desire at the sight of his sleepy eyes and bedded hair. They almost touched they were so close, they could smell each other and she breathed him in and then smiled, but not at John.

Disclaimer - Pg 146

   I cried, as quietly as I could, but I did cry. Nancy shook. Tremors ran through her whole body, not just her shoulders. She was not shaking with sobs. This was prolonged, lengthy. Something had ruptured inside her, sending wave after wave of shock through her. It was as if she had been plugged in and couldn't be switched off.

Disclaimer - Pg 145

   They might have assumed fear of flying. But it was fear of landing which afflicted Nancy and me--the fear of it all becoming real. So far all we had been able to do was imagine. Now we must look at the body of our son who had gone ahead and experienced something which he should have waited for us to do first.

Disclaimer - Pg 110

   I finish my sandwich, enjoying being part of this alfresco lunching club. I feel a comradely spirit between myself and the other diners, a few of us on benches, others lying on the grass or sitting on jackets. None of us knowing one another, but relaxed nevertheless in one another's company, privileged to be sharing this luscious green space along with the ancient plane trees, the only living things older than I, in this London square.

Disclaimer - Pg 95

   She's twitchy. I like that. But her fingernails are painted. I don't like that. They make me want to weep. They are a sign that she doesn't care. That she is carrying on as if nothing has happened. I don't want to see that. She must not be allowed the comfort of amnesia. That cannot happen. She should not be able to paint her nails, do her hair. She should not care about herself. She knows what she has done and yet she still thinks she is worth preserving. I want to see her nails chewed and bleeding. I want to see a sign that she feels something.

Disclaimer - Pg 82

   I have sucked up every word in them; I have tasted the ink on their pages; I take them to bed with me and sleep with them under my pillow, dreaming the words swim off the page into my head and Nancy's most private thoughts are absorbed into mine. I have eaten those pages and swallowed them down. She is in me now, my darling girl. Now we are one. She has given me strength: the outside world can't touch me, but I can touch it whenever I choose.

Disclaimer - Pg 43

   It's so bloody complicated. She wants him to be a grown-up but she also wants him to remember how much he loved her once. How much he needed her. But she is nervous too that he still needs her more than is good for him and it makes her tougher and it makes her relieved, in the end, that he is leaving Sandy behind.

Disclaimer - Pg 40

   A book, written in secret and locked away from my prying eyes.
   Sticks and stones, I told myself, but I feared the words on those pages might actually break me.

Disclaimer - Pg 34

   Robert shrugs at the book, wondering why she's so interested in it, thinking it's just a diversion from the thing that is really worrying her. He is convinced that she is trying to make conversation and this worries him. They're not that that kind of couple. They don't need to "make conversation."

Disclaimer - Pg 20

   I could hear her voice quite clearly: Nancy as a young woman, not yet a mother. There was energy in it, fearlessness, and it threw me back to a time when the future had excited us, when things that hadn't happened yet thrilled rather than frightened.

Disclaimer - Pg 17

   I couldn't bear to let everything go at once and so I staggered my trips to the charity shop. I got to know the two women at All Aboard quite well. I told them the clothes had belonged to my wife, and after that, when I dropped by, they would stop what they were doing and make time for me. If I happened to turn up when they were having coffee, then they'd make me a cup too. It became strangely comforting, that shop full of dead people's clothes.

THE FUTURE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE - GREGORY SHERL

The Future for Curious People - Pg 294

   And I don't know why, but Evelyn softens into me. I slide my hands around her waist. I pull her to me. And I kiss her. We fall in place. Evelyn's eyes were closed before my lips touched hers and I don't want to feel left out, so I close mine and imagine everything that will probably not happen: days feeling like amusement parks, burying my mother together, following our kids into tubes, dying together in a bed the size of the moon.
   And for a few moments, Madge ceases to exist. For a few moments, I understand why we have lips. We give escalators of light a reason to wrap around our heads. I discover a new part of mouth and teach it to French. I study every movement like a history lesson.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 209

   I decide this is my favorite part of her neck--the left side--but if someone were to ask me tomorrow, I might say, No, no, it was the right all along. Or I never said it was her neck--why do you think I always walk behind her at grocery stores and strip malls? But this neck! Men don armor for this kind of neck. Break oaths to God. Discover continents and cut off their ears.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 203

   Godfrey smiles. It's dark, but holy shit. This is why birds make noise and music sounds like music.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 187

   Amy and Bart are staring at the floor, or maybe Bart is staring at his boat shoes. I bet the floor is wondering why it's getting so much attention. I imagine the floor doesn't want the attention--it just wants to be a fucking floor.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 184

   I take another sip of beer and count to one hundred. I've heard this helps--the counting, not the drinking, though I've heard that helps, too, just for different reasons. I'd check my pulse, but I can never find that shit. I'd be a terrible doctor. This one's dead, too, I'd tell the nurse. I just don't feel anything happening. Must be an epidemic or the zombie apocalypse. Would the nurse call the CDC or would I?

The Future for Curious People - Pg 171

   I do not know how to get from here to there--I do not know where there is. If I knew that, I'd have a better chance of getting there. I am not a grown-up. I ride a bicycle and glue flowers on my rain boots. Last year, I hosted a cocktail party but realized I didn't know how to make any cocktails. We drank out of mugs and jelly jars. I have a job and a best friend who steals things like a juvenile delinquent. We talk about our crushes. What if life goes on this way--on and on. It can't. Once, I was an eleven-year-old who was terrified that I would never be able to give up playing with Barbies. I'd be a closet Barbie player my entire life--a dark hidden shame. Were there more like me? Was there a support group? And then one day I realized I hadn't played with them in ages. It was over. How will this part of my life be over?
   And worse, why would I want it to ever end?

The Future for Curious People - Pg 162

   "Look, science and the mysteries of true love can only coexist for so long before weird shit occurs."

The Future for Curious People - Pg 154

   Everything is so goddamn clear, especially Tina's shiny skin. I wonder if she applies lotion on it or if the lotion does it itself. Like the lotion says, No, no, I've got this. You just keep lying there.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 144

   I stand at the door, staring at the chipped paint, the dirty knob. If someone asked me what I was doing, I would say, I don't know. Please tell me. I am not waiting for Adrian to come back. I know that.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 143

   I'm already beginning to feel lonely--the hole in me that maybe no one can fill. Or maybe I'm lonely because Adrian is more outside my front door than inside my front door and that means something.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 142

   I follow him to the front door and open it.
   Then the lag. We both want this to end, but we don't know how. Or we both want to stay, but we don't know why.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 138

   I open the door and we look at each other like strangers who've just happened to constantly fall into bed with each other over the last few years.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 135

   There's a quiet moment. I flop back onto the bed. I think of origami and how I wish it were human. One minute I could be a puffed-up box and the next minute a crane.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 124

   The woman at the bus stop is kind of beautiful. Her skirt is too short for the cold and I love the way she's hugging herself and stomping her feet to keep warm--innocent but sexy. I could probably watcher her be cold forever, which sounds kind of mean.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 119

   He looks like he tastes like a sledgehammer, but in a good way.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 116

   I notice the flush of my cheeks, the dimples in his. I'm smiling. Godfrey's smiling. Still, we're crying. Everything is so tilted. I feel completely alive and therefore vulnerable as if that's what feeling fully alive demands; this scares me, too.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 116

   It's deafening, the quiet. The camera zooms in. Godfrey and I are crying. I want Godfrey to say something. I want to hear his voice. I want him to tell me why we're crying. I want his mouth pressed against my lips, and I want to know everything he's ever thought. I want to learn it all slowly. I want the ridges of his teeth.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 113

   In my newfound Time Bomb Theory of Heart Calcification, as I now name it, how much toughening of my heart did Adrian cause? How many small rejections, how many missed opportunities, how big of an accumulation of jadedness has taken its toll? I think of my heart. This isn't its first hardening of a loss. How much is left?

The Future for Curious People - Pg 112

   I say, "What if there is this time bomb to love. What if it's like you fall in love with so many people who just aren't right for you, and with each one, your heart toughens up, and you have to find the one who is right for you before your heart is completely calcified in your chest?"
   "Like there's a closing window."
   "Right."
   Adrian shakes his head. "No. It's more like every person you fall in love with is right for you but just not at this moment. Like the now-you would be perfect for the me ten years from now, but because we can't sync it up, we'll never make it. Unless you're willing to wait for me to become that person."
   "But my ten-years-from-now self can never be my now self, so I'd have to completely stop growing--deep down--so that we can sync up."

The Future for Curious People - Pg 98

   I have a deep abiding distrust of fake grass. It's bullshit. By Easter, there's always plenty of real grass if grass is what you want to use to pad your basket, except maybe in the Dakotas and shit, where it's still cold. No one should ever trust fake grass. Its insincerity is hateful.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 94

   "It's easier to define yourself when you're standing next to the same person all the time. You just let the other person define you. It's simple."

The Future for Curious People - Pg 63

   Jason doesn't eat carbs. This is bad. I love bread. My favorite food groups go cheese, bread, cheese bread, and soup served in a hollowed-out loaf of bread.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 36

   I pick up a postcard from Wildwood, New Jersey's boardwalk. The date is June 3, 1931. It's written to a Helen. The sign off reads, I'll only miss you more tomorrow.
   As soon as I read it, I know I've memorized it. It seems like a definition of love.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 36

   "Um," Binter says. "'Kiss Me Honey Do' is kind of urgent right now so..."
   "Oh, you want me to leave?"
   "Well, that or you'll have to just sit there and not be, you know, weird."
   "Right," I say. "I can do not-weird, short term."
   "Good."
   "Good-good."
   He frowns at me because that was slightly weird.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 33

   "You're a good citizen," Binter says, and it strikes me as the kind of thing that might only be a hot come-on to a communist, speaking in a boozy Russian accent. Could this be Binter's attempt at flirtation? I know, I know, this is a stretch, but librarian flirtation can be very subtle. He pulls a key from a desk drawer, unlocks the door for me.
   "Zank you, comrade," I say, in a pseudo Russian accent, even though the Russian thing is something that only existed in my head.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 29

   I love the smell of books, the dust motes spiraling in sun. I love shelves and order. I love the carts and metal stools on wheels. I love the quiet carrels and the study rooms. I love the strobing of copy machines, the video and audio bins. I love the Saturday morning read-alouds for kids and how they try to hush when they come in; all these books can still demand a bit of awe. I love the teen reading groups, clutching books to their chests, little shields protecting them from the world's assaults--those are my people. I even love the homeless shuffling in--it's warm here with running water, safe--and the couples who make out in the stacks. I don't blame them: books are sexy after all.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 28

   Bookstores, on the other hand, can make me nervous. All those books and I can't possibly buy them all and tend to them properly, love them enough, give them the eyes they deserve. But, here, at the library, the patrons take the books out as a kind of foster care program--into the world and back again.
   If they don't come back? Well, some books are meant to live in the wilds. There's not much you can do about that.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 28

   My own house was austere, hushed, and dusty like a library, but once you understand that each book on the shelf has a heartbeat, then you'll want to stay. I don't tend dead things--paper, ink, glue bindings. I tend books the way someone in an aviary tends birds.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 13

   Why isn't Madge looking for me? Is anyone thinking about me right now? If not, do I exist just a little less?

The Future for Curious People - Pg 13

   She tilted her head and sighed at me as if seeing a current failure of some kind but one with promise. And, in that moment, my pencil mid-clitoris, I don't know if I fell in love with her, but I know I wanted her to take me on. I wanted to fulfill that promise. I loved the tilt of her head and her sigh and the fact that she called me on my bullshit. I needed Madge and that was the start of love. I think that's how it sometimes goes.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 6

   "I'll miss you, Adrian."
   He touches my face gently with his fingertips and says, "You can't fire me. I quit." But he says it in the saddest voice possible and I love him with a flash that's deep and unmistakable. Each person you love leaves his or her own stain, and the way you remember him is like a smell, a taste, a color--indescribable but distinct.

The Future for Curious People - Pg 5

   I'll miss his hands on me and the way he says I'm the best goddamn librarian in the world, even though he's never understood what I do at the library exactly. There's something sweet about how he loves me without knowing me--a blind love, which is almost like an unconditional love but not quite.

FACES IN THE WATER - JANET FRAME

Faces in the Water - Pg 250

   I have never met a man who knew so many secrets; but although he behaved as if he had opened all the lucky packets of life he never disclosed what he really found in them and one suspects that it was only trinkets that broke when he touched them.

Faces in the Water - Pg 247

   Who are we, have we changed when we no longer claim as our treasure the stalk of grass in our hand or the chocolate paper but choose the human beings that we hope to hold tight in our heart? Are we sane then? Have we progressed from illness when we do not care any more for the pink cretonne bag with its pattern of roses, but begin to look for people that we may thread a drawstring round their neck and carry them back and forth inside ourselves, and not be willing to let them go not even in the night in sleep and dreams?

Faces in the Water - Pg 244

   Looking through the window I felt depressed and hopeless at the sameness of everything. Living is so much like one of those childhood games where you keep shutting your eyes and on opening them expect to find everything changed--anew city with glass towers, a table laden for a feast, a kindly forest where the trees no longer strike blows or twist themselves into fearful shapes.

Faces in the Water - Pg 241

   He sees the land of meaning, and one path to it, and the so-called "normal" people traveling swiftly and in comfort to the land; he does not include the shipwrecked people who arrive by devious lonely routes, and the many who dwell in the land in the beginning.

Faces in the Water - Pg 239

   The fact that there were notices demanding Silence when one would never have dreamed of speaking made it seem that the room contained secret presences which had to be controlled and which related in a strange way the death and painstaking reconstruction of the moa and the micelike letters that were wired with meaning and resurrected to make words, and placed in imposing attitudes on the pages of the books. So it was for her own protection that the librarian hid behind a grille and pinned notices on the wall; she had to make every effort to subdue more than the timid subscribers tiptoeing between the shelves.

Faces in the Water - Pg 230

   Time and again, with Doris and other dwarves and patients who resembled witches or seemed inhabited by dragons, one felt like a witness to the origins of folklore; one felt that such people, whose only home in the world was a mental hospital, would have their problem solved if they could indeed dwell in the cups of flowers or behind people's eyes, or in cottages deep in the wood with poisonous thorns in the garden and a one-eyed cat waiting at the front door.

Faces in the Water - Pg 230

   Her sewing was the neatest I have seen, like that of the legendary small people who climb at night into the flowers and embroider the petals or sit on stalks of grass knitting dewdrops, or the evil folk who creep in people's eyes and draw the curtains and furtively stitch tapestries with poisoned needle and thread or have their workroom in people's ears, tatting back and forth with their shuttle full of decibels.

Faces in the Water - Pg 226

   The brilliant whiteness increased until it could no longer bear its own intensity, when it changed suddenly to deadly black velvet, like love which overstrains itself into hate, or like the dark side of our nature which we meet most suddenly when we believe ourselves to be journeying farthest from it.

Faces in the Water - Pg 222

   They talked of the future as if it were something tangible and within reach, like a ripe pear hanging over the fence from a neighbor's garden, whereas I had known for so long now that the future had been attacked by worms that had crept into it and eaten its heart. Faith might be a good neighbor and hang fruit over the fence but something else was needed to wield the arsenic spray.

Faces in the Water - Pg 204

   I smelled the room, I went shopping among the smells--old urine mixed with misery for it was not the honest stench of babies not yet trained but a preserved and outcast adult smell of those who had known and been deprived of their knowing; the smell of stale polish, straw and straw dust, sunlessness; the smell of corners, of the wooden door that had been kicked and hammered upon for seventy years.