The motions. She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Astonish Me - Pg 42
Astonish Me - Pg 38
That day, before, I said you were lucky because you'd decided for yourself what you wanted out of life and I hadn't. But that wasn't true. I realized later I'd decided for myself that I want you. Will you please just consider that I'm the right one? just consider it. Don't decide now. Consider it, I don't know, forever. Or at least until it happens.
I am going to have one more little bit of whiskey, and then I am going to mail this. And in the morning I'll probably regret everything, but it'll be too late.
Astonish Me - Pg 30
He missed her, but he also felt a self-congratulatory satisfaction in having outgrown her. He learned to play racquetball. He drank beer. He decided on psychology, much to the disappointment of his mother, who had been pushing for medicine. He dated a girl named Sarah and lost his virginity to her. Everything was fine, and then, late one night, drunk, he wrote his first letter to Joan.
Astonish Me - Pg 30
Their friendship was no longer a thing in itself. They were warily circling a different thing, something that might exist or might not.
Astonish Me - Pg 27
She smiled ruefully. "With my mom, it's like she's missed the whole point of my entire life. I work myself to death at something that's really actually important, and all she wants is for me to be a secretary. It's not like I know if ballet's going to work out, but I have to believe or else there's no point.
Astonish Me - Pg 26
As he started across the sand, he kept his eyes on the terrain in front of him, but his nerves were busily mapping her body. His hands were wrapped around the backs of her thighs. He could feel her ropy muscles under his fingers and a film of sweat. The rough plaster of her cast occasionally scraped the outside of his left calf. her arms were around his neck, her sharp chin on his shoulder, the soft points of her small breasts against his back.
Astonish Me - Pg 24
At first, he had been eager to spend long, unsupervised hours indoors with Joan, but she was so morose that it seemed inappropriate to persist in the hope that they would finally make out, if only to dispel the boredom. Instead he made sandwiches for her that she didn't eat, poured Tab over ice, changed the channel at her bidding, and waited for the unseen filaments of her ligament to knit themselves back together.
Astonish Me - Pg 20
Jacob and his two older sisters had high IQs, and their father, a naval officer, was frequently reposted, allowing their ambitious, unmaternal mother to skip her children forward in school until they were high school freshmen at twelve and college students at sixteen. The great mercy of Jacob's life was that he grew early (but then stopped--he is not tall) and was a reasonably handsome, affable kid, good enough at baseball and track to avoid classification as an irredeemable nerd.
Astonish Me - Pg 19
Joan had not appeared to be very attached to the others, had certainly not loved any of them. Then Rusakov came along and swallowed her up, and Jacob's belief that they would end up together one day, after they'd exhausted the dubious pleasures of trying out people they didn't love, had begun to dwindle.
Astonish Me - Pg 15
The yellow night drops a window-square on the pale sheet. Tom makes a rough sound in his sleep that might be Old or Middle English. The cells continue to multiply.
Astonish Me - Pg 11
Outside, the three of them find a taxi heading downtown. The city's summer breath rushes forcefully in through the windows, smelling of garbage and gasoline, and they recline in the warm air, saying little, worn out but also energized, their blood circulating smoothly, as though the performance had swept their veins clean.
Astonish Me - Pg 11
She likes Yvette, finds her dippy and harmless. Yvette was born in France and retains traces of an accent and of continental diffidence even though she has lived in New York since kindergarten.
Astonish Me - Pg 8
Elaine knows all the bouncers in the city and has enticed Joan to nightclubs and parties where glittering people loom out of the smoke and flashing lights, sometimes in costume--Cleopatras, unicorns, Dionysuses--slip-sliding and pivoting, not caring how they dance, just that they are dancing.
Astonish Me - Pg 4
Love in a ballet is something that does not exist and then suddenly does, its beginning marked by pantomime, faces fixed in rapture, a dance. After, when they are hidden in the wings or behind the curtain, the dancers will grimace like goblins, letting the pain show.
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