Quotidian

On Day Four

Sarah Lotz, Day Four

- One: there is no death; and two: the souls of those who've left the physical world are always with us...-

- He'd given in to temptation, and now he had to pay. -

- 'It's why you go on a fucking cruise, innit?' he droned on. 'To have a drink and a laugh. And if the ship's going to do a Titanic, then I wanna be as pissed up as possible.' -

- It's a shame musicians are no longer required to go down with the ship. -

- Curiously, although they now had each other in person, she missed receiving Elise's emails, and Elise admitted that she missed her messages, too. There was an intimacy in writing that was somehow absent from personal interactions, although she couldn't complain. -

On I Wrote This For You

Please Find This, I Wrote This For You

- You've written my story backwards. -

- I have pretended to go mad in order to tell you the things I need to. I call it art. -

- My apologies if I haven't written in a while. It's just that words ran out of letters (these are the last in the bag). It's just that language isn't perfect. It's just, me. -

- It says that there is no right way to feel but, right now, after something like this happens, you do need to feel however you're feeling and that feeling this way, however you're feeling, is healthy. -

- I am these words and these pages. -

*See blog: http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me/

On She Will Build Him a City

Raj Kamal Jha, She Will Build Him a City

- So many question marks, their dots and their hooks float in the air, block my view of your beautiful face. And I say, yes, maybe there is. -

- He is going to kill and he is going to die. That's all we know for now, let's see what happens in between. -

- This time it's the road that has become a living thing curling up into the sky, then coming down to break his car window and swallow him. -

- My wife says your KG teacher is the one who knows you best because she knows you when you know nothing, she is the one who teaches you how to read, write, count and I never got to say thank you to you. -

- The shortest love story ever told is when a parent tells her child that she loves a man who is not her father. -

- Why don't you push me to learn how to live without you? -

On The Fetch

Finuala Dowling, The Fetch

- Nina imagined that hell might be like this: being mauled by a tall woman in tight stonewashed jeans while her husband pointed out one's aesthetic shortcomings and spoke admiringly of an ectomorph. -

- You longed for someone to notice you, the real you inside, the one that had ideas and feelings, but people kept returning to your appearance instead, forcing it upon you, saying: 'This plump milkmaid is the real Nina. She is not glamorous or fascinating or clever, but she would look good on a milk cart, surrounded by her churns.' -

- She was not a subtle, nocturnally scented shrub. Dolly was one of those people who present themselves to the world as a permanent emergency. Nothing else is important, shrieks the permanent emergency, but my crisis, my pain, my need. -

- Nina had been inside old houses that had been stricken by the past. Something sad hung about the banisters or dangled from the cornices; you found yourself walking through unexplained cold patches; you felt relieved when you were out in the sunshine again. -

- There was nothing you could do to reform a hugger. -

On Charm

Cat Hellisen, Charm

- Irene Kerry; the Girl of Failed Good Intentions. -

- The day she died, she saw her death coming and she sat me down on her bed and held my hands in hers and told me. I think it messed me up a little. -

- There's nothing slow-motion about car-accidents. One moment there's noise, then a single empty space where everyone takes a breath, and then the vultures crowd in. -

- My mother's voice is gone, the stories she read from her book can't scare me any more. -

- Making good art is painful. It sucks you up. I can feel how I've dried up inside, like a prune or a raisin, withered before my time. -

On Good Omens

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

- The manuscript arrived at their door the next morning; the author's sense of timing, as always, was exact. -

- Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men. -

- "I don't see why it shouldn't be a British Inquisition," said Brian. "Don't see why we should of fought the Armada and everything, just to have their smelly Inquisition." -

- He didn't say "that's weird." He wouldn't have said "That's weird" if a flock of sheep had cycled past playing violins. It wasn't the sort of thing a responsible engineer said. -

- DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH. -

- I don't see what's so triffic about creating people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people. -

On The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician

Tendai Huchu, The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician

- The tat came before the rat, though the a-tat remained in pretty much the same place, producing a distorted, yet familiar sound, but the Alfonso Pfukuto, the knocker, was an ambiguous man. -

- This book, Boethius; masterpiece written when he was in prison, was one of those favourite texts he returned to time and again, hoping with each reading to unlearn the last and discover it anew. -

- The natives gave directions using street names as if they were reading off maps, but how does one orient oneself without reference to a landmark in the environment? -

- This was not the first time he had fallen in love with music as the backdrop. He could not tell whether it was music that made him fall in love or whether it had just been there at the time. -

- They sit in the shade of Edinburgh's Shame. -

- But, if there is one thing I've learnt in the last few years, it's that everyone needs a story. That's all our lives amount to, nothing but stories that we hope will live on after we are gone. -

On Dracula

Bram Stoker, Dracula

- But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for. -

- Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the 'New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. -

- All men are mad in some way or the other, and insamuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world. -

- That way madness lies! -

- It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy, and reason so sound. -

On The Icarus Girl

Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl

- Her mother's voice sounded through the hallway, mixing with the mustiness around her so well that the sound almost had a smell. To Jess, sitting in the cupboard, the sound of her name was strange, wobbly, misformed, as if she were inside a bottle, or a glass cube, maybe, and Mum was outside it, tapping. -

- Jess liked haiku. She thought they were incredible and really sort of terrible. She felt, when reading over the ones she'd written herself, as if she were being punched very hard, just once, with each haiku. -

- 'Maybe that's why you get so sad,' she said, 'because you're so clever.' -

- All my thoughts have left, / with her. / I thought I'd kept them in my head / But when I tried to find the thoughts / They all told me she was / dead. -

- Jess blinked. It was incredible that her mother could really believe that a mother's dreams, a mother's fears, were the same as her child's, as if these things could be passed on in the same way as her frizzy hair had been, or the shape of her nose. -

- Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. . . Only two people who are full up can be friends. They don't want anything from each other except friendship... -

On H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

- Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work. -

- And when I think of the U2 pilot up there reading a book about King Arthur...I can't help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude. And the solitude of of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading The Once and Future King fifty thousand feet above the clouds - that makes my heart break just a little... -

- Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. -

- There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, thought you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are. -


- Hands are for other humans to hold. -