7. The Forbidden Bride by Cheryl Reavis

Title:  The Forbidden Bride

Author: Cheryl Reavis

Publication: Harlequin Historicals

My Humble Opinion: I wanted to read a Harlequin Historical in order to get back in the mode of writing one. HH’s are very formula-based, and I wanted to stay within the pace and mood that is usually expected of them. I was pleasantly surprised with this book, as I have not found many of the newer Harlequin Historical to be very impressive, compared to their predecessors.  This one was well written, intriguing, researched to the appropriate level, and, naturally, satisfyingly romantic. ☺

Favorite Quote(s):

“Jane was the kind of woman Reverend Branwall had once warned him about. The kind whose heart and soul were worthy of a man’s admiration and protection. The kind whose welfare meant more to him than his own. The kind who had the power to hurt him at every turn, yet would not do it. That kind, the reverend said, rendered a man helpless – and was the only kind ever worth having.” (239)

6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Title: Wuthering Heights

Author: Emily Brontë

Publisher: Bantam Books

My Humble Opinion: Yes, they’re all insane. Certifiably insane.

My Favorite Quotes:

If looks have language… (4)

By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate. (4)

Dog Scene – page 4-5

Meanwhile, the young man had slung onto his person a decidedly shabby upper garment, and, erecting himself before the blaze, looked down on me, from the corner of his eyes, for all the world as if there were some mortal feud unavenged between us. (9)

A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself. (25)

The spectre showed a spectre’s ordinary caprice; it gave no sign of being. (25)

The distance from the gate to the grange is two miles: I believe I managed to make it four; what with losing myself among the trees, and sinking up to the neck in snow: a predicament which only those who have experienced it can appreciate. (28)

End of page 74 – Catherine’s love for Heathcliff

I determined to watch his movements. My heart invariably cleaved to the master’s, in preference to Catherine’s side: with reason I imagined, for he was kind, and trustful, and honourable; and she – she could not be called the opposite, yet she seemed to allow herself such wide latitude, that I had little faith in her principles, and still less sympathy for her feelings. (98)

On pages 136-137, the section used in Stephenie Meyer’s novel Eclipse can be found, discussing Heathcliff’s love for Catherine

He might as well plant an oak in a flower pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares. (141)

Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. (143)

‘I shall not be at peace,’ moaned Catherine, recalled to a sense of physical weakness by the violent, unequal throbbing of her heart, which beat visibly and audibly under this excess of agitation. (146)

‘The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it. (147)

‘I have not broken your heart – you have broken it, and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me, that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you – oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?’ (148)

I don’t know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter – the Eternity they have entered – where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness. I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr. Linton’s, when he so regretted Catherine’s blessed release! (151)

“Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” – Mr. Heathcliff (153)

‘”I’m weary of enduring now,’ I replied; ‘ and I’d be glad of a retaliation that wouldn’t recoil on myself; but treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends: they wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies”‘ (160) Mrs. Dean

It is preferable to be hated than loved by him. (166)

Time brought resignation, and a melancholy sweeter than common joy. (168)

‘I fret about nothing on earth except papa’s illness,’ answered my companion. ‘I care for nothing in comparison with papa. And I’ll never – never – oh, never, while I have my senses, do an act or say a word to vex him. I love him better than myself, Ellen; and I know it by this: I pray every night that I may live after him: because I wold rather be miserable than that he should be: that proves I love him better than myself.’

‘Good words,’ I replied. ‘But deeds must prove it also; and after he is well, remember, you don’t forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear.’ (213)

We deferred our excursion till the afternoon; a golden afternoon of August: every breath from the hills so full of life, that it seemed whoever respired it, though dying, might revive.

Catherine’s face was just like the landscape – shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient; and her poor little heart reproached itself for even that passing forgetfulness of its cares. (243)

263-265 Heathcliff talking about his Catherine’s gravesite

‘In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That however which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in ever tree– filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women- my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! (296)

I distinguished Mr. Heathcliff’s step, restlessly measuring the floor; and he frequently broke the silence by a deep inspiration, resembling a groan. He muttered detached words also; the only one I could catch was the name of Catherine, coupled with some wild term of endearments or suffering; and spoken as one would speak to a person present: low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of his soul. (303)

5. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Title: The Importance of Being Earnest

Author: Oscar Wilde

Publication: Dover Thrift Edition

My Humble Opinion: This has always been one of my favorite plays, although I’ve never read it as thoroughly as I did this time. The humor kills me. Slays me to the ground.

My Favorite Quotes:

Algernon [Languidly]: I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.
Lane: No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself. (2)

Jack: When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring. (2)

Algernon: The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.
Jack: I have no doubt about that, dear Algy. The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted. (3)

Algernon: Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right. (3)

Algernon: You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to everyone as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest looking person I ever saw in my lift. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn’t Ernest. (5)

Jack: My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression. (5)

Jack: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! (6)

Lady Bracknell: Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of this modern sympathy with invalids. I consider is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life. (9)

Gwendolen: Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous. (10)

Jack: I know nothing, Lady Bracknell
Lady Bracknell: I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. (12-13)

Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. (14)

Algernon: My dear boy, I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. (15)

Jack: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever now-a-days. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
Algernon: We have
Jack: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
Algernon: The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.
Jack: What fools! (16)

Algernon: What shall we do after dinner? Go to the theatre?
Jack: Oh, no! I loathe listening.
Algernon: Well, let us go to the Club?
Jack: Oh, no! I hate talking.
Algernon: Well, we might trot round to the Empire at ten?
Jack: Oh, no! I can’t bear looking at things. It is so silly.
Algernon: Well, what shall we do?
Jack: Nothing!
Algernon: It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. (17)

Algernon: I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane.
Lane: It never is, sir.
Algernon: Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist.
Lane: I do my best to give satisfaction, sir. (18)

Algernon: I never say anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result. (30)

Algernon: If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated. (30)

Cecily: It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. (31)

Cecily: And of course a man who is much talked about is always very attractive. (32)

Cecily: I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest. (33)

Cecily: Pray do! I think that whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid. (35)

Gwendolen: I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. (36)

Cecily: This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen [Satirically]: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different. (37)

Cecily: That certainly seems a satisfactory explanation, does it not?
Gwendolen: Yes, dear, if you can believe him.
Cecily: I don’t. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer.
Gwendolen: True. In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing. (43-44)

Lady Bracknell: To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable. (48)

Gwendolen: If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life. (52)

Lady Bracknell: I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing. (52)

Gwendolen: This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last. (52)

Jack: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
Gwendolen: I can. For I feel that you are sure to change. (54)

4. Othello by William Shakespeare

Title: Othello

Author: William Shakespeare

My Humble Opinion: Surprisingly not well-versed in Shakespeare, I’ve been very much enjoying what I’ve read of him these past few months. Although I knew the basic storyline of Othello, it was nice to enjoy Shakespeare’s beautiful writing. It truly is poetry in so many ways, and I can’t help but ponder the beauty and the truth of so many of the lines he writes. He was aware of the psychology of man in an insightful and profound way.

My Favorite Quotes:

Iago:  you are one of those that will not serve God if the devil bid you. (1.1.105)

Brabantio: Thou art a villain
Iago: You are – a senator. (1.1.114-115)

Othello: She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange
‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. (1.3.158-160)

Roderigo: It is silliness to live when to live is torment. (1.3.303)

Iago: ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. (1.3.314-316)

Iago: With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. (2.1.166-167)

Othello: O my soul’s joy! (2.1.181)

Othello: (I cannot speak enough of this content;
It stops me here [touches his heart]; it is too much
of joy) 2.1.193-195

Iago: Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me
For making him egregiously an ass. (2.1.308-309)

Cassio: I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking; I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment. (2.3.31-34)

Cassio: Reputation, reputation, reputations. O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. (2.3.261-263)

Iago: Reputation is an idle and most false imposition. (2.3.268-269)

Iago: So will I turn her virtue into pitch.
And out of her goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all. (2.3.360-362)

Iago: What wound did ever heal but by degrees? (2.3.371)

Othello: I should have found in some place of my soul / A drop of patience. (4.2. 51-52)

Othello: This sorrow’s heavenly, It strikes where it doth love. (5.2.22)

Desdemonna: That death’s unnatural that kills for loving. (5.2.42)

3. Anam Cara by John O’Donohue

Title:  Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Author: John O’Donohue

My Humble Opinion: Genius, as always. John O’Donohue is my hero. I started this book during my trip to Ireland in October of 2008, but put it aside when I found I could not handle the sheer depth and profundity of it, especially while simultaneously experiencing the beautiful and transcending quality of the very land Mr. O’Donohue so generously wrote about. I had the honor of sitting beside John O’Donohue’s grave one cold but light-infused morning, and reading to him a section of his own work. I cried with mixed emotions, grateful to have felt the impact of his gifts upon the world, yet saddened that I never had the honor of shaking his hand. He has left a profound legacy behind him, and I am forever indebted.

My Favorite Quotes: (I’ve only typed up my favorite quotes from the first 50 pages or so – I will be add to this later)

“Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.” (XV)

“When you had an ‘anam cara,’ (soul friend), your friendship cut across all convention and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul.” (xvii)

“Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in this modern world. We are not even aware of our loss, consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely unintelligible.” (2)

“Darkness is the ancient womb.” (2)

“Every thought you have is a flint moment, a spark of light from your inner darkness.” (4)

“The soul awakens and lives in light. It helps us to glimpse the sacred depths within us.” (5)

“Everything that happens to you has the potential to deepen you.” (5)

“… the hearth of your own spirit… Love begins with paying attention to others, with an act of gracious self-forgetting. This is the condition in which we grow.”

“The whole time… love is but a few inches away from you. It is at the edge of your soul, but you have been blind to its presence.”
Pasternak: “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.”  (8)

“Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes.” (9)

“We do not need to go out to find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.” (11)

“Love is the deepest language and presence of soul.” (11)

“In the sacred kinship of real love two souls are twinned. The outer shell and contour of identity become porous. You suffuse each other.” (13)

“Love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other.” (15)

“Jesus, as the son of God, is the Other in the universe; he is the prism of all difference. He is the secret anam cara of every individual. In the embrace of this eternal friendship, we dare to be free.” (15)

“All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and contours.” (18)

“Regularly throughout conversation in Gaelic, there is explicit recognition that he divine is present in others. The stranger does not come accidentally; he brings a particular gift and illumination.” (18)

“A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.” (19)

“The life and passion of a person leaves an imprint on the ether of a place. Love does not remain within the heart, it flows out to build secret tabernacles in a landscape.” (19)

“When you give in to creative passion, it will bring you to the ultimate thresholds of transfiguration and renewal. This growth causes pain, but it is a sacred pain.” (22)

“Friendship is always an act of recognition. This metaphor can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body. When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your lover’s clay and your clay lay side by side. Then, in the turning of the seasons, your one clay divided and separated. Without even knowing it, your secret memory mourned your loss of each other.” (22)

Meister Eckhart: Many people wonder where they should be and what they shoul do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. (24)

“In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient of mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.” (24-25)

“You do not have to go outside yourself to know what love is.” (26)

“You are sent here to love and receive love… It is a freedom. Love should make you free. You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect, and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself.” (27-28)

“To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.” (28) – Exercise on page 28 – Nourishing Stream

“It is usually the difference between people that makes one person attractive to another. Consequently, this difference needs to be preserved and nurtured.” (29)
Kahlil Gibran: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”

Pablo Neruda: “I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells / dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses / I want / to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees.”
-    shows that love is also the awakening of springtime in the clay part of the heart (32)

“A strange dynamic comes alive in the soul if you make something into an issue… Frequently, it is better simply to acknowledge that there is a wound there, but then stay away from it. Every chance you get, shine the gentle light of the soul in on the wound.” (33)

“When you love someone, it is destructive to keep scraping at the clay of your belonging.” (34)

“Landscape: the most ancient presence in the world.” (37)

“We cannot seal off the eternal. Unexpectedly and disturbingly, it gazes in at us through the sudden apertures in our patterned lives.” (42)

Heidegger: we are custodians of deep and ancient thresholds.

“Your body is as ancient as the clay of the universe from which it is made; and your feet on the ground are a constant connection with the earth. Your feet bring your private clay in touch with the ancient, mother clay from which you first emerged.” (42)

The Face and the Second Innocence – 43-44
“the face always reveals who you are, and what life has done to you.”

“Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe.
Your body is the home of your soul on earth.” (44-45)

“The body is a sacrament: a visible sign of invisible grace.” (47)

The Body As A Mirror of the Soul (48-50)“>

2. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

Title: The Power and the Glory

Author: Graham Greene

Publisher: Viking Press 1962

My Humble Opinion:  This is a great book. Written beautifully. The omniscient point of view is something you don’t see often these days, which was interesting (and sometimes confusing) to read. A heavy book, sometimes depressing – a caustic realism, straining to hope. Powerful commentary on religion and faith; staggering portrayal of early 20th century Mexico.

My Favorite Quote(s):

There was an enormous sense of freedom and air upon the gulf, with the low tropical shore-line buried in darkness as deeply as any mummy in a tomb. I am happy, the young girl said to herself without considering why, I am happy. (25)

He walked slowly: happiness drained out of him more quickly and completely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared. (49)

He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man makes that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration: there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (81)

… or perhaps it was only that the desire of life, which moves in cycles, was returning – any sort of life. (159)

… the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had faded and left a kind of grace. (160)

At the word bastard his heart moved painfully: it was as when a man in love hears a stranger name a flower which is also the name of a woman. Bastard: the word filled him with miserable happiness. It brought his own child nearer: he could see her under the tree by the rubbish-dump, unguarded. He repeated “Bastard?” as he might have repeated her name –with a tenderness disguised as indifference. (168)

The old man was muttering, and the priest’s thoughts went back to Brigida. The knowledge of the world lay in her like the dark explicable spot in an X-ray photograph: he longed – with a breathless feeling in the breast—to save her, but he knew the surgeons decision—the ill was incurable. (172)

“What’s the good of your saying an act of contrition now in this state of mind?”
“But the ugliness…”
“Don’t believe that. It’s dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.”
“Beauty,” she said with disgust. “Here. In this cell. With strangers all round.”
“Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain.” (176)

That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone: now in his corruption he had learnt… (187)

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin—only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. These people went out of the stable clean: he was the only one left who hadn’t repented, confessed, and been absolved. He wanted to say to this man: “Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open – it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy… it can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of God. You don’t need a penance, my child, you have suffered quite enough,” and to this other: “Lust is not the worst things. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.” But the habit of the confessional reasserted itself: it was as if he was back in the little stuffy wooden boxlike coffin in which men bury their uncleanness with their priest. He said: “Mortal sin… danger… self-control,” as if those words meant anything at all. He said: “Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.” (231-232)

“How do you know? Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man—or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.” He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “It’s wanting to protect Him from yourself.” (233)

“Oh,” the priest said, “that’s another thing altogether –God is love. I don’t’ say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us – God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark? Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.” (269)

“I can’t think how a man like you can believe in those things. The Indians, yes. Why, the first time they see an electric light they think it’s a miracle.”
“And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you might think so too.” He giggled unconvincingly behind the smiling mask. “Oh, it’s funny, isn’t it? It isn’t a case of miracles not happening – it’s just a case of people calling them something else. Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all—what’s the expression?—reserve their opinion. They won’t say it’s a miracle, because that’s a word they don’t like. Then it happens again and again perhaps – because God’s about on earth – and they say: there aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has again disproved a miracle.” He giggled again. “You can’t get round them.” (270-271)

He felt like someone who had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. (284)

1. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Title: As I Lay Dying

Author: William Faulkner

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1957

My Humble Opinion: Impressively written, but I found the syntax strange and the random quotations and transitions hard to follow. I was terribly annoyed for the first few chapters, but eventually found the flow of the writing. I loved how each chapter was seen through the eyes of a different character, written in the first person. My absolute favorite chapter was Addie (the mother’s).
My Favorite Quote(s):

I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone, and the process of coming unalone is terrible. (Dewey Dell 59)

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth. (Dewey Dell 61)
“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you were filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he doesnt not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are ‘was’, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is ‘was’, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is , so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am ‘is’.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” (Darl 76)

My mother is a fish. (Vardaman 79)

So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are not good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew that it had been , not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.

I would think that even while I lay with him in the dark and Cash asleep in the cradle within the swing of my hand. I would think that if he were to wake and cry, I would suckle him, too. Anse or love: it didn’t matter. My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I realised that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he couldn’t have known he was right anymore than I could have known I was wrong.

“Nonsense,” Anse said; “you and me aint nigh done chapping yet, with just two.”

He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a _________ and I couldn’t think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse. It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. And I would think Cash and Darl that way until their names would die and solidify into a shape and then fade away, I would say, All right. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they call them.

And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. (Addie 163-166)

Then it was over. Over in the sense that he was gone and I knew that,  see him again though I would, I would never again see him coming swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a gallant garment already blowing aside  with the speed of his secret coming. (Addie 167)

My father said that the reason for living was getting ready to stay dead. I knew at last what he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house afterward. (Addie 168)

Books, Books, Books!

I have created this blog as an addendum to my travel/life blog: Kara Emily’s Hearth.

The year 2009 welcomed, for me, a burgeoning passion to self-educate myself – to read, read, and read some more. I have spent 18 years of my life in formal education settings, and after a year or two away, I finally feel the fire to learn and read return to me.

Here you will find a list of the books I have read, starting in January 2009. Each title will hold a link to the product on Amazon, so you can easily navigate and expand your bookshelf, as well.

Quotations are a huge thing for me as I read, so my main goal with this blog is to not only share my opinions of the books I read, but predominantly the quotes that really stood out and inspired me. A good book often speaks for itself, and I am often disappointed if I can’t walk away with at least a couple lines that stir the soul, Therefore, I I won’t bore you too much with my personal opinions here; rather, I would like to add another source of quotational genius into the world.

Of course, if I feel the need to expostulate on something profound, I do hope you will humor me, and perhaps join in the fun?