“'Don’t seek out elaborate metaphors,' her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother’s death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief."
--Kate Atkinson, Transcription #SundaySentence
#SundaySentence
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"I beg you
do something
learn a dance step
something to justify your existence
something that gives you the right
to be dressed in your skin and body hair
learn to walk and to laugh
because it would be too senseless
after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life."
From Prayer to the Living to Forgive Then for Being Alive
written in French by Charlotte Delbo Translated by Lisa Mullenneaux
MastodonAuschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmuseum@mastodon.world)Attached: 3 images
10 August 1913 | A Frenchwoman Charlotte Delbo was born. A writer & resistance fighter.
In #Auschwitz from 27 Jan 1943.
No. 31661
Transferred to Ravensbrück in Jan 1944, freed thanks to a Red Cross action.
Author of a trilogy, „Auschwitz and after."
She passed away in 1985.
"We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening."
#SundaySentence from Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust https://tinyurl.com/2ep46rxp
tinyurl.comIn Search of Lost Time Volume II Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust | The Center for Fiction
“Her reclusive existence had served to release her gift and hold it at its explosive edge.”
Lyndall Gordon
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds
#SundaySentence
"No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves."
#SundaySentence from Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright https://tinyurl.com/3h7f54kt
Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings · Reading Proust : Within A Budding GroveLooking back, it seems that I spent a substantial amount of June reading the second volume of Proust’s massive novel sequence – called “Within A Budding Grove” in my transla…
"In conclusion," he said, "one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse."
- William Dodd, American Ambassador to Berlin, October, 1933
From "In The Garden Of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin" by Erik Larson
“The reader needs writers who reveal, explain, entertain, persuade, and, most of all, articulate readers’ own feelings and thoughts.” Donald Murray #SundaySentence
Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.
Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures
#SundaySentence #bookstodon
"Given I was now a beyond-the-pale, reputed to read-while-walking as if sitting down; prone, according to the community, to back-to-front reading, starting on the last page and working back to the front page because I didn't like surprises; given I put bookmarks in books, they said, or else turned down pages not correctly where I left off, but slyly at misleading places so as to deceive the public for personal round-about paranoid reasons; given I was reported to have a counting thing where I'd figure cars, lampposts and tick off landmarks whilst at the same time pretend to give directions to invisible people--all while reading-while-walking; given I didn't like pictures of people's faces on books or on record sleeves or hanging in frames on walls because I'd imagine I was being spied upon by them; [...] 'What's an affair with a major paramilitary player,' she asked, 'and who would give a damn anyway, taken amidst the craziness of all that?'"
from Milkman by Anna Burns (a very long) #SundaySentence
A few lines from Mort by Terry Pratchett, the last being my offering for #SundaySentence:
"In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn't been one of them."
"And he continued to shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected, with the purely formal resignation that each one of them had possibly sought to drive him to despair."
#SundaySentence from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust https://tinyurl.com/2f8b4jaa
tinyurl.comMarcel Proust, Lydia Davis, William Carter: In Search of Lost Time,
vol. 1: Swann's Way
Continued thread
And this line, from the same book, is a feeling I can relate to:
“Meanwhile Charlie, having gone to the library and selected a book, was sitting there reading with the air of a man who has joined a book club and hopes none of his friends will call him up for a year.”
— Earl Derr Biggers
“What is wealth? Write down list of friends and you have answer.”
— Charlie Chan Carries on by Earl Derr Biggers
“In the half-circle formed by her body a man sat negligently, using her knees as a rest for his right elbow, and her hips as a support for his back.”
#SundaySentence from The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell, 1938 #Bookstodon
"Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly in my mind like a flowering Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time - perhaps, quite simply, from what dream - it comes."
#SundaySentence from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust https://tinyurl.com/y6ymmmue
Project GutenbergSwann's Way by Marcel ProustFree kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.
He supposed she was the sort of woman who thought he was an idiot from the get-go, although he seemed to meet no other kind these days.
Kate Atkinson
Death at the Sign of the Rook
#SundaySentence #KateAtkinson #bookstodon #AmReading
Trump is declaring fake "emergencies" while reducing our ability to deal with real ones.
Robert Reich
Trump has cut FEMA grants for communities recovering from disasters as he plans to phase out the agency.
He's also taking an axe to NOAA the agency that warns us of severe weather.
[Cartoon by Dave Whamond]
“The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, adroit, the other dark, properly dressed, gentle and firm, all too supple, lisps, both epicurean, constantly drink wine, coffee, beer, schnapps, smoke uninterruptedly, one of them pours for the other, their room across from mine full of French books, write a great deal in the musty writing room when the weather is nice” (Kafka’s Diaries, 29 July 1914).
"The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest."
#SundaySentence from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust https://tinyurl.com/2s47sx9p
Penguin Random House CanadaIn Search of Lost Time Volume I Swann's Way by Marcel Proust | Penguin Random House CanadaIn Swann’s Way, the themes of Proust’s masterpiece are introduced, and the narrator’s childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in the evocation of the famous maternal good-night kiss.
“While I enjoy the sweet friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.”
#Thoreau 14 July 1845
#SundaySentence