Everything I Read

"And the hostess is going to get arch, and say, ‘You know, we have quite a celebrity with us to-night. Mrs. Parker is an authoress, I hope you realize,’ and everybody is going to coo, and say, ‘Well, well, well,’ and look at me encouragingly. And somebody will say, ‘Well, for goodness sake! And what do you write, Mrs. Parker? Goodness, I’m so ashamed, I never seem to get a chance to read a book. I’m always meaning to.’ And the hostess will say, ‘Oh, you’ll see. Maybe she’ll recite some of her little things for us, after dinner.’ Yeah, maybe she will. And maybe there was no war."

"It was a crazy year, a year when things that should have run on schedule went all which ways. It was a year when snow fell thick and lasting through April, and young ladies clad in shorts were photographed for the tabloids sunbathing in Central Park in January. It was a year when, in the greatest prosperity of the richest nation, you could not walk five city blocks without being besought by beggars; when expensively dressed women loud and lurching in public places were no uncommon sight; when drugstore counters were stacked with tablets to make you tranquil and other tablets to set you leaping. It was a year when wives whose position was only an inch or two below that of the saints—arbiters of etiquette, venerated hostesses, architects of memorable menus—suddenly caught up a travelling bag and a jewel case and flew off to Mexico with ambiguous young men allied with the arts; when husbands who had come home every evening not only at the same hour but at the same minute of the same hour came home one evening more, spoke a few words, and then went out their doors and did not come in by them again."

"She had visited innumerable specialists, spent uncounted money, endured agonizing treatments, in her endeavors to be able to hear what went on about her and to have a part in it. They had finally fitted her with a long, coiling, corrugated speaking-tube, rather like a larger intestine. One end of this she placed in her better ear, and the other she extended to those who would hold speech with her. But the shining black mouthpiece seemed to embarrass people and intimidate them; they could think of nothing better to call into it than “Getting colder out,” or “You keeping pretty well?” To hear such remarks as these she had gone through years of suffering."

"There’s little in taking or giving,
There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine."

"Mrs. Morse looked into the liquor and shuddered back from its odor. Maybe it would help. Maybe, when you had been knocked cold for a few days, your very first drink would give you a lift. Maybe whisky would be her friend again. She prayed without addressing a God, without knowing a God. Oh, please, please, let her be able to get drunk, please keep her always drunk."

"She was beginning to feel toward alcohol a little puzzled distrust, as toward an old friend who has refused a simple favor. Whisky could still soothe her for most of the time, but there were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud fell treacherously away from her, and she was sawed by the sorrow and bewilderment and nuisance of all living."

"She was not a woman given to recollections. At her middle thirties, her old days were a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film, dealing with the actions of strangers."

"They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They’ll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They’d make of you another person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They’d alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired."

"This, no song of an ingenue
This, no ballad of innocence;
This, the rhyme of a lady who
Followed ever her natural bents.
This, a solo of sapience,
This, a chantey of sophistry,
This, the sum of experiments—
I loved them until they loved me."

"Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne."

"To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier."

"She looked up at the mountains. Out in the dark on the ridge, silhouetted in the moonlight, were all the selves she could have been. They had linked their arms and were doing a kicky Scottish dance. One of them was an American Eve. She had very good skin and had married well. She lived in this house whose porch Eve was on, with several children, all boys, and a husband who was a stud farmer; they owned those beautiful horses, those perfect fields. The Eve next to her was a rougher American Ever, who had grown up and never married anyone and always looked out for herself; she was tanned and healthy and golden and she worked her own farm and owned her own beautiful thoroughbreds. Her hands were lined and strong. She knew how to breed and break a horse. Next to her was Eve now, but Eve as she’d have been if her mother hadn’t died. She was happy. She radiated light. Next to her was the Eve who had stayed with Adam Berenski. She had a blank face. Next to her was the Eve who had never met Adam Berenski. She was unimaginable. Eve had no idea what she was like. Next to her was easier, it was the air hostess Eve had wanted, when she was eight years old, to grow up to be. She was glamorous and exact. Her sixties-style coat was buttoned to the top. Next to her was an Eve just like Eve was now, in reality, but one who buttoned the top button on the coat her daughter Astrid was wearing before she went out in the cold and rain, and felt real, good love as she did, not the kind of love that made you panic but the kind that made you happy."

"The film is almost over now because everything is adding up in it. The actors from all the different segments of the story have all met each other at the school nativity play or at the airport and smiled and waved at each other like they all live in the same world and they’ve known each other all along. The actress pretending to be the Portugese cleaner has said yes to getting married to the actor most famous for being in the Jane Austen adaptation. Everybody has laughed at the fat actress pretending to be the fat sister of the Portugese cleaner. The film is supposed to be about love. But its only message, as far as Magnus can make it out, is not to be too fat if you’re a girl or everyone will think you are laughable and no one will want to marry you."

"But vows were only vows. Intentions—and no matter how serious, public, heartfelt, they were still only vows. Promises. The future still loomed before them, able to take them anywhere at all. That was their great and terrible freedom. The weird emptiness of the future! How we long to fill it in, now, in the present; and how completely we are denied."

"He felt the water heavy inside him, lungs and stomach both, and marveled that he was still conscious, still thinking. You really do get a last moment, he thought. What do you know.
And indeed he felt an enormous liquid clarity growing in him, like a flash of something or other. It was quiet and blue black white, a riot of bubbles flying in every direction around him, glowing. Blue capture plate, white quarks. Done for. Relax. Concentrate. He cast his mind deliberately back to his wife, her face, his baby held easily in his hands, and then the images tumbled, a forested cliff over ocean, a window filled with blue sky and clouds, swirling like bubbles of nothing in the rich blue field of the life he had lived, every day of it his and Pamela’s, and the crying out of his cells for oxygen felt like the pain of all that love given and lost, nothing of it saved, nothing but the implosion of drowning, the euphoria of release—and all the blue world and its blue beauty tumbled around him, flashed white and he snapped alert, wanting to speak, pregnant with a thought that would never be born."