Campo Santo - W.G. Sebald
“There, in that vast space still almost untouched by human hand, was the abode of the armies of the dead, and clad in the full, billowing cloaks of the brotherhood of corpses, or the colorful uniforms of fusiliers who had fallen on the battlefields of Wagram and Waterloo, they set out from the maquis to ensure that they received the share of life due to them.”
p. 28
Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
“The wall spun until Rodman’s face came into focus, framed in the door’s small pane like the face of a fish staring in the visor of a diver’s helmet - a bearded fish that smiled, distorted by the beveled glass, and flapped a vigorous fin.”
p. 21
Art by Katie Vane
The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
“His mind was a slippery, reptilian thing.”
p. 96
The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
“His smile was full of cheap sunsets and lonely Christmases.”
p. 75
The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
“The Ping-Pong table sagged in the middle of the room, like a rotting sea vessel.”
p. 42
Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel García Márquez
“He turned around several times and realized he was in the middle of a circle of phantasmagoric nuns with veiled faces who brandished their crucifixes and pursued him with their cries.”
p. 146
Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel García Márquez
“They spent the mornings stumbling through exercises under the trees in the orchard, she with patience and love and he with the obstinacy of a stonecutter, until the repentant madrigal surrendered to them without regret.”
p. 37
Art by Katie Vane
Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel García Márquez
“He was a funereal, effeminate man, as pale as a lilly because the bats drained his blood while he slept.”
p. 9
Pnin -Vladimir Nabokov
“Then the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.”
p. 191
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
“They exchanged a few words, she smiled at him in the remembered fashion, from under her dark brows, with that bashful slyness of hers; and the contour of her prominent cheekbones, and the elongated eyes, and the slenderness of arm and ankle were unchanged, were immortal, and then she joined her husband who was getting his overcoat at the cloakroom, and that was all—-but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.”
p. 134
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
“The piquancy of these pinnacles and the merry, somewhat even inebriated air the mansion had of having been composed of several smaller Northern Villas, hoisted into mid-air and knocked together anyhow, with parts of unassimilated roofs, half-hearted gables, cornices, rustic quoins, and other projections sticking out on all sides, had, alas, but briefly attracted tourists.”
p. 123
Art by Sam Jacoff
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
“He had fallen asleep at last, despite the discomfort in his back, and in the course of one of those dreams that still haunt Russian fugitives, even when a third of a century has elapsed since their escape from the Bolsheviks, Pnin saw himself fantastically cloaked, fleeing through great pools of ink under a cloud-barred moon from a chimerical palace, and then pacing a desolate strand with his dead friend Ilya Isadorovich Polyanski as they waited for some mysterious deliverance to arrive in a throbbing boat from beyond the hopeless sea.”
p. 109
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
“Technically speaking, the narrator’s art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes.”
p. 31
Art by Chris Beeston
Art by Sam Jacoff
“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country - William H. Gass
“We pull down darkness when we go to bed; put out like Oedipus the actually offending organ, and train our touch to lies.”
p. 202
