(School cafeteria, couple of months ago.)
Pt.3 : “Stoner” by John Williams and "Born a crime" by Trevor Noah :
https://norikaeden.hatenadiary.com/entry/2020/05/19/131947
1冊目; “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara
この本についてはquotesを書く前に、簡単に感想を書きたいと思う。
感想
: It was such a devastating read. I knew this is not an easy, light, and fun kinda book, but it was really heart-wrenching.
My expectation was pretty high especially because many people were recommending this on social media. However, although I constantly cried in the last 30-50 pages (btw this is such a thick ass book with over 700 pages), I wouldn’t say it was my favorite book. Not because it was devastating, but because there were some puzzling parts.
But it is also un-doubtful that this book is strong in many kinds of ways. To me, this book is about a life that existed no matter how short it was, no matter how “little” it was.
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And these are the quotes I chose from this book with the same reasons as I do with other “Quotes & musings”. Some, I chose it because it reminded me something about the moments of a life I know. Some, I just liked the way it’s written.
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・and feel a warm, watery, rush of happiness and thankfulness as if an ocean were rising up in his chest. I’m lucky, he’d think.
・JB’s ambition was fueled by a lust for the future, for his sports arrival to it; Jude’s he thought, was motivated more by a fear that if he didn’t move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left and about which he would tell none of them.
・He would like to make his own money, he would. But he wasn’t one of those rich kids who tortured himself about it.
・Oh, what was wrong with him ? Sex; sexuality; those too were things he should have sorted out in college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but encouraged.
・almost as if their conversation were something liquid, and he was guiding it through a series of thoughts and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape, until it reached its inevitable end.
・and in that moment his sadness was so great, so overpowering, that he wanted to tear himself, to rip the scar from the back of his hand, to shred himself into bits as he had done to Luke’s flowers.
・I have never been one of those people - I know you aren’t, either - who feels that the love one has for the child is somehow superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and greater than any other. (中略) But it’s a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not a physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what trucks us thinking that it is more significant.
・what must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasure.
And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem life seem less everyday. For a brief period - briefer and briefer with each week - the world was splendid and unknown.
・But he doesn’t want you to admire him ; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life.
・But now they are inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.
2冊目 ; A manual for cleaning women by Lucia Berlin
・We experience each story not only with our intellects and our hearts, but also through our senses.
・The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted ? Everything in Mexico tasted.
・Eloïse woke at six, as usual. She opened the shutters, watched the sky turn from milky silver to lavender grey. Palm branches slipped in the breeze like shuffled cards.
・The cookie expanded in my mouth like Japanese flowers, like a burst pillow. I gagged and wept.
・Nothing much matters, you know ? (中略) But then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole a lot.
・It got too late even to go to bed so we made some fresh coffee and sat down under the tree.
・Dixon stride down the path to the pond, walked out into the water, and pulled himself into the boat. He kissed her, pinned her down into the watery bed of the boat while he entered her. They clashed widely into each other and the boat bubbles and spun until it finally moored itself in the reeds.
・She wondered if so much passion had come from simple rage or from a sense of loss.
・She was silent. But I could see death working on her. Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don’t want to die alone.
・It was the ghostly setting moon that shone upon us as we made love that night. We lay next to each other than under the wooden revolving fan, hot, sticky. Max’s hand on my wet hair. Thank you, I whispered, to God, I think....
・I watched jealousy hit him smack in the face, in the heart. Left hook to the gut.
・I liked him right away, just talking to him on the phone. Raspy, easygoing voice with a smile and sex in it, you know what I mean. How is it that we read people by their voice anyway ?
・So many others have gone. I used to think it was funny when someone said, “I lost my husband”. But that is how it feels. Someone is missing
・The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. ←大袈裟で(でもどこか共感する)笑える文
