This is a new little series that I hope will appeal as a bonus post each month on the day that my newsletter goes out! Just a small collection of beautiful or thought-arresting passages of words from whatever I’ve been reading recently. Little extracts like this are often what prompt me to seek out a book, so perhaps they might do the same for you. I know that a lot of people who follow this this blog are avid readers. Let me know if you like it. And let me know if you end up reading any of the books too.
I didn’t know how to use time. I was in too much of a hurry, had no patience, wanted everything to happen at once, on my terms, at my own speed. I had left too quickly. No wonder I never got anywhere. But I had done it, and couldn’t turn back. There was never any turning back. Each step forward was fatal, finished. The fickle finger of fate flicked you about like a tiddly-wink. I knew that much, even if I didn’t know or care where I was going.
Alan Sillitoe, Down From the Hill
Serendipitous find in The Open Book, Ponsonby
The success or failure of all human relationships lies in the atmosphere each person is aware of creating for the other, what atmosphere could a disillusioned Polly feel that she was creating for a bored and lonely Boy? Her charm, apart from her beauty, and husbands, we know, get accustomed to the beauty of their wives so that it ceases to strike them at the heart, her charm used to derive from the sphinx-like quality which came from her secret dream of Boy; in the early days of that dream coming true, at Alconleigh, happiness had made her irresistible.
Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate
Recommendation from Backlisted, Episode 4: Nancy Mitford – The Blessing
On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Recommendation from the eponymously titled 93rd Episode of Backlisted
If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. […] I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. […] The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Recommendation from the eponymously titled 67th Episode of Backlisted
They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, ‘in love’, romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. […] They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm resting on an arm. […] Neither was quite sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other. Neither dared ask.
A. S. Byatt, Possession
Picked up after reading The Children’s Book (- gifted to me by Becca)
Mad to Live 