That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one’s passion.

 —Marguerite Duras. The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Seeing Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman for their book ‘Why We Broke Up’ at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.

Opening weekend at the San Francisco Ballet’s performance of Onegin.

Tonight, I have confirmed that the New York Times has stopped the presses to redraw A1. That is, the most influential newspaper in the world has put its work and printing process on hold to make room on the front page for the obituary of a single man. If that isn’t a testament to his work, I don’t know what is.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time. If heaven was to be this world purged of disaster and nuisance, if immorality was to be this life held in poise and arrest, and if this world purged and this life unconsuming could be thought of as world and life restored to their proper natures, it is no wonder that five serene, eventless years lulled my grandmother into forgetting what she should never have forgotten.

Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson.

There it is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a hell for people but a paradise for whales.

Uncharted Books: Uncharted Kickstarter is live! ›

Murakami was in my latest Vanity Fair. One day this week I’m venturing out to get the new book.

flavorpill:

Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood

If he could ever fall for anyone, the quintessential example of masculine teen angst would probably go for the classic example of feminine teen depression. After all, Esther’s condition is much like Holden’s, although, ahem, way less phony. The two of them could sit by the duck pond together, complaining about the oppressiveness of the world and their parents’ inabilities to fully understand them, and then maybe hold hands a little.

Literary characters who would date in real life 

True story.

…and the coincidence struck me as so outlandish it was all I could do to keep from laughing. I felt as if I’d tapped in to the inner hilarity of things, or else brushed up against a truth so overwhelmingly only a fit of hysterics could keep it at bay; but maybe it wasn’t a coincidence at all…The significance of a dream, we’re told, has less to do with its overt drama than with the details; a long time ago it struck me that the same was true of real life, of what passes among us for real life.

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

-Graham Greene

“He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chapter 3, on Gatsby