"On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch." -- from José Saramago's 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', trans. Giovanni Pontiero
"We could recognize her in an instant, even though we’ve never seen her up close. She’s always with us, a whisper on the wind, a shadow passing over our eyes when we’re looking away." - from the story Last Tour Into the Hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste in the anthology of Baba Yaga stories, Into the Forest
"In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further."
Gaspery Roberts, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
"There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening. They trashed the optician’s interior. They were many of them, they never paid their rent, and they couldn’t be evicted." -- from
Mariana Leky's What You Can See From Here, translated by Tess Lewis
"People have been living on earth for thousands of years, and yet they’ve still not learned to be good. How strange." - from The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith
"I cannot write in any other way, and if I have thrown myself into this writing, it was precisely in order to give myself sufficient time to think, to think with time." - from José Saramago's first novel 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', translated by Giovanni Pontiero #SundaySentence#BookQuote#quotes#reading@bookstodon
"We lived on this earth. Don’t entrust it into the hands of the destroyers, the barbarians and the ignoramuses." - from a note that was found in Konstantin Paustovsky's writing desk after his death in 1968
I've just started reading Paustovsky's The Story of a Life, which is a collection of the first three of six books of the Ukrainian/Russian writer's memoirs published by NYRB earlier this year. It's kind of a doorstopper, but I already don't want it to end.
"The rich man never sees or notices, he simply looks and lights a cigarette with the air of someone expecting it to arrive already lit." - from 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy' by José Saramago (tr. Giovanni Pontiero)
“This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world, cheese so good it inspired a line every first Saturday of the month”
A cheesy #SundaySentence from Deacon King Kong by James McBride
"I like books that make you discover other books—a virtuous cycle that should never be broken." - from 'Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop' by Alba Donati (tr. Elena Pala)
"So that is why I found myself waiting at a station in a city whose name I could hardly pronounce, and where I did not speak a word of the local language, waiting for someone I would not recognise to take me somewhere I did not know." - from 'Who's Who When Everyone is Someone Else' by C.D. Rose
“Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw - what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps on you.”
"The sentence that best expresses a snail's way of life: 'The right thing to do is to do nothing, the place to do it is in a place of concealment and the time to do it is as often as possible." - from 'The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating' by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
And music is only good if, first of all, it makes you weep, second, if it makes you die laughing, and third, if it gets your legs and arms, your bosom and rear end moving and whirls you through the room like a maniac.
--from The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil (tr. David Burnett)
"In the same way, a village on the side of a hill, seen from a train, may look like the perfect place to spend the rest of the your days, yet if you were to get out of the train and go into the village you would find that the magic had escaped from it to settle on the tail of the departing train which had so bored you as you sat in it and yearned towards the village." - from The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens