finished wonder boys by michael chabon in the early hours of this morning, and i just spent all of the downtime during my shift to type up my favorite lines and selections on my phone, so here you are.
i love his descriptions, but i only included those which i found at least mildly relevant. please be warned that some of these passages are riddled with drug references.
this is in my opinion why writers-like insomniacs- are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and nissed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urhed repeatedly to do so.
i also felt that i loved emily, but in the fragmentary, half-narrative way you love people when you're stoned.
and yet for all that i still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.
after a moment we parted, and i looked at her face, freckled and pale and alive with the look of disappointment that often haunts the difficult faces of redheaded women.
when she danced she kept her eyes closed and described solitary, interlocking circles across the floor, so that there were moments when i felt that she wasn't really dancing with me at all, but simply employing me as a kind of fulcrum, a hub on which to hang the whirling spokes of herown private revolutions.
...his gait unsteady, his arms enfolded so tightly around the bones of a heloless young angel that it was impossible to say if she was holding him up or if, on the contrary, he was dragging her down.
i looked out at the morning with a caffeine quiver of hope in my spine and at the tips of my fingers.
it allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and for mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, and framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret.
to one degree or another the obsession, like all obsessions implied a certain windy emptiness within.
there was nothing in them it was an empty gaze, a hole in the fabric of the world.
they had dared one another into taking this leap like children balanced on the railing of a bridge.
[it] had been enough to trouble the edges of everything with a woozy shimmer of indeterminacy.
it struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was the perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.
while the coffee was brewing i drank a tall glass of orange juice, to which i added two tablespoons of honey, on the theory that an increase in my blood sugar, along with a massive dose of caffeine, would eliminate the last traces of my hangover. pot for the nausea and the heaviness of heart, vitamin c for the cell structure, sugar for the depleted blood, caffeine to burn off the moral fog; it was starting to come back to me now-the whole praxis of alcoholism and reckless living.
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