art remains

“The isms go, the ist dies, art remains”

~~ Vladimir Nabokov

a single diaper

"Usually, our husbands had nothing to do with them. They never changed a single diaper. They never washed a dirty dish. They never touched a broom. In the evening, no matter how tired we were when we came in from the fields, they sat down and read the paper while we cooked dinner for the children and stayed up washing and mending piles of clothes until late."

~~ from The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

An abominable religion

"'An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.' He turned again to Okonkwo and said, 'Thank you for calling us together.'"

~~ from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

W. H. Auden

"As a young man, W. H. Auden renounced his faith. He wrote his most popular poems during this period of unbelief in his native England—notably the rousing civil-war poem “Spain.” As such works skyrocketed him to fame, Auden recognized that he was being tempted into soaring rhetoric and sweeping moral judgments that failed to reflect the subtleties of real life. Believing such a performance to be unethical, he abjured his position as national icon and fled to America."

good riddance

"Nneka had had four previous pregnancies and childbirths. But each time she had borne twins, and they had been immediately thrown away. Her husband and his family were already becoming highly critical of such a woman and were not unduly perturbed when they found she had fled to join the Christians. It was a good riddance."

~~ from Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Rabbit's last stop (sort of)

 

from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

captured the bat

At first, it served my wife and me as our bedroom. On day two or three, I was hovering in that space between wake and sleep when I suddenly felt something hovering above my head. Resisting the urge to duck under my covers, I mustered all my courage, stood up, ran outside to get my fishing net, came back in, and boldly captured the bat, without waking my wife.

the old Nazi

 

from Be Mine by Richard Ford

He liked to be alone

"Margaret Obank writes: Mahmoud was a completely secular person, rather philosophical, an avid reader, elegant in his dress, and supremely modest in his opinion of himself. He liked to be alone, but would always be ready to speak on the telephone."

From Detroit

"From Detroit, when I told her semi-coherently what little I knew about Paul's situation, she seemed glad to hear from me, was completely ready to step in and seemed to know all that was required. She, for starters, wasn't satisfied with the evaluation at Cornell. ("Cursory at best. This is much too serious.") These first-rate specialists only trust their own--their own nurses, techs, phlebotomists, scanners, pipettes, blood pressure cuffs, etc. Medicine, in most ways, is not a science or an art, but a guildish freemasonry extending back to black mysteries and necromancy. I'm okay with it."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford