zozoduck

[zozoduck]

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire. - Teilhard de Chardin

[zozoduck]

His gaze gets stuck to her, and then he has to detach it with brutal care, like someone removing his tongue from a frozen pump. —Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union

[zozoduck]

"Listen," Mannering said firmly. (He was rather bewildered that he had so swiftly lost the upper hand.) "I didn’t mean for us to start on the wrong foot." "Certainly you meant it," said Gascoigne. "Perhaps now you regret it, but you meant it." Mannering swore. "I don’t regret anything!" he cried. "I don’t regret anything at all!" "That accounts for your serenity." - Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

[zozoduck]

Spend any time in his presence and your reputation begins to curdle. - Graydon Carter, Editor's Letter, Vogue Dec 2017

[zozoduck]

... it occured to me—not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience—that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked feeling, and the feeling was good. ... Presently I found myself approaching populated places. Passing through a red light was like a sip of forbidden Burgandy when I was a child. Meanwhile complications were arising. I was being followed and escorted.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

By that time night had eliminated most of the landscape and as I followed the narrow winding highway, a series of short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrowed my own lights to indicated this or that curve.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

She lit up and the smoke she exhaled from her hostrils was like a pair of tusks.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

Then as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin...

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

... I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table...

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

Pratt paused trunculetly, then rubbed her index finger under her nostrils with such vigor that her nose performed a kind of war dance.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

Eventually she lived up to her IQ by finding a safer hiding place which I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school's theatrical program...

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

Above all—since we are speaking of movemet and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising up on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off...

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

... hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

The slope seemed undtrodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earned breather on the rock it had reached.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

Distant mountains. New mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south eastern ranges altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words" (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

[zozoduck]

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits.

But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to the beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

-Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver

[zozoduck]

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony. -Franz Kafka