Shadow of the Wind

After I've read a book, I will usually save my favorite passages into notebooks or word documents to savor in the future. I thought it was this very private thing that I did and that the things I wrote had no bearing outside of the book itself. I guess what I'm realizing is that many of these sentences make sense and carry the same emotional weight when they don't come with the context. I recently read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon for my book club (which I highly recommend), and I thought I'd post those bits here for a change of pace.

"Slowly I became possessed by the absurd conviction that everything was possible, and it seemed to me that even those deserted streets and that hostile wind smelled of hope" (183).

"Sometimes Jacinta asked herself whether that dreamy peace that filled her days, that absence of consciousness, was what some people called happiness" (263).

"All I know is that those two weeks I spent with Julian were the only time in my life when I felt, for once, that I was myself, when I understood with the hopeless clarity of what cannot be explained that I would never be able to love another man the way I loved Julian, even if I spent the rest of my days trying" (369).

"'Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to'" (371).

"Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice" (419).

"'I could ell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets'" (427).

"Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires" (440).

"We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth" (440).

"Remember me, Daniel, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go" (446).

"'We all love in our own way'" (475).

"'The city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it'" (480).

"Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind" (484).

I'll Be That Pretty Motherfucker

Bianca Green / braids from Refinery 29

A Pack of Wolves

Hanna Liden / Sonja Ahlers

Oh Fuck

Lost in the Supermarket

Notes...

"The dream had the placidity of memory - not to say memory wasn't painful...but it was contained, bounded by event, and most of the time recollection was a matter of choice. Not like dreams, which knew where to find you, how to get in." Ehud Havazelet

Quogue, New York

Fuck You and Your Underground

You know those songs that you don't listen to for years and then when you hear it again you're like, "holy shit this song is really rad - why haven't I been listening to it for the last few years?" I just had one of those moments with Blood Sausage's "Fuck You And Your Underground." Blood Sausage contained members of Huggy Bear, but I don't think they happened in the United States quite in the same way that the latter did. It's too bad, really. This song rules.

Blood Sausage - Fuck You And Your Underground

Vary

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching these last few months, and I think I've finally come to the conclusion on what my favorite word is: very.

Speaking of words, I do a lot of tweeting. I try to keep it a secret like most of my other bad habits, but I figured it was time to get this going viral. You can find me at twitter.com/bisforbummer. It is a VIP affair, so good luck getting on the guest list.

I Miss What We Had; I Need You So Badly

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

A quote by Joan Didion that just made me weep. I am so sad to be losing my childhood home.