Turns of Phrase

I find that when I am reading, I will occasionally come across phrases or sentences or paragraphs that strike a chord because they are so eloquent or unusual or funny or true and I feel like I should write them down.  I decided to create a page dedicated to that purpose.  Dear readers, please feel free to send me your own!

8-21-07 From The Man of My Dreams:

“Out on the street again, it’s comparatively quiet.  He says, ‘Live music can be so great,’ and he seems in this moment like a person who will never say a surprising thing.  In the summer, he will ask, Hot enough for you? and on the first day of November, he’ll complain (but not even fervently–he’ll complain cheerfully, conversationally) about how Christmas decorations go up earlier and earlier every year, and if a scandal occurs involving a politician, he’ll say that the press is just trying to be sensational, that it’s boring to read about it in the paper day after day.  (Hannah herself will never feel bored by such scandals.)  He will evemtually propose marriage–not to Hannah but to someone– by showing up to the girl’s door with a dozen red roses, taking her out to a nice restaurant, and arranging with the waiter to hide the ring in the creme brulee so she’ll find it with her spoon, and that night, after she says yes, they’ll have sex–he’ll call it making love–and he’ll look deeply into her eyes and tell her she’s made him the luckiest guy in the world.  The engagement ring will be a gold band with a small, earnest diamond.” 

7-5-07 Turns of Phrase:  These all come from my most recent read, The Time Traveler’s Wife.

-“Henry is beautiful.  His hair is shoulder length, black and sleek.  He’s cat-like, thin, exuding restlessness and physicality.  He looks like he might bite.”

-“Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door.  She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting.”

-“He’s sitting all bunched up in his chair, and I notice his hands, long elegant hands that lie in his lap like a cat napping.”

-“I feel as though all my organs are becoming creatures, each with its own agenda, its own train to catch.  Alba is tunneling headfirst into me, a bone and flesh excavator of my flesh and bone, a deepener of my depths.  I imagine her swimming through me, I imagine her falling inti the stillness of a morning pond, water parting at her velocity.”

From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking:

-“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.  The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room … This is a case in which I need more than the words to find the meaning.  This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”

-“I stopped at the door to his room.  I could not give away the rest of his shoes.  I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need his shoes if he was to return.  The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.  I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away his shoes) if the thought has lost its power.”