Colder
What I bought – 27 February and 6 March 2013
George looked at his granddaughter’s empty suit. He thought of Job. Satan lacked imagination. To crack a man’s faith, one need not resort to burning his flesh, ruining his finances, or any such obvious afflictions. One need only take a man’s species away from him. (James Morrow, This Is The Way The World Ends)
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What I bought – 6 February 2013
“Italians have made the family an extremist group. The family is the instrument of revenge.” (Don DeLillo, from The Names)
What I bought – 2 January 2013
The writer was pacing. “I have never been a violent man. I don’t believe in violence. Violence does not advance the human condition. Ideas do.”
“Ideas don’t perish in prison cells,” Levanter said. “People do.” (Jerzy Kosinski, from Blind Date)
What I bought – 5 December 2012
It came to me that he meant something different by “smile” than I did; that the irony, the humourlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. (John Fowles, from The Magus)
What I bought – 7 November 2012
Out of the seven days of creation, four were successful and three were unsuccessful. Only one day held sway and made this world a successful world. That was the seventh day, the day of rest, when the Creator did nothing. (Milorad Pavić, from Landscape Painted with Tea)
