Will > Books: favorites‎ (33)

“When will you have achieved all your ambitions, Mrs. Pemberton?” she asked, as others jostled around them.
“When the world and my will are one,” S

“When will you have achieved all your ambitions, Mrs. Pemberton?” she asked, as others jostled around them.
“When the world and my will are one,” Serena answered.

--------------------------------------

The mountain lion was the first to depart the valley. The front paw lost years back to a trap’s steel teeth was warning enough. As the trees began to fall, others followed: black bear and bobcat, otter and mink, some in pairs, some singly. Then beaver and weasel, deer and muskrat, groundhog and fox. After them raccoon and rabbit, opossum and chipmunk, squirrel and vole, deer mouse and shrew . . .

One thing I want to do is for landscape and my characters to be inextricably bound together. I believe the landscape people live in has to affect their psychology. - from the Transatlantica interview

In a sense, I’m writing a current that runs through time in those stories. And, also, paradoxically time is a kind of geography as well: it is also a way of showing people in much different cultural mindsets, even within a specific culture, and thus another way to probe for the universal within a specific cultural landscape.

If the language were not so beautiful and sublime, particularly in a play such as King Lear, the experience would be unbearable. What I’m trying for in my work—it’s up to the reader to decide if I do—is the sublime. I want my work to take the reader to that place. And I think you can do that with that juxtaposition of language and violence. - from the Transatlantica interview

I think I tend to use maimed characters with the idea that the world they inhabit is wounded. - from the Transatlantica interview

The women would bring food enough to get Rebecca and the children through the winter. Men would bring axes and the surrounding woods would sound like gunshots as the honed metal struck in the November air. All day the women would cook and tend fires. Children would gather kindling, then scuff among ashes for the iron nails that had secured the shingles. Everyone would work until dusk, then return the next day to help more. Ira Wilkey might or might not say We will get through this together, but that was understood. They were neighbors.

When Brent was growing up, his father would point out how a plumber in Brevard had done shoddy work but then gone out of business, or how a county clerk embezzled money for three years but ended up in prison. It catches up with you, son, he’d say. But plenty did get away with it, Brent knew. All you had to do was look at the recession, which almost caused him and his father to lose everything. The silk-tied crooks who’d done it weren’t arrested and no one pretended they ever would be. People like that got away with anything. Get caught robbing folks, all you had to do was pay back part of what you stole. Turn a million people into drug addicts, you didn’t spend a day in jail.

Four congregation members on his porch, Marvin Birch at the head. They do not want him to baptize Gunter. He says there is a chance that the baptism may cleanse his soul, even if he does not really expect it to do so. And if he refuses, he will force Eliza [Pearl’s mother] and Pearl to walk in the freezing cold to another preacher much farther away, endangering their health.

Trout have to live in a pure environment unlike human beings; they can’t live in filth! And so I think there is a kind of wonder; to me, they’re incredibly beautiful creatures…when such creatures disappear, we have lost something that cannot be brought back. - from the Transatlantica interview

I think people in mountains tend to feel very close to that place. … There’s almost the sense that the mountains are rising up around them, protecting them, almost like a womb. There’s a sense of security in a way. I think that also at times it can be oppressive. There’s a sense of mountains looming over people, reminding them how small and brief their lives are. I find it interesting to see what I can do with that as a writer. - from the Daily “Yonder interview

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry—the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible—but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader. - from The Daily Beast interview

He headed west on Highway 19, the directions on the passenger seat. The leaves were off the trees now, revealing time-worn swells so unlike the wild, seismic peaks and valleys beloved by European Romantics such as Pernhart and Friedrich. Sturm und Drang. Yet the Appalachians were daunting in their uniformity, a vast wall, unmarked by crevices that might provide an easy path out.

Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this? Forget healing, my specialty should be having my life destroyed and then being forced to rebuild fr

Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this? Forget healing, my specialty should be having my life destroyed and then being forced to rebuild from nothing.

---------------------------------------

Yet everything was just a touch off. There were empty spaces where conjured buildings should have stood, ugly pockmarks on the skyline. The brass walls were tarnished, the edifices—on closer inspection—riddled with missing bricks and blackened mortar. Defying any weather pattern Nahri knew, somehow the eastern half of the island was draped in snow while the sun scorched the western half so fiercely small fires smoldered in the scrubby hills. A hazy black cloud revealed itself to be a swarm of flies, and the ruined Citadel still lay bare to the sky like a scar, its tower half-drowned in the lake. Just like the mountains, Daevabad was sick…

Oh, this kingdom was eight hundred years. There’s no kingdoms that lasted for eight hundred years. There’s this one stable ruling family? I think we should pull that apart a bit. - from the Fantasy Inn interview

Fiza, however--God bless her--had stopped finding anything about his transformation intimidating and treated him with her normal base level of rudeness. “Yes, your wateriness,” she said with a sarcastic bow.

No more journeying with attractive magical warriors on ridiculously dangerous quests after this. Nahri clearly had a problem.

I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my desi

I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."…I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?” They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said… So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy. On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?" I felt like a detective. I was like, "When did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it?" I was the Nancy Drew of joy. - from the author’s TED talk

Seeing it all laid out, it was clear that joy was not a mysterious, intuitive force; it emanated directly from the physical properties of the objects. Specifically, it was what designers called aesthetics—the attributes that define the way an object looks and feels—that gave rise to the feeling of joy.

A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that workers with sunny desks are happier and more productive than their peers in dimly lit offices.

We all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it. What might happen if we were to reawaken this instinct for finding joy?

Wonders never cease, as long as we are willing to look for them.

All we seen is hard trials and sorrows. I’d not deny it. Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation. But the go

All we seen is hard trials and sorrows. I’d not deny it. Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation. But the good Lord knows we need to see at least the hem of the robe of glory, and we do. Ponder a pretty sunset or the dogwoods all ablossom. Every time you see such it’s the hem of the robe of glory. Brothers and sisters, how do you expect to see what you don’t seek? Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we’re there, we’ll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven’s glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They’ll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?

I had not spoken since the day of the shooting. Then one day in July, my grandparents’ neighbor nodded at the ridge gap and said watershed. I’d followed the creek upstream, thinking wood and tin over a spring, found instead a granite rock face shedding water. I’d touched the wet slow slide, touched the word itself, like the girl named Helen that Ms. Abernathy told us about, whose first word gushed from a well pump.

Trout have to live in a pure environment unlike human beings; they can’t live in filth! And so I think there is a kind of wonder; to me, they’re incredibly beautiful creatures. I can remember being only four or five and staring for long periods at them, just watching them swimming in the water. But also, like Faulkner in “The Bear,” the idea that when such creatures disappear, we have lost something that cannot be brought back. And I think this is what McCarthy is getting at, at the end of The Road. They mean many things: beauty, wonder, and fragility, in the sense that they can be easily destroyed. - from the Transatlantica interview

Though sunlight tinges the mountains, black leather-winged bodies swing low. First fireflies blink languidly. Beyond this meadow, cicadas rev and slow like sewing machines. All else ready for night except night itself. I watch last light lift off level land. Ground shadows seep and thicken. Circling trees form banks. The meadow itself becomes a pond filling, on its surface dozens of black-eyed susans.

One thing I want to do is for landscape and my characters to be inextricably bound together. I believe the landscape people live in has to affect their psychology...This…novel is…about wonder, about how nature might sustain us. I wanted to look at the world a little more hopefully. – from the Transatlantica interview

…this whole entire scene says the same to me as it says to every other knucklehead who ever thought bad thoughts across this whole city: now’s your

…this whole entire scene says the same to me as it says to every other knucklehead who ever thought bad thoughts across this whole city: now’s your fucking day, homie. Felicdades, you won the lottery! Go out there and get wild, it says. Come and take what you can, it says. If you’re bad enough, if you’re strong enough, come out and take it. Devil’s night in broad daylight, I call it.

They think it’s sad, some kind of thoughtless, primal rage thing. It’s not. It’s mostly planned and it’s one of three things—grudge, mayhem, or insurance…It’s grudge if one guy doesn’t like the other guy for whatever reason, so he takes advantage of the chaos to do something about it, so even the race stuff, like what the blacks are doing to the Koreans, goes here. It’s mayhem if you’re deliberately setting it for the heck of it, or if you’re trying to cover a crime, or using it as a distraction to draw emergency assistance elsewhere so you can commit a crime somewhere else, which the gangs definitely do…. The last and likeliest, it’s insurance if you’ve got a business in a run-down part of the city and it’s not making as much money as you want but you do have fire insurance and you’ve been paying hefty premiums on that policy for damn near too long and then one day the racist cops get acquitted and all of a sudden up pops the opportunity to torch your own premises and get away with it—all you have to do is blame gangs or looters, so why not?

There’s a helicopter overhead—looks like Channel 7—shining a light down on us like we’re at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. The people who live around here, they know what that actually feels like. They know how ugly life can get. Everybody else, the people sitting at home, watching this unfold on television, they have no idea. Those are the people shocked by the riots. They can’t comprehend them because they don’t understand the other side. They don’t understand what happens to people with no money who live in a neighborhood where crime is actually a viable career path when there are no other opportunities, and I’m not excusing it or condoning it or saying it can’t be avoided, but I’m saying that’s how it is.

…nothing was as it seemed

…nothing was as it seemed

…when young he had admired their sarcasm and sharp wit, his older female cousins—the misanthrope, the pyromaniac, and the exhibitionist—all obviously hated their lives, lives that would never recover the hope of their youth, lives now defined by their status as old maids, though barely thirty. They were stuck here, and the finality of that sentence pained him. It was impossible to have a conversation with one of them and not feel like he was addressing a ghost.

she’d once admitted that her family wasn’t close; that her father expressed a greater affinity for moths and fruit liqueurs and her mother a keen interest in civil rights. She dubbed them emotionally abusive.

Every organization, every single one, Daron worries himself, orchestrates a silent competition with the church; they want not employees but practitioners, apostles, acolytes—not workers, but worshippers. Between this observation and his reflections on school, he concludes that everyone advertises for the mind but expects you to bring the soul.

Did his parents also look at each other with resentment born of intimacy; did they want more than anything else to reach out to each other, to close cold space; did they say things to hurt each other first intentionally and then again, accidentally, even without meaning to, in the midst of apologizing? Did they inventory their intimacies? How did you look at someone and care so much for them and hate them at the same time, be so angry that you didn’t even trust yourself to have a valid emotion, so angry it couldn’t be real?

The wino’s voice catches Jonathan’s ear. It’s dissonant, all flats and sharps with no clear words.

Nearly every day Jonathan tells Fadi about a piece of music that’s perfectly suited to the moment. Last week he said, “It’s an afternoon for Gershwin. Mostly sunny, a little snappy, but with a hint of rain.” And two evenings ago he asked. “Did you see the sunset? Only Philip Glass could write a sunset like that.”

There wasn’t a goddamned night on the inside when I wasn’t woken by somebody haunted by the person he dropped. Ghosts aren’t the dead. They’re those the dead left behind. Stay here long enough, you’ll become one of them—another ghost haunting the Hook.

As he crosses from this abandoned corner of the waterside back over to the Houses he becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook—the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, the lofts overtaking the factories, the grocery stores overlapping the warehouses. The new bars cannibalizing the old ones. The skeletons of forgotten buildings—the sugar refinery and the dry dock—surviving among the new concrete bunkers being passed off as luxury living. The living walk on top of the dead—the water front dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead—everyone still there. A neighborhood of ghosts.

The women grow grungier and sexier the later it gets. Soon they bear no resemblance to the morning commuters who will tuck themselves into bus shelters along Van Brunt on Monday, polished and brushed and reasonably presentable to the world outside Red Hook. Nighttime abrades them, tangles their hair and chips their nails. Colors their speech. At night, the hundreds of nights they’ve passed the same way begin to show, revealed in their hollowed cheeks and rapid speech. Jonathan wonders how long it takes for their costumes to become their clothes, their tattoos their birthmarks. When will they let the outside world slip away and forget to retrieve it?

Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.

The water was no longer turquoise. A dark, dark blue today, with blackness in it, a clarity, no glacial silt suspended. Irene didn't know it could change so completely in even a day. A different lake now. Another metaphor for itself, each new version refuting all previous.