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Novel Passages: Cool Lines from Recommended Books

In actuality I wouldn't have minded sharing the Object's toothbrush. I wouldn't have minded being the Object's toothbrush. I was already well acquainted with the splendors of her mouth. Smoking is good for that. You get a full display of the puckering and the sucking. The tongue often makes an appearance, licking form the lips any stickiness imparted by the filter. Sometimes bits of paper adhere to the bottom lip and the smoker, pulling them away, reveals the candied lower teeth against he pulpy gums. And if the smoker is a blower of smoke rings, you get to see all the way in to the dark velvet of the inner cheek.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
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In the novels nothing ever seems to get by him, so how come when he's here, he's not? Perhaps so much assails him that he has to close down ninety percent of himself to phenomena in order not to explore. Though then again, I thought, maybe he's just out to lunch.

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
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... impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there was no longer the "0," the "l," the "i," the "v," the second "i," the "a"--licked until the up-swept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.

" ...This girl is full of tears. You see that the moment you look at her. Inside she is all tears. Can you stand up to her tears, Marcus?"

Indignation by Philip Roth
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"No writer ever hits a slump. As Algis Budrys (who is a helluva writer, and who taught me about half of what I know) once said to me: You don't slump, you just reach a plateau. Then you have to get your wind, and readjust your thinking and your synapses, and get set to write better, with more maturity, with greater passion and purpose. He was right."

Harlan Ellison, On Being a Writer
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"You have not whipped me, whittled me down, or scared me enough to make me quit."

A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls LaNier
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"They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos--for whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition's chosen path to certainty, the rigorous daily given of life--and the daughter who is chaos itself."

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
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"That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise the Swede, even it if was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they are and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was a s though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup."

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
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"She had worked like a great artist; for a time--indeed, for years--she had been meaningless, but at the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better--a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have used them the most.

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
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"It has seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book."

The Hours by Michael Cunningham
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"Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I ready did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written. Even if I assume that readers will be charitable enough to absolve me from personally having done or thought such things--itself a dubious assumption, given my own reprehensible tendency as a reader to see autobiography in the purest of fictions--the mere facts that I could even imagine someone's having done or thought them, whispers my fear, is damning in itself."

Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon
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"But how will I get out?" And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. "How'd you do that?" I said. "I opened the door," he said. "But how?" He shrugged. "I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time." And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, "That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone."

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
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"Let's formulate our manifesto, gentleman," said Zola. "First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet maker, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life."

Lust for Life by Irving Stone
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The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
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What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap of freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

The Stranger by Albert Camus
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He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
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It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
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How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
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"Do you call yourself an artist?"
"Yes"
"How absurd. You never sold a painting in your life."
"Is that what being an artist means--selling? I thought it meant one who was always seeking without absolutely finding. I thought it meant the contrary from 'I know it. I have found it.' When I say I am an artist, I mean 'I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart."

Lust for Life by Irving Stone