Grab-A-Line Monday: Leviathan edition

Fan of historical fiction*: no
Fan of re-imagined history: a wee bit
Fan of war fiction: not at all
Fan of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan: YES!
Fan of my blog readers who share quotes from books they've enjoyed so I don't feel lost in the sea of new books: Yes, Yes and most definitely Yes!

This is just one of several books I've enjoyed after being enticed by the quotes from Grab-A-Line Mondays and I thought I should let you know that I really appreciate every passage that has been quoted here. Keep 'em coming!

*Turns out the genre intended by Westerfeld for Leviathan is dystopian steampunk.

Grab-A-Line Monday (a focus on Jordan Sonnenblick)

After the frivolity of my last post, I will now go back to my normal serious self. *Makes serious face...then busts out laughing.*

It's Monday! Seriousness is not allowed on Mondays! (I'll be serious tomorrow, seriously. I've already written the post, it's about voice, and you know a post about voice can have no silliness.)

I read the following in Jordan Sonnenblick's After Ever After . It's from the point-of-view of a thirteen year old boy who is completely smitten with the new girl. He sits behind her in class and has been admiring her beautiful neck when she said something funny:

I laughed. How could someone with such a perfect neck be so funny, too? Somewhere in the world, there had to be an eighth-grade girl with no neck who still told knock-knock jokes and wondered why the world was so cruel.

I laughed, as well.

Back to our regular Grab-A-Line-Monday programming. Last week, Sherrie came over with this opening line to Stormbreaker, the first novel in the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz:

When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news.

Speaking of Sherrie, she did a great interview with Jordan Sonnenblick. And since GALM is a little on the slim side this week, I thought I'd tell you what I know about him as well.

I picked up Drum, Girls, and Dangerous Pies because I was trying to find out more about an editor who was judging my middle grade novel in a contest. In an interview, she mentioned she liked this book, so I dutifully checked it out from the library. Duty might have been the original motivation for me to read this book, but it had nothing to do with why I inhaled and loved it. I have to resort to a cliched answer here: it made me laugh and cry. A longer reason is that it was written with such a big heart and such authenticity, I couldn't help but become involved in the story.

So then, I did something I'd never done before; I contacted the author. He replied the next
day, really gracious and friendly.

I just finished After Ever After, and once again, laughed and cried as I read it. Now, before you entertain the suspicion that it is yet another futile attempt to bank on the success of the original and therefore not very good, (you have seen Godfather II, haven't you?) you should (a) know that Sonnenblick resisted the idea initially, and (b) go read it.

Then come back and we'll discuss what you think. And don't put down the book just because it seems to start three times: a prologue of sorts, and then an end (I know, an end at the beginning?), and the real beginning.

I found that what I enjoyed the most in Drums are found in AEA as well:

• a close relationship (between Steven and his little brother, Jeffrey, in Drums,Jeffrey and his friend Tad in AEA)
  
• the easy humor
  

Drums is told by the eighth grader Steven, and AEA by Jeffrey as an eighth-grader. Both stories feature cancer prominently but neither is merely a cancer book. Character and plot, the king and queen of fiction, drive the story.

I'll end this post with another quote from After Ever After, which describes my current phase with my middle grade novel. Jeffrey is on a 50-mile charity biking event, and this is how he describes the last stretch:

It was my favorite part of a long ride: when you're already tired and crampy, but you're more than halfway done. And it would be so easy to tumble off your bike into the grass and quit. but you know you won't.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

Welcome to another installment of Grab-A-Line Monday, where readers share a line or two from what they read. We've had short lines, we've had long passages, we've had serious thoughts as well as light-hearted moments. Most important, some of the lines quoted here have led some of us to read the books from which those lines are taken.

Last week, Tricia shared this quote from GOING BOVINE, by Libba Bray. a book I've placed on hold and am still the 9th person in line:

"We believe our universe may be a small part of something vast--we're one house in a cosmic subdivision of houses all right next to each other. If only we could just pop in to see the neighbors, easy as opening the front door."

MG Higgins shared from INKSPELL by Cornelia Funke:

But as soon as she tried to make something new of them, a story with a life of its own, her mind went blank. The words seemed to fly out of her head --like snowflakes leaving only a damp patch on your skin when you put out your hand to catch them.

What caught you this week? And don't forget, you can always pop back throughout the week and post in the comments.

Grab-A-Line Monday

I am not sure why I allowed GALM to escape me last week, since some wonderful things had happened the week before. What are these wonderful things, you ask? Well, let me tell ya! First, I had a new contributor to GALM: Tabitha!

She quoted from The Adoration of Jenna Fox:
[In looking up the link, I came across the book trailer for the first time. I am intrigued!]

I used to be someone.
Someone named Jenna Fox.
That's what they tell me. But I am more than a name.

Welcome, Tabitha, and hope you'll drop by again soon!

Second, MG Higgins offered a quote she read from a book recommended by another of my blogging friends, Bish, via GALM. Love it that this happened!

The line is from The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo:

Below him were the twisting, turning cobblestoned streets, the small shops with their crooked tiled roofs, and the pigeons who forever perched atop them, singing sad songs that did not quite begin and never truly ended.

And the third wonderful thing is that my friend, Nandini, who has been so supportive, continued to drop by and offered a passage that made an impression on her. It is The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner.

He put down his pen and listened. He was a soldier as well as a scholar, and he was not unfamiliar with the sound of men screaming.

I have something that made me laugh from The Alchemyst: The Secrets of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott:

"Maybe they're Mafia," Elle suggested dramatically. "My dad knows someone in the Maifa. But he drives a Prius," she added.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday, Hot-Dog Edition

The synonym system knew that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also thought a hot dog was a boiling puppy.


That passage is from a WIRED magazine article on Google searches. Poor boiling puppies! (And poor puppies in those ridiculous outfits)

Incidentally, Mark McVeigh, super-editor turned super-agent, has a blog post on hot dogs today as well. The content is totally different but I thought it was interesting: what are the chances of two blogs devoted to writing and publishing focusing on hot dogs on the same day?

(Now my statistically-minded friends will consider that a challenge...)

Onto GALM proper. Since I am primarily a fiction writer, I will post a line from a fiction. This is from the The Elegance of Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery:

As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.

A big thanks to those of you who came over to comment and to offer memorable lines. Last week, Bish enjoyed this line from The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo.

Peter could see the magician all too clearly. His beard was long and wild, his fingernails ragged and torn, his cloak covered in a patina of mold. His eyes burned bright, but they were the eyes of a cornered animal: desperate and pleading and angry all at the same time.

Nandini quote from Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Deryn felt brilliant, rising through the air at the center of everyone's attention, like an acrobat aloft on a swing. She wanted to make a speech: "Hey, all you sods, I can fly and you can't! A natural airman, in case you haven't noticed. And in conclusion, I'd like to add that I'm a girl and you can all get stuffed!"

And Corey will to back to the Berkshires soon to get her book!

What caught you this week? (besides hot dogs, that is.)

Grab-A-Line Monday

Happy Monday! I hope those of you who made resolutions are still happy with them. I am a little behind on my old-year/new-year transition. When I have sorted my thoughts out, hopefully still within the month of January, I will post them here.

Onto our regular programming of GALM, or Grab-A-Line Monday.

What is Grab-A Line Monday? It is a weekly occurrence here at my blog, where I post a line--or two or however many it takes to capture a thought--that I've read that has stayed with me. I invite my readers to do the same. There are so many books that we'll never get to read everything that interests us. Such a shame. This is my small attempt to find writing that we shouldn't, but may otherwise, miss.

These quotes don't have to all be profound. Simple and light-hearted are great as well. I hope you find some passages that made you think and feel, or intrigue you enough that you'd want to read the book from which the passages originate.

Here are the quotes last last week's GALM:

MG Higgins shared from THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE by Jacqueline Kelly.

...I crept downstairs and went out onto the front porch very early before the daily avalanche of my brothers could crack open the peace of the morning.

Nandini offered this from The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex.

It was Moving Day, and everybody was crazy. You remember. It was chaos; people running around with armfuls of heirloom china and photo albums, carrying food and water, carrying their dogs and kids because they forgot that their dogs and kids could carry themselves. Crazy.

I thought I should also mentioned that Nandini's contribution from the week before struck a chord with Beth, who posted her wonderful thoughts about writing fearsome for kids. I am re-posting the poem from Salman Rushdie, who dedicated to his son while in hiding during the fallout from Satanic Verses. The acrostic spells ZAFAR, his son's name.

Z emble, Zenda, Xanadu:
A ll our dream-worlds may come true.
F airy lands are fearsome too.
A s I wander far from view
R ead, and bring me home to you.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

This is what Grab-A-Line Monday is.

Last week, not only did I get some excellent quotes, I also received a most appreciated validation from fellow writers. What would I do without my author-community?

Tricia grabbed some lines from THE LAST UNICORN by Peter S. Beagle:

Then the Lady Amalthea smiled at him for the first time since she had come to stay in King Haggard's castle. It was a small smile, like the new moon, a slender bend of brightness on the edge of the unseen, but Prince Lir leaned toward it to be warm. He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.

And MG Higgins grabbed her lines from the YA novel WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED by Judy Blundell:

Why did the air here smell like a pocketful of promises? It was the flowers and the ocean and the sky all mixed in together.

This week I was taken by this passage, which describes in such vivid details the noise in a city I almost felt I was there. It is from the 2009 National Book Award winner LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann

The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled up against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pot hole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the dankest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweet spots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clunked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out in to the street.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

Last week brought Nims' Island, Grinch, and a passage from The Changling Sea:

from Wendy Orr's Nim's Island:

"A whistle shrilled--and there was the strangest, most wonderful thing she'd ever seen: a wild-haired girl blowing a shell and riding a sea lion across the waves."

from Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch stole Christmas:

"Every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small, was singing, without any presents at all. He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming, it came. Somehow or other, it came, just the same."

Intriguing and complex sentences from Patricia McKillip's The Changling Sea:

The dark horseman from the sea gazed up at her, mounted at the foot of the cliff. She caught her breath, chilled, as if the sea itself had crept noiselessly across the beach to spill into her circle. Then she blinked, recognizing him. It was only the young prince out for a ride in the bright afternoon. The dark horseman was Kir. Kir was the dark horseman. The phrases turned backward and forward in her mind as she stared at him. A wave boomed and broke behind him, flowing across half the beach, seeking, seeking, then dragged back slowly, powerfully, and, caught in the dark gaze of the rider, his eyes all the twilight colors of the sea, Peri felt as if the undertow had caught her.

Thanks, Tricia, Nandini, and Shelley!

Mine this week is the opening line to Jennifer Murdley's Toad by Bruce Coville, and I don't know any middle-schooler can resist reading more: (okay, I couldn't.)

If Jennifer Murdley hadn't been forced to wear her brother's underpants to schooo, the whole thing might never have happened.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

Grab-a-line Monday is a weekly occurrence here at my blog, where I post a line--or two or however many it takes to capture a thought--that I've read that has stayed with me. I invite my readers to do the same. There are so many books that we'll never get to read everything that interests us. Such a shame. This is my small attempt to find writing that we shouldn't, but may otherwise, miss.

These quotes don't have to all be profound. Simple and light-hearted are great as well. I hope you find some passages that made you think and feel, or intrigue you enough that you'd want to read the book from which the passages originate.

My selection this week is rather long, and sad. It's taken from Stephanie Kallos's BROKEN FOR YOU:

Loved ones, whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them...Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgrimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.

Last week, Tricia and Nandini--thanks for supporting my little venture week after week, guys!--came over with their passages:

From Patricia Wrede's DEALING WITH DRAGONS:

"Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable."

From Kristin Cashore's FIRE:

The Queen's House--for Fire reminded herself that this was Roen's house, not Brigan's--seemed a good place to soothe an unhappy soul. The rooms were small and cozy, painted soft greens and blues and full of soft furniture, the fireplaces huge, the January fires in them roaring. It was obvious a child lived here, for her school papers and balls and mittens and playthings, and Blotchy's nondescript chewed-up belongings, had found their way into every corner.

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

Last week we had selections from several YA novels:
Tricia shared from Maggie Stiefvater's Ballad

When I woke up, my mouth was stuffed with golden music. It was like having a song stuck in my head, but with taste and color and sensation attached to it. It was all wood smoke and beads of rain on oak leaves and shining gold strands choking me.

Sherrie had this from Beautiful Creatures

The truth was killing me. Maybe Lena was going to be Claimed on her sixteenth birthday, but I had been claimed since birth. I had no more control over my fate than she did. Maybe none of us did.

Nandini quoted from the City of Ember:

The sky arched over them, higher than they could have imagined, a pale, clear blue. Lina felt as though a lid that had been on her all her life had been lifted off. Light and air rushed through her, making a song, like the songs of Ember, only it was a song of joy. She looked at Doon and saw that he was smiling and crying at the same time, and she realized that she was, too.

And a passage from Shakespeare:

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste;
Wings and no eyes, figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.

- A Mid-Summer Night's Dream

My line this week is a lot more light-hearted than my usual offering. It is from Brue Covile's middle grade novel, Juliet Dove, Queen of Love, a magic shop book. The dad, a professor of poetry, is lamenting the current sorry state of education and threatens to run for the school board:

Do you suppose I could get elected on the motto 'Less self-esteem, more poetry?'

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

Tricia showed up last week with this quote from Pearl North's Libyrinth:

The wind howled and the flames roared, but the books, as they died, merely fell silent.

And Nandini, who has since moved one step closer to this dream (congrats, Nandini!), quotes from Little Women:

Six weeks is a long time to wait, and a still longer time for a girl to keep a secret, but Jo did both, and was just beginning to give up all hope of ever seeing her manuscript again, when a letter arrived which almost took her breath away, for on opening it, a check for a hundred dollars fell into her lap

Here is my line this week:

...that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with...what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression...I shall be expressed, totally. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.

The Sea, by Joh Banville

What caught you this week?

Grab-A-Line Monday

Thank you, my blog friends, for all your good wishes while I've been cocooning. I have been reading your blogs on and off. Nandini said she would check in on Mondays, so I wanted to peek out once a week, in case any of you have lines and passages you want to share.

From Garbiel's Gift by Hanif Kureishi, I wanted to share this line:

Now Dad had gone and was living somewhere else. If the world hadn't quite been turned upside down, it was at an unusual and perilous angle, and certainly not still.

Drop a line.

Grab-A-Line Monday

Here is my offering this week:

...how fragile I feel....Like a piece of fine glass that has just been thumped, I'm vibrating, waiting for just the right frequency that will shatter me to pieces.

From BREATHE MY NAME
by R. A. Nelson


These are the offerings from last week's Grab-A-Line Monday:

Annie Louden shared this:

"He only loved his love for me and the pictures he was drawing. He loved those two. He loved the feeling he was having. I was a mere accessory to the feeling.

-Charles Baxter, THE FEAST OF LOVE

And Solving Sherrie, being the rock star that she is, offered a line from a song by Gin Blossoms.

"She had nothing left to say, so she said she loved me. And I stood there grateful for the lie."

Tanita remembered the colorful quotes from the week before and offered this saffron-colored line:

Deep down I'm not all that cynical, or hard or mean-- more soft-centered and especially vulnerable (or gullible, if you like) to first impressions; so I was a bit overwhelmed when I stepped into that Air India plane and was immediately transported to another planet. - Indian Summer, Pratima Mitchell

MG Higgins read Umbrella Summer after reading my review (I am glad you liked it!) and liked this line:

"I wished there was a way to keep that in a bottle, that one moment of wonderful perfect, so I could open it up whenever I needed to get a good whiff.

Shelley the story queen probably loves speaking this line to her young audience:

"Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done."

Eva Ibottson, ISLAND OF THE AUNTS

Nandini explained that this line needed context to be funny, which I didn't understand:

"Greetings, Ancient Uncle," he panted, "you have a very fast bullock."

YOUNGUNCLE COMES TO TOWN by Vandana Singh

What caught you this week?

A Passage to Savor

I picked up The Sea by John Banville, based on Davin's recommendation. Here is the first passage:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of a soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no never again.

I read and re-read it a few times, and maybe I'll manage to herd my thoughts into something that resembles coherent ideas sometime next week. In the mean time, enjoy!

Fat bullocks, no, what was that again?

Nandini provided a line for this week's Grab-A-Line Monday. She said it was funny if read in context.

I read it and thought, no, the line is funny all on its own. I mean, fast buttocks? C'mon! It don't need no context.

Well.

The word was

b u l l o c k s

with the letter "l"

and not "t."

And then I was all that's too funny and you can call me fast buttocks for a week.

But in my haste, I didn't check that I'd typed "fat" instead of "fast."

Don't know if that qualifies as Freudian.

Moral of the story:

1. all those carefully crossed ts should be read
   
2. typing has to be checked
3. slips should be embraced

You can all call me fast bullocks or fast buttocks, and okay, even the other one. But only for a week.

Grab-A-Line Monday

Here are the quotes from last week's Grab-A-Line Monday:

MG Higgins offered this: (and it's in gold because that's the color of the pen she used to jot this down specifically for this post.)

From When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead:

"Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop feeling mean."

Tanita Davis introduced me to a new sleuth from Georgette Heyer's They Found Him Dead. So this was longer than one line: but who cares? Great quotes, people, that's what I want!

"Well, I wanted to know. Besides, you're wasting your time, anyway. I told you the gat wasn't here, only you wouldn't listen. I looked for it myself, ages ago, because I thought probably the murderer would be pretty likely to hide it amongst the bushes. Well, he didn't, and I don't think it's in the bushes on the other side of the drive either. I haven't actually combed them, but I've got a theory about it. I'll tell you what it is, if you like."

Turns out Georgette Heyer is a fav author of Nandini, who shared this from Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.

"The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream: how could she have, living as she did in northern Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast?"

Davin Malasarn said he's reading Olive Kitteridge, the book I took my quote from, and I am waiting to hear what he has to say after he finishes.

It seems appropriate to end with another colorful quote, contributed by Coco, this time from Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote

'Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl's complexion.'

So, what caught you this week? (Color references optional.)

Grab-A-Line Monday: The Inaugural post

Quick, grab a book from your bookshelf and find a memorable sentence. Or if you have one that you carry around in your mind, even better. Here's one that struck me the first time I read it and continued to occupy my mind:

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

Flannery O'Connor
in A Good Man Is Hard To Find

If you've missed my multicolored, super-hyper announcement of a new feature on my blog, here is a recap:

Grab-A-Line Monday is the place to share sentences that stopped you in your tracks, or made you spew coffee or have stayed with you for years for other reasons. The moments when I read those sentences I count among the best in life. Since there are more books than any one of us can finish in a life time, I hope that this will become a place where we can share our treasures.

So I'd love it love it love it if you would grab a line and put it in the comments. And if it turns out you like the idea, please blog about it and share the word. Let's celebrate excellent writing and memorable moments!

Universal in a unique way

This past week, I've been struck by passages from two different books, passages that made me stop and remind myself to breathe.

Here's the first one from Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls. LIa, the teen narrator is
alone in her room, mourning the death of her best friend, Cassie. They've both been struggling with eating disorders:

Spiders hatch and crawl out of my belly button, airy little tar beads with ballerina feet.

They swarm, spinning a silk veil, one hundred thousand spider thoughts woven together until they wrap me up in a cozy shroud.
...
I breathe out and it begins.

Thorn-covered vines creep across the floor, crackling like a bonfire. Black roses bloom in the moonlight, born dead and brittle. The web on my face holds my eyes open, forcing me to watch as Cassie steps out of the shadows, briars twining up her legs and around her body, reaching up through her hair.
...
I can't make a sound. Spiders crawl on my face and leap across to her arms. They fly back and forth, knitting us together.

The second passage is from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. The narrator is writing a letter to the Chinese Premier, trying to explain what life is like in Bangalore, India.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks...sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come
to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half-formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger on another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

What makes these two passages, so very different in style and subject matter, to have startled me so much? Maybe it's because they are so unusual. Spiders crawling out of belly buttons? Definitely a memorable image. But uniqueness alone doesn't do it. I've read many other passages in other books where the unusual descriptions actually made me not read because they try too hard to be different, they are too self-conscious.

As I re-read the passages, they stirred up a sense of familiarity, which is strange. I have never been to India, nor have I suffered from eating disorders. What about them that makes me catch that glimpse of recognition, a kinship, almost?

And there, I think, is the answer. These passages are so engaging because, for me, at least, they create a perfect balance between the universal and the unique.

I've never been to India, but I grew up having lizards on the ceiling and reading interesting snippets of newspaper recycled as snack-wrappers. I've never binged and purged, or counted the calories of every bite, but I've definitely thought twice about indulging in an extra piece of chocolate cake or scraped off the sour cream from baked potatoes.

Much deeper than these connections, however, are the ones that are even more universal:

• lingering in that expanse between reality and imagination,
• feeling such a strong bond with someone that it seems we've been woven together
• grasping onto ideas that seem so promising, yet so unformed and elusive
• feeling the inadequacy of our abilities and experiences

Drawing on the invisible strings that tie us all to the same basic human experiences and thoughts, yet in such unusual and vivid ways:

that's why these passages caught me,
that's why these are masterful writers,
that's what I strive for in my writing.

From "Cost" by Roxana Robinson

I just started reading Cost by Roxana Robinson, and am thoroughly enjoying the slower pace, after my recent bout of MG adventure books. It feels so luxurious to pay attention to whatever the author brings to the fore: the setting, (if you knew me as a reader and writer, you'd know I am not a big setting person) the ruminations and yes, even back story.

Anyway, I am only at the beginning and plan to take my time savoring the experience, but here is a sentence that I wish I'd written. It's from the point of view of Edward, an 80+ year-old man.

Hearing about other people's lives was either tedious or frustrating; they made so many mistakes.

Doesn't that just tell you a million things about his character?

It's all good

The family-reunion genre may not have the classic story arc; the characters may seem to act in ways that defy story logic; the conflicts don't often resolve in satisfying ways. But it is characterized by moments of grace and sacrifices, compassion and stubborn optimism.

From Natalie Goldberg's Friends From Far Away:
It's a simple idea really; eac a lot of peaches, you'll become a peach. Read good books, ones that are well-written where the author cares, thinks, is willing to feel the aching texture of the world and of this own rough mind and you are at least a third of the way into the practice.