Ten Quotes I Really Like From Books on the Reading Pile

1. From: Travels with Charley; John Steinbeck. Re: Turkeys. 'To know them is not to admire them for they are vain and hysterical. They gather in vulnerable groups then panic at rumors.' Fresh, fabulous writing. This is what turkeys are like, no-one ever said it this way before.
2. From: From Cape Wrath to Finisterre; Bjorn Larsson. Re: Marriage. 'Why then, one might ask with some justification, don't more people move in together on a boat for a trial period? They would soon find out whether there was any point in getting spliced.' In a sailing book what better analogy for marriage than rope-talk.
3. From: Gilles Deleuze; Claire Colebrook. Re: Love. ‘Love is the encounter with another person that opens us up to a possible world.’ That's a great way to think of something that is usually over-defined and thus pray to disappointment.
4. From Written on the Body; Jeanette Winterson. Re: Something unforgettable that someone says (or shows) to you. 'I've hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded.' Ah, Jeanette! Whole tracts of your work could be in this list. You are magic with words. I have a line of words hidden in my coat lining too. Just as they were hidden on a wall in marking only detectable by ultra violet light when I was first shown them.
5. From 1Q84; Haruki Murakami. Re: Amazing ways of describing facial expressions. 'Komatsu smiled. It was the kind of smile he might have found way in the back of a normally unopened drawer.'
6. From Auto de Fay; Fay Weldon. Re: Justifying name changes. 'Those who don't change their names enjoy a straight line from their past to their future, stay the same person, for good or bad.'
7. From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago Volume II. Re: Stool pigeons in the general populace. 'He is an ordinary human being like you and me with a measure of good feelings, a measure of malice and envy, and with all the weakness which makes us vulnerable to spiders.'
8. From Tender is the Night; F Scott Fitzgerald. Re: The characteristics of children. 'Lanier was an unpredictable boy with an inhuman curiosty. "Well, how many pomeranians would it take to lick a lion, Father?" was typical of the questions with which he harrassed Dick.'
9. George Bernard Shaw quoted in Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life; Nora T Gedgaudas. 'No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.'
10. From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Murakami again. Re: simply stunning simile. 'I held May Kasahara's hand in my pocket. It was a small hand and warm as a sequestered soul.' Simile and metaphor are sometimes too clever for themselves, but I cannot help but hold them as my favourite word game.