Read More

Spirit

• ‘We are creatures of habit. Lived in a little house, had four kids, worked at gardening, each day a round of eating and sleeping and other pleasures, pictures on the weekend, the bar on Friday nights at five for bar lunch, cold fish and dead potatoes, footy in the weekend, footy’s a kind of game, everyday mostly just going backwards and forwards doing this and that. - I see, quite a simple existence. Any enemies? -Yes we all have enemies. A big black death swoops down from the skies at any moment to carry us away. A kind of death got me yesterday while I was sunning myself in the garden.
• -You have newspapers? -Of course. And radio for the wrestling and the serials, and books too. And there’s some sort of music and some of the folks paint and dance but give me three feeds a day and a comfortable place to live. -You say there’s music and dancing? -Not for me. They’re always trying to leave their mark on the world some sort of a trail but it’s like the wind and the sand ha ha. 

Read More

(‘at the time of first publication Janet Frame was in a mental hospital and when the book went on to win the Hubert Church award it was decided that she should be spared a threatened leucotomy operation. As she says in her autobiography, “my writing saved me”.)

The Lagoon

• ‘her mother had been a Maori princess, very beautiful they said, and with fierce ways of loving and hating’
• ‘I remember we used to skim round white stones over the water, and catch tiddlers in the little creek near by, and make sand castles on the edge. This is my castle, we said, you be Father I’ll be Mother and we’ll live here and catch crabs and tiddlers for ever.’
• ‘We took baskets with fruit and sandwiches, not tomato, for tomato goes damp though some like it like that, and three pences in the pocket for ice-creams…And then it got dark and the couples came back from the trees..Everybody went back singing, with the babies crying because they were tired and sunburnt and bitten by sandflies. Sandflies are the devil, everybody said, but they were great days’

Read More

“Oh, you wicked little thing!” cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace.

‘And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the say before — all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens;”and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, “Well, you can be one of them then, and I’ll be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”But this is taking us away from Alice’s speech to the kitten. “Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try, there’s a dear!”

“Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through — “She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

‘she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again)’

“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” 

Read More

‘a boy of nineteen—was studying a small manual of anatomy, and peering occasionally at a bone which lay upon the piano. From time to time he bounced in his chair and puffed and groaned, for the day was hot and the print small, and the human frame fearfully made’

‘Lucy, who was in the little seat, seemed on the edge of a green magic carpet which hovered in the air above the tremulous world’

Read More

“That place is too sweetly squalid for words. I love it; I revel in shaking off the trammels of respectability” 

Read More

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up, and remember.”

 ’Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell’s Art, read: “Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture? Yes. I do” ‘

 ‘the air of my room heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics’

•  “I must go to the Botanical Gardens.”
• “Why?”
• “To see the ivy.”
    
• It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him.  He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.
    
• “I’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens,” I said.
    
• “Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn!  There’s a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed.  I don’t know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.”

 ’Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of such imperatives. “I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,” “I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,” “I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!” ‘

Read More

(I have decided from this day forth that life is too short to finish books I am not whole-heartedly adoring devouring at a rate of knots. I shall of course always persevere until I am satisfied the situation isn’t going to suddenly rectify itself, that it isn’t a case of laziness due to archaic vocabularies or paragraphs being infested with irrelevant or tedious footnotes and highly unlikely if not nigh on impossible that I will become endeared to dull characters, pompous, stuffy prose or whatever other literary feature I am finding fault with. This newly granted permission to abandon ship is on account of the future being uncertain and the fact that even if I -touch wood- avoid a fate involving a combination double decker buses plus my absent mindedness crossing roads, even if I eschew a myocardial infarction or assassination or self-destruction or anything faintly apocalyptic (heaven forbid being morbid on the 31st) there are still a distinct lack of hours in the day and a stupendous plentitude of both fiction and non-fiction that I not only feel obliged to pore over but actually very eager to! The first novel to suffer under this new objective of mine was Mr. Swift’s, I’m afraid his incessant Political allegories and protracted, slightly self-indulgent satire does not leave me chomping at the bit for the next instalment so I am abandoning him for more appealing things. I appreciate the general sentiment and skill but to be frank, I’ve had my fill.

To end this impromptu tirade positively the nonsense language featuring names like ‘Brobdingnag’ and ‘Glubbdubdrib’ and ‘Flimnap and Skyresh Bolgolam’ was fun and bits like them calling him a ‘man-mountain’ and I loved this;

“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.”