A few years ago, my husband and I decided to finish our home and added a library in an unfinished corner of the ground floor. It's a small room, a nook really, with a glass door, a large window, and floor to ceiling built-in maple bookcases. I am sitting in this room now and I have just finished re-organizing it. Our books primarily deal with the following topics: religion, home improvement, children's chapter books, children's picture books, health, science, history, academic review course materials, travel, arts and crafts, accounting and business, foreign language, atlases, coffee table books, yearbooks/scrapbooks, and literature, which is the largest collection by far.
Most likely because of my background as an English major, I always mark passages in the books I read. I started doing this originally so that I could recall significant events for tests and essays. Today I do it so that I can thumb through books I read and recall exactly why I liked them so much, how they affected me and why.
For this entry I will share some significant passages from "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first book I read by the author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez:
...she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love. p.66
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past....He had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. p. 106
...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. p.165
The only convincing document he could write was a love letter. p.171
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them. p.207
She would visit with new friends or some old ones from school or the painting classes: an innocent substitute for infidelity. p.212
She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young....Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. p.221
Men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men, whispering in their ear, as if not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street...p.257
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. p.345
No comments:
Post a Comment