BB FANS

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my families, and my countrie's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least I've figured out. I know this much is true.


''I know this much is true'' by Wally Lamb (last paragraph)

A 900 pager I just finished. aww

Well that just ruined the ending for me

ah but do you know this much is true?

Is that a Spandau Ballet song?

is that your favourite line from a book?

Nope

I picked this up from the library today Milly and I was sure I had seen you mention it on the forum in quotes. Funny the things we remember Anyway like you say a short story but a powerful one all the same.

oh did you like it? I think it is an amazing book..

yes it's very powerful. I read it a couple of times and this book came with notes at the back too. Very interesting and a bit disturbing too when thinking about the treatment of women of that time

Eureka Street, By Robert McLiam Wilson. My favourite contemporary book.

Eureka Street, By Robert McLiam Wilson. My favourite contemporary book.[/quote]


What a fantastic line! I love it. I've never read this book but am going to order on the basis of this one line.

It's a wonderful book, Ellie.

I just typed out my quotation, but I've found the longer version online, so I'm just copying and pasting it now:


Belfast is Rome with more hills: it is Atlantis raised from the sea. And from anywhere you stand, from anywhere you look, the streets glitter like jewels, like small strings of stars...
However many, whatever size, it is magical. This night, the streets smell stale and tired, the air is full of regret and desire. Time seems passing and passed. The city feels how it feels to grow old.
But at night. in so many ways, complex and simple, the city is a proof of God. This place often feels like the belly of the universe. It is a place much filmed but little seen. Each street. Hope, Chapel, Chichester and Chief, is busy with the moving marks of the dead thousands who have stepped their lengths. They leave their vivid smell on the pavements, bricks, door-ways and in the gardens. In this city, the natives live in a broken world — broken but beautiful.
You should stand some night on Cable Street, letting the little wind pluck your flesh and listen, rigid and ecstatic, while the unfamous past talks to you. If you do that, the city will stick to your fingers like Sellotape (…)
But most of all, cities are the meeting places of stories. The men and women there are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing (…) The merest hour of the merest day of the merest of Belfast’s citizens would be impossible to render in all its grandeur and all its beauty. In cities the stories are jumbled and jangled. The narratives meet. They clash. they converge or convert. They are a Babel of prose (...)
And the sleepy murmurings of half a million people combine to make an influential form of noise, a consensual music. Hear it and weep. There is little more to learn on the earth than that which a deserted city at four in the morning can show and tell. Those nights. those cities are the centre, the fulcrum, the very wheel upon which you turn (…)
In Belfast, in all cities, it is always present tense and all the streets are Poetry Streets

As the hours went by, something solemn and sacred filled the room, just as on the occassion of Andreas birth. The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric. The air became more nand more still; we moved slowly, in order not to disturb our hearts' repose. We were filled with Paula's spirit, as if we were all one being and there being no separation among us: life and death were joined. For a few hours, we experienced that reality the soul knows, absent time or space.

Paula by Isabel Allende

What is fidelity, what do we expect of the woman we love? I am old, and I have thought a great deal about this too. Is the idea of fidelity not an appalling egoism and also as vain as most other human concerns? When we demand fidelity, are we wishing for the other person's happiness? And if that person cannot be happy in the subtle prison of fidelity, do we really prove our love by demanding fidelity nonetheless? And if we do not love that person in a way that makes her happy, do we have the right to expect fidelity or any other sacrifice? Now, in my old age, I would not dare answer these quesitons as unequivocally as I would have done forty-one years ago..

Embers by Sandor Marai

One of the most haunting boods I've read in the past few years.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

- Neil Gaiman