BB FANS

If we can have one about movies and songs,I thought why not books.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere appartition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.

I've faced it then have I? I suppose I have. The magical answer to the cannonball question "what do you really want?" I have want, now I want the have, the touch, the hand, the real, the feel of the same leg cast easily over mine for a decade of winter mornings... for two decades... or three... that same leg flung over me, the same smile. A sameness. I'd love that. I've tasted the hors d'oeuvres, nibbled at the cakes, the pies, tasted all the lies of liberty and free. Who sold me that? I want mine back, the savage sweet of same and same and same again - the same sweet man to share a life of love and have and same with me.
Life with its odd endings and beginnings, its occasionally very painful middles, its riddles, its surprise hellos, and at times astonishing adieus, its greens, its greys, its reds, its blues, its flowers which come like sunbursts on a gloomy day, given by a man you barely know. Life, with its rare gifts, its strange charm, its strong arm, its vast sass, its more than occasional boot in the ass, its blunt pain, its bleak rain, its sorrow and its grief... is somehow all too brief, like a cinderella ball, so deck the halls, put on your shoes, your furs, your minks, don't shrink, put your tiara on, step out, prance high, chin up, dance nigh the flame with eyes aglow, and above all, dear friends, before you go, before it ends, and there remains no further tale to tell, dare once...twice...often if you choose, but dare, yes, dare to love, and if you do, make sure that you love well. For love is worth it all, is worth a call, a dream, a scheme, a sleepless night, a carriage ride, or crossing half the world, for a glimpse, a touch, a truth... for love is youth, is fun, is grand... a carnival... an opera ball.... For truth to tell, Love is Life... and Life is Love... and Love is All.


Daniel Steele

I was thinking that was quite nice HC til I saw who wrote it. What a literary snob I must be.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Claire, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread throught the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.


See I can do soppy too.

I think I'm as bad hence the smaller font

Can I join in?

I love this bit in Lady Chatterley's Lover... such sexual tension..



The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, hushed, not cold. She got very warm as she hurried across the park. She had to open her light waterproof.

The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness.

There was still no one at the clearing. The chicks had nearly all gone under the mother-hens, only one or two last adventurous ones still dibbed about in the dryness under the straw roof shelter. And they were doubtful of themselves.

So! He still had not been. He was staying away on purpose. Or perhaps something was wrong. Perhaps she should go to the cottage and see.

But she was born to wait. She opened the hut with her key. It was all tidy, the corn put in the bin, the blankets folded on the shelf, the straw neat in a corner; a new bundle of straw. The hurricane lamp hung on a nail. The table and chair had been put back where she had lain.

She sat down on a stool in the doorway. How still everything was! The fine rain blew very softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise. Nothing made any sound. The trees stood like powerful beings, dim, twilit, silent and alive. How alive everything was!

Night was drawing near again; she would have to go. He was avoiding her.

But suddenly he came striding into the clearing, in his black oilskin jacket like a chauffeur, shining with wet. He glanced quickly at the hut, half-saluted, then veered aside and went on to the coops. There he crouched in silence, looking carefully at everything, then carefully shutting the hens and chicks up safe against the night.

At last he came slowly towards her. She still sat on her stool. He stood before her under the porch.

That is a very sexy quote Milly.

I am tremendously sympathetic with the sort of dilligent mother who turns her back for an eye blink, who leaves a child in the bath to answer the door and sign for a package only to scurry back and find her daughter has hit her head on the faucet and drowned in two inches of water. Does anyone give the woman credit for the twenty four hours-minus three minutes a day that she watched the child like a hawk? for the months, the years of ''don't put that in your mouth'' of ''whoops we almost fell down'' Oh no. We prosecute those people. We call it criminal parental neglegence and drag them to court through the snot and salty tears of their own grief. Because only the three minutes count, those three miserable minutes that were just enough.


From We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

That still chokes me now

From The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A really strong short story....

Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.

He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.

He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.

If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise,--but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

I love The Yellow Wallpaper Milly. It is a fantastic story.

And HC it would have been hard to pick one paragraph from that book, it was so good, but that one does sum up some aspects of the guilt of parenting.

Also love this ... E M Forster Howards End

"Sleep now," said Margaret.

The peace of the country was entering into her. It has no
commerce with memory, and little with hope. Least of all is it
concerned with the hopes of the next five minutes. It is the
peace of the present, which passes understanding. Its murmur came
"now," and "now" once more as they trod the gravel, and "now," as
the moonlight fell upon their father's sword. They passed
upstairs, kissed, and amidst the endless iterations fell
asleep. The house had enshadowed the tree at first, but as the
moon rose higher the two disentangled, and were clear for a few
moments at midnight. Margaret awoke and looked into the garden.
How incomprehensible that Leonard Bast should have won her this
night of peace!

or this part of 'A Room With A View'

She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into
view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts,
irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems
collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with
spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion;
this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty
gushed out to water the earth.

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good
man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he
was alone.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he
contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw
radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her
dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped
quickly forward and kissed her.

So so beautiful Ok I won't do anymore

This is from my favourite book ever. Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is Dr Urbino's views on marriage.


....an absurb invention that could exist only by the infinite grace of God. It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddently find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. He would say: "The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast".

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death...

''so you dont think a traumatic or even joyful event can make a difference in a persons life? you dont believe in revelation or epiphany?''


''I think people have epiphanies all the time, usually they're worthless. Maybe two percent of the time someone may decide to change some aspect of their behaviour. It's like Paul on the road to Damascus. Here's this anal-retentive control freak who likes to persecute Christians. So God knocks him down and blinds him and reams him out. So he stops persecuting Christians. But-go read him, he was still an anal-retentive control freak. He changed his behaviour but I dont believe people can change their essential natures. The things that happen to me just make me more me''


deep


gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson