《Birds of America》Lorrie Moore

Dance in America

"The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney... And once we tried to smoke them out.  We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back.  Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead."  Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that."

Community Life

He's been trying to look pleasant, but now he winced a little. "Oh, I see," he said. "Miss High-Minded.  You whose father made his living off furs.  Furs!"  He took two steps toward her, then turned and paced back again.  "I can't believe I'm living with someone who grew up on the proceeds of tortured animals!"

She was quiet.  This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in the people around here.  They were not good people.  They were not kind.  They played around and lied to their spouses.  But they recycled their newspapers!

Real Estate

They'd been married for twenty-three years.  Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally.  One got it very, very specifically.

Terrific Mother

He was a practical man.  He often referred to the annual departmental cocktail party as "Standing Around Getting Paid."

"You don't understand," she said.  "Normal life is no longer possible for me.  I've stepped off all the normal paths and am living in the bushes.  I'm a bush woman now.  I don't feel like I can have the normal things.  Marriage is a normal thing.  You need the normal courtship, the normal proposal." She couldn't think what else.  Water burned her eyes.  She waved a hand dismissively, and it passed through her field of vision like something murderous and huge.

"Normal courtship, normal proposal," Martin said.  He took off his shirt and pants and shoes.  He lay on the bed in just his socks and underwear and pressed the length of his body against her.  "I'm going to marry you, whether you like it or not."  He took her face into his hands and looked longingly at her mouth.  "I'm going to marry you till you puke."

因為不知道要放在哪裡

Beth Lisick's Indie girlfriend decisive moment.

《人造衛星情人》村上春樹

一切的事物，或許在某個遙遠地方已經預先注定會悄悄喪失了，我想。至少以一個互相重疊的身影，他們擁有將要失去的安靜地方。我們只是一面活著，一面像把一條條細繩子拉近那樣，一一發現這些吻合而已。我閉上眼睛，試圖盡量再多想起一些在那裡的美好東西的樣子。試圖把那留在我手中。就算那只是保有短暫生命的東西也好。

每個人各自擁有某個特定年代才能得到的特別的東西。那就像是些微的火焰般的東西。小心謹慎的幸運者會珍惜地保存，將那培養大，可以當做火把般照亮著活下去。不過一旦失去以後，那火焰卻永遠也回不來了。

《Who Will Run the Frog Hospital》Lorrie Moore

'Yes,' I say.  I cannot tell her the truth.  Or can I? Can I tell you the truth?  I might begin.  And she might say, Bien sur.  And I would explain that, well, after weeks of fighting and months of door-slamming straight out of the most boisterous of farces, Daniel pushed me down the stairs.

-
Daniel has never really like opera.  'What I like is philosophy,' he said to me once. 'Philosophy's great.  Except I don't like the whole Existence thing.  Do we exist?  That really pisses me off.  But I like Good and Evil.  I like What is Art.  But just a little of What is Art.  If you get too much it circles back around again to Do we exist?, which pisses me off.'

-
Deputy Kerry unlocked my handcuffs by the car but still clutched my elbow, pushing me along in front of him like a little cart.  It was a long march during which I understood that, for all the unusualness in their lives, all my parents had ever wanted was to be average, normal, useful, ordinary.  They could not bear the full force and chaos of their own eccentricity, could not bear the full life of it, the full course, all the stuff and ramifications.  To see something out of line in their own children must have reminded them of all that they were and could not hide from.  It must have reminded them of the deep and sorrowful loneliness of themselves, which they had tried so desperately not to suffer.

-
My husband has that look again, the look of how difficult the world is, life is, how sometimes you just want to go back to your house with the bushes around it and stay inside... 'Don't you feel, you must, like going home?' Daniel asks in a voice of such ailing homesickness it makes me smile.

Everywhere life is full of heroism.

I lean warmly toward him, try to get closer, in empathy and companionship, to study his face, so moist and young in these rains, to match or approximate it, 'don't be lorn, don't be blue, it's only morn, and I'm with you.' I sing this, but he stiffens, then tries not to stiffen, forces a smile but moves too quickly away.  He does this often now.  Something, someone, keeps him, is kept, in some other corner of his life.  I can't follow him there - where that is, a place of woundedness, we are too without each other.  To meet there would be to step into the strange dark rage of strangers.  But I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.  I can feel the jangle and money of it.  I will wait for him, I think: let him go and sicken himself, confuse himself, dash through the bad woods of himself.  Love is perennial as the grass!  I'll wait for him, my heart in epilogue, knit and reknit, perhaps as it always has been.  I'll wait until I just can't wait anymore.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.  

《冰雪紀行》 Werner Herzog

而在維也納，當多瑙河上那座老橋在黎明時分坍塌時，有位本來打算過橋的目擊者說，橋是緩緩躺平下來的，就像老先生就寢的動作。

《寂寞芳心小姐》 Nathanael West

“就算他真經歷過上帝的神蹟，那也是他家的事，只有心理學家會對這無意義的事感興趣。”

“他的問題和我們一樣，就是沒有物質生活，只有精神生活，而這是無可避免的。”

“他是個逃避現實的人。他想耕耘心靈的花園。但你不能逃避現實，不然這心靈花園的果實要賣給誰呢？這種農會真是失敗。”

他想像自己在當鋪窗口，眼前盡是毛皮大衣、鑽戒、名錶、槍、釣具和曼陀林等。這些都是帶有受苦意味的物品。一把鍍金匕首刀鋒上閃著痛苦的光芒，一支磨損的喇叭苦苦哀號著。

《Tender is the Night》F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were still in the happier stage of love.  They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be  on a plane where no other human relations mattered.  They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence, as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other.  They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew, she stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.

I love you

"I love you, of course I love you! Jesus Christ can you let it go? Is that okay?"
"I love you if okay. Of course I love you - is not."

Writing advise from Charlie Kaufman as Robert McKee

Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

Writing advise from Matrick Marber 《Closer》

Larry: You should write another one.

Dan (shrugs) Haven't got a subject.

Beat.

Larry: When I was nine, a policeman touched me up.
He was my uncle. Still is. Uncle Ted.
Nice bloke, married, bit of a demon darts player.

Don't tell me you haven't got a subject, every human life is a million stories.

Thank God life ends - we'd never survive it.

From Big Bang to weary shag, the history of the world.

Our flesh is ferocious... our bodies will kill us... our bones will outlive us.