Kudos

“He had many friends – smart, aspirational people of good taste – who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as though this law of nature somehow didn’t apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can’t imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.”

“A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.”

“You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.”

“The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they'll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.”

“If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.”

“She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.”

“I realised,’ she said, ‘that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.”

“Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.”

“It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.”

“That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.”

“Podría ser que solo cuando ya es demasiado tarde para escapar nos demos cuenta de que siempre hemos sido libres.”

“because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards”

“But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.”

“That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.”

“She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.”

“Minden kiadó azt keresi, folytatta, mondhatnánk, ez a modern irodalom világának Szent Grálja, hogy kik azok az írók, akiknek a művei megállják a helyüket a piacon, mégsem veszítik el a kapcsolatot az irodalmi értékekkel; más szóval, akik olyan könyveket írnak, amelyeket az olvasók élvezetesnek találnak, de nem kell szégyenkezniük, ha rajtakapják őket az olvasásukon.”

“Tudomása szerint egy problémát nem lehet megldani egyszerűen azzal, hogy újra meg újra megfogalmazzák a végtelenségig, hacsak nem bízunk abban, hogy maga a végtelenség megsemmisít bizonyos tényezőket.”

“It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.”

“...he observed that in the current situation the possibility of destruction seemed genuinely to be upon us, to the extent that he couldn't see what move on the chess board would get us out of this corner.”

“It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.”

“You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.”

“I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world---whatever its features---was catastrophic.”

“You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.”

“History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.”

“a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.”

“In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.”

“I made sure to work hard, she said, and to achieve the highest results, but no matter how hard I worked there was always a boy there, level with me, who appeared to be less out of breath and to be taking things in his stride; and so I cultivated the art, she said, of nonchalance, and gave every impression of being less well-prepared than I was, until one day I found that this impression had become a reality, and that I achieved even more by leaving a few things to chance and by taking a leap of faith, such as the child takes when the training wheels come off the bicycle and it finds itself cycling unsupported for the first time.”

“The one thing you can say about people for sure,’ Ryan said, ‘is that they’ll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.”

“I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion.”

“My husband came very close to killing me,’ she said, ‘without ever laying a finger on me, and I saw now that it was my willingness to be killed that allowed him to get that far,”