sub divo

from the novel Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

• “It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.”
• “Charley, who sat on her porch with his hands on his knees and his belly in his lap, his flesh mottled like sausage, thick veins pulsing in his temples and in the backs of his hands. He conserved syllables as if to conserve breath.”
• “Her raincoat was so shapeless and oversized that she must have found it on a bench.”
• “Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable.”
• “There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps were sometimes words.”
• “in the circle of chairs and couches, by the refracted lunar light of the vacant sky, while darkness began to fill the room, to life the ice-blue doilies from the sodden sleeves of chairs.”
• “Add to them the swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaces spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.”
• “They’re always prompt about hanging people.”
• “I knew that if I turned however quickly to look behind me the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when I turned away again.”
• “When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that.”
• “She was a music I no longer heard, that rand in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.”
• “The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of water darkness, but could such a birth be imagined?”
• “That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.”
• “Perhaps memory is the seat not only of prophecy but of miracle as well.”
• “It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.”

I kept a blog while I studied in London last year, which has so many photos and words about adventures in Europe. It is located at londononeten.tumblr.com