‘… when I open a book I feel the shape of another human being’s brain. To me, Nabokov’s brain is shaped like a helter-skelter. George Eliot’s is like one of those pans for sifting gold. Austen’s resembles one of the glass flowers you find in Harvard’s Natural History Museum. Each has strengths and weaknesses, as I apply them to the test of my own sensibility. I can slide down Nabokov, but not slowly, and not fully under my own control. I can find what’s precious with Eliot, but only hidden among mundane grey stones of some weight. Austen makes me alive to the Beautiful and the Proportional, but the final result has no scent and is cold to the touch.’

Zadie Smith, in The Guardian. [1]

‘a tint between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud.’

Nabokov, on the colour of Chekhov’s prose. [2]

‘After we’d left I’d sit and think of sets — six games in tennis or however many matching cups and plates, the scenery in theatres, patterns. I’d think of remote settlements in ancient times, village outposts crouching beneath hostile skies. I’d think of people — dancers, maybe, or soldiers — crouching, set, waiting for some event to start.’

Remainder, Tom McCarthy. [3]

‘He squints at the barometer, whose needle is stuck to the “g” of “Changeable.”’

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind …

“Storm Warnings,” Adrienne Rich. [4]

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. To realise something about Voltaire’s famous cure for misery: ‘we must work in our gardens.’ Some might think the point of this is the garden; and some the simple fact of work, but I begin to suspect the real brilliance of this is the: must.

Adam Roberts, blogging. [5]

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

Pilgermann, Russell Hoban. [6]

___________________

[1] “Read Better”, Zadie Smith. The Guardian, 20 Jan 2007 (via msodradek)
[2] “The Wonder of Chekhov,” James Lansdun. The Guardian. 6 Feb 2010
[3] p. 5. Read the first chapter at the New York Times, if you like.
[4] “Storm Warnings,” Adrienne Rich. A Change of World. (1951). Trying to find which collection something like this was published in is a headache if you don’t have the book handy — anything useful is buried under material for high schoolers who have been assigned the poem in class. Representative: ‘“Storm Warnings’ is a poem about an oncoming storm. The narrator is reading and realizes a storm is approaching. She gets up to watch the storm from the window. Then, when the storm begins to get worse and move closer, she makes preparations to get ready for the storm.’
[5] Adam Roberts blogs here, and here. Yellow Blue Tibia was a great book, & he wrote it.
[6] Russell Hoban.