As it happens, sometimes, in life… This from one of my favourite novels.
I remarked one day that if our characters could have been combined we may have made between us one good person.
—Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River
Category Archives: December fragments 2012
December fragments #11
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December fragments #10
Words to write by…
I think that nearly all good writing is suggestion, and all bad writing is statement. Statement kills off the reader’s imagination. With suggestion, the reader takes up from where the writer leaves off.
—John McGahern, Memoir
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December fragments #9
We all have our own ways of describing love. I’ve always been drawn to this one. Perhaps it’s the idea of a secret sky…
This is love:
to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment,
First to let go of life
Finally, to take a step without feet.
—Rumi
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December fragments #8
This from the wonderful Cate Kennedy’s first collection of short stories. Her new collection is Like a House on Fire.
Just wait, and the sea returns everything to you.
—Cate Kennedy, ‘Flotsam’, Dark Roots
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December fragments #7
Seen, looking up, in a métro carriage in Paris. I love a city that reveres its poets.
Le poème—cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens.
(The poem—that prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning.)
—Paul Valéry
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December fragments #6
I can imagine a life spent watching clouds…
I searched the clouds for omens, answers. They seemed to be moving very fast, dome-shaped, delicate, connective tissue. The face of art, in profile. The face of denial, blessed.
—Patti Smith, Woolgathering
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December fragments #5
Larkin’s poem is about truth and untruth more than it is about love, but I’ve never forgotten this last line.
What will survive of us is love.
—Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel tomb’
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December fragments #4
One of the things I love about fragments is their inherent ambiguity.
… the camera could lie after all. Proffering a fractional moment caught in time, with no sense of the before or after, nor all the things that made it so. A false imprint that cheated memory.
—Emylia Hall, The book of summers
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December fragments #3
From one of my favourite novels of 2012, much awarded, and deservedly so. Anna Funder will be giving the closing address at the Perth Writers Festival in February 2013.
The clouds are retreating over the street and the front garden, away from me in my dressing gown in my house, out to sea. In Sydney’s spring they perform each morning, rolling back from us like a tin-lid on sardines. The birdcall is intense. I choose to believe it is joy at the new day, but I know they’re checking to see who has made it through the night.
—Anna Funder, All that I am
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December fragments #2
I love these lines, recently seen on a signboard in Central Park, New York City:
I’ve wandered the earth in search of life
bird by bird I’ve come to know the earth.
—Pablo Neruda
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looking up/looking down 