The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

"...what I've always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he'd done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present."

"...getting angry at another driver for a driving incident is pointless. You need to watch the drivers around you, understand their skill, confidence, and aggression levels, and drive with them accordingly. Know who is driving next to you. Any problems that may occur have ultimately been caused by you, because you are responsible for where you are and what you are doing there."

"There is no dishonor is losing the race...only in not racing because you are afraid to lose."

The Family Fortune by Laurie Horowitz

"But Charlie had married her. He must have seen something in her. Though the flush of new love might be over, something else must have come along to sustain them. If not life would simply be a series of meals, chores, and petty aggravations."
(p. 85)

"It was important to have a purpose. Winnie had her husband and children, and as soon as you have children, you can stop looking for a purpose in life. Your purpose is always there, running around, messing up diapers, needing food, education, toys, and experience. Children are a built-in purpose. Maybe that's why so many people have them."
(p. 97)

"I think some romantic love works that way: you fall not only for the person, but also for a vision of yourself in their world."
(p. 125)

"'I was afraid you had become the type of man I wouldn't like.'
'Have I?'
'I don't know. It doesn't matter. Some feelings are so tied up in who you are, you can't get rid of them, even when you know you should.'
'If I have turned into the kind of man you wouldn't like, I'll change,' Max said."
(p. 269)

"When does civility stop being a good thing and become a way of never saying what you mean?"
(p. 281)

I Wish I Had A Red Dress by Pearl Cleage

"Here's what I believe: life is much harder than anybody can possibly tell you, but it doesn't matter because even if they could, you wouldn't believe them and what good would it do anyway?"
(p. 9)

"...distinctions are important. It's like the Eskimos having so many different words for snow. People always name carefully what they have to come up against to survive. An avalanche and flurries are both snow, but one will kill you..."
(p. 125)

"Sometimes your ego will tell you it's important to get the credit for assisting in somebody else's growth and development, but it's not. What's important is that Johnny now had a new piece of information he could use."
(p. 129)

"'Nobody ever dies of a broken heart. They just think they will.'"
(p. 191)

"Sister says confession without closure is just whining."
(p. 195)

"I'm old enough to know that sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't."
(p. 199)

"There is no enemy. There's just a lot of complicated human beings, some more damaged than others."
(p. 311)

• doctrinaire: dogmatist; a stubborn person of arbitrary or arrogant opinions; stubbornly insistent on theory without regard for practicality or suitability
• "the personal is political" (p. 177)
• "conscious use of language" (p. 210)
• "free-floating rage" (p. 254)

Pearl Cleage postulates that "the beginning of doubt is the end of faith" (8). But I think that the beginning of doubt is really the beginning of true understanding. Belief does not demand blind faith or devotion; when you believe in an idea, you begin with the structure - the initial, primitive idea - which then fleshes & rounds itself out with every new evaluation.

Is Cleage saying that integration strengthened or weakened class ties in Idlewild?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."
(p. 12)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Notes On:

INTRO BY LEO BERSANI

I. Background

In 19th century novelistic convention, the protagonist is:

• a “perceptive vessel of experience”;
• distinctively superior – intellectually, or morally, or;
• a “hero of fiction” with extraordinary sensitivity to articulate the human experience – in other words, wiser than the rest.
• Flaubert’s contemporaries included Austen, Stendal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky
• In literary history, MB was the 1st novel to defy this literary convention: his protagonist is not a hero we can champion.

II. On Theme

• This is a novel about the literary imagination;
• Flaubert is exploring:


• the link between art and reality, asking: “Can literature “represent” life?”
  Quality of Art compared to Quality of Life
• “…the distance between words and things” (pg. xviii)
• “the murder of meaning in language” (pg. xix)
• Not a mere morality story, not intended to raise social consciousness;
• Not criticizing Emma’s “cheap fantasies,” because “more interesting fantasies would not necessarily be more accurate representations of reality” (pg xvii)

III. On Style

• vision binoculaire – observe opposite poles of a subject
  Flaubert accomplishes this by juxtaposing different “worlds,” but he establishes no definitive “reality” (since both are real to its respective participants)

IV. On the Characters

• Emma is sensual, has a physical presence, a hunger for sensation. Her imagination is extravagant. She seeks to define, in real life, what her novels call “bliss” and “passion.” She comes to believe that “bliss” is immediate sensual gratification; her obsession is with consumption. Her plight is to “equate reality with art,” and her tragedy is that she “can’t connect…literary fantasies with her own experience.” (pg xiv)
  
  • “…she never finds her language in the world” (pg xxi)
  • Emma is also selfishly indifferent, and has no empathy for anyone else.
• Rodolphe displays Flaubert’s own mistrust of words. He hears words of passion from every mistress, therefore, Emma’s words are hollow, devoid of any meaning to him. (Flaubert’s philosophy is that writing breeds inspiration, leading to excess of imagination and betrayal of reality.)
• Homais. Flaubert identifies with him because what makes himself so different from “that detestable lover of clichés”?
  Simultaneously, though, Flaubert is critical of clichés because they pretend to “offer the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas” (pg xviii)

Ash Wednesday: A Novel by Ethan Hawke

"'You're forgiven...but forgiveness is overrated. Actions have repercussions --like a science experiment, a chemical reaction.'"
(p. 52)

"'There are no secrets, just things people pretend they don't know.'"
(p. 53)

"It's easy to be gracious, tolerant, and accepting and say Everyone is equal and I wish everybody well when you get everything you want. But the real challenge is to still be this way when you don't get what you want."
(p. 96)

"'If you're not careful, ninety-eight percent of your life will be habit.'"
(p. 120)

"Oh, God, I wanted to remember every moment of my life. I didn't want to forget anything. If I could remember, then the passing seconds might have some meaning or be amassing into some definition or purpose."
(p. 147)

"It's funny. I had had this notion that when you were married you could put to rest all the insecurities and musings about whether you should really be together, but it didn't work that way. Marriage just seemed to have loaded the relationship with responsibility and fear of failure. I knew I had to stop caring whether it was a good marriage or a bad marriage, the right decision or the wrong one, and realize that it was gonna be all those things."
(p. 207)

"To believe that my life may be full of joy, laughter, and understanding fills me with so much fear of disappointment that I would prefer to smoke a cigarette and not believe at all. I either want everything to be magic and mythic or I want it to be dead. But I can't take the everyday living with small disappointments and fragile victories, the grayness of maybe-it'll-work-out and maybe-it-won't."
(p. 207)

Lucrezia Borgia: A Novel by John Faunce

"I weas aware of her crying, but with a child's selfishness I assume my own hurt worse than anyone else's in the world."
(p.14)

"Absence is only emptiness, from which the lucky recover. But presence, though filled with transgression and horrendous hurt, is also rife with moments of love and soul- and body-satisfying peace."
(p.14)

"Joy is only a moment, passing quickly as flash-paper."
(p.32)

The Secret Life of Bees: A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd

"People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life."
(p.2)

"The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life."
(p.82)

"I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?"
(p.95)

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here."
(p.2)