Goodreads | The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel (P.S.)

Brynn rated it:

08/20/07

Read in September, 2006

"Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some stray emotion or other I said, more or less: It's the beginning of the summer and I'm standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge di...more "Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some stray emotion or other I said, more or less: It's the beginning of the summer and I'm standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds."

"We came out into the yellow light of the book porch, that estival old yellow of Bug Lite, which had illuminated the backyards and soft moth of bodies of so many summers past."

"As I approached, I looked far below me, into the ravine, and tried to imagine two cravatted schoolboys, kicking through the sand and Coke cans down there, discussing the primes of their lives as though they were yet far off, and not already upon them."

"I felt happy - or some weak, pretty feeling centered in my stomach, brought on by beer - at the sight of the fading blue sky tormented a its edges with heat lightening, and at the crickets and the shouting over the water, and by Jackie Wilson on the radio, but it was a happiness so like sadness that the next moment I hung my head."

"Why, that summer, was I so often the victim of astonishment?"

"I found it strangely pleasing that, beyond all the new and crucial connections between me and Phlox, there could also be this old and silly connection of families; I felt the lover's shocked but unsurprised love of anything that appears to suggest the whimsical engines of destiny."

"I had always felt pleasure on looking into the houses of strangers...For a long time I thought that one became a spy in order to watch the houses of other people, to be confronted by the simple, wondrous fact of other kitchens, other clocks, and ottomans."

"Solace is in the fabric of sweatshirts."

"Riding on a city bus along the route that you have taken from your job, from the movies, from a hundred Chinese meals, with the same late sun going down over the same peeling buildings and the same hot smell of water in the after-shower air, can be, in the wake of catastrophe, either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of a beautiful routine."

"When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything."...less

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The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel (P.S.)

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