More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Speeding away on a bike, he felt he was escaping himself more effectively than he could on foot, if only a little.
viscid
From Latin meaning bird lime
Until now, a siren had always been a moving object: it approached from a distance, hurtled by, moved away. Now a siren was attached to Bird like a disease he carried in his body: this siren would never recede.
In your opinion, does a vegetable suffer?”
They were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the sight filled them with innocent awe.
Apollinaire
French poet who coined the term surrealist
He could feel himself turning into a sentimental jelly,
“In this age of ours it’s hard to say with certainty that having lived was better than not having been born in the first place.”
‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’ “
From poem by William Blake
Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it.
There must have been moments in your twenty-seven years when you stood at a dubious junction of life and death. Well, at each of those moments you survived in one universe and left your own corpse behind in another. Bird? You must remember a few of those moments.”
If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover;
ineluctability
Inability to resist something
Himiko abruptly put down the book on her lap, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by the African writer Amos Tutuola,
Lit Reference
Himiko quoted in English from Macbeth: “ ‘These deeds must not be thought after these ways,’ Bird, ‘so it will make us mad.’ ”
Lit rreference
“You’re right about this being limited to me, it’s entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I’m experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in
...more
oned of my favorite -- Tom Sawyer ref
“Kafka, you know, wrote in a letter to his father, the only thing a parent can do for a child is to welcome it when it arrives. And are you rejecting your baby instead? Can we excuse the egotism that rejects another life because a man is a father?”
Bird felt as if he had been downed by a bullet of criticism from an unexpected sniper.
He had become a chrysalis of personal misfortune, seeing only the inner walls of the cocoon, never doubting for an instant the chrysalis’s prerogatives. …
In northern Europe there’s a little animal like a rat, it’s called a lemming, and sometimes these lemmings commit mass suicide. I just wonder if somewhere on this earth there aren’t lemming-people.
stridulating
Shrill sound of legs rubbing together made by insects
“As a matter of fact, I kept trying to run away. And I almost did. But it seems that reality compels you to live properly when you live in the real world. I mean, even if you intend to get yourself caught in a trap of deception, you find somewhere along the line that your only choice is to avoid it.”
On the inside cover, Mr. Delchef had written the word for hope. Bird intended to look up forbearance.
