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'Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn't agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I don't find that writing and publishing a book about my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path.'

Don't let him notice me, don't let him look at me. Isn't there something you can do so that nobody looks at you or sees you? Of course, you must make your mind vacant, neutral, then your face also becomes vacant, neutral - you are invisible.
No use. He comes up to my table.

'There was always a very strong smell of scent.'

Yes, I know she means perfume, but it's a funny sentence.

'It shouts 'Anglaise,' my hat. And my dress extinguishes me. And then this damned old fur coat slung on top of everything else - the last idiocy, the last incongruity'

Poor thing.

'Now I have forgotten about dark streets, dark rivers, the pain, the struggle and the drowning. I'm not talking about the struggle when you are strong and a good swimmer and there are willing and eager friends on the bank waiting to pull you out at the first sign of distress. I mean the real thing. You jump in with no willing and eager friends around, and when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter.'

Again, the awful repetition!

'Dingy--that is what I felt before this quiet, thoughtful woman with the absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the immense dinginess of being a human being, for there is an immense, unalterable dinginess in being human, in the limitation of being human. But why I should feel that particularly with her I did not know then. She, too, was human, quiet, gentle, very unaware.'

"'Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too.'
Those absorbed, blazing blue eyes! The sea was in them, and the whisper of all the open places: the magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds."

'She was fair. As they would say it in the England of long ago - she was fair. And she was grave, so grave. That is a sad lady, I thought. To be fair, to be sad...why, was she intelligent, too? And white she was, very white'

IS THIS PARODY?

'She was tall, not very tall, but as tall as becomes a woman. Her hair, in the shadow of her hat, may have been any colour, but I dared swear that there was a whisper of tawny to it. And it seemed to dance, from beneath her hat, a very formal dance on her cheeks. One had, with her, a sense of the conventions; and that she had just been playing six sets of tennis.'

Ah yes, one of those senses of a person.

'as to this party I am telling of, it had, with that infallible sense of direction peculiar to parties, whether given or thrown, taken a man by the nerves at the back of his head and had hurled him into a deep pit. And it was as one encompassed by that pit, deep as a playground of the seven devils, dark as the very dungeons of gaiety, that I found myself back in my flat.'

Oh yes, the very dungeons?

'I had been that evening to a party; for that is the name that folks give to a dance,--I am not sure why.'

Good grief. Maybe because they're not gawky corsaged teenagers.

A little prissy, Arlen. A tad bitchy.

'It has occurred to the writer to call this unimportant history The Green Hat because a green hat was the first thing about her that he saw: as also it was, in a way, the last thing about her that he saw. It was bright green, a sort of felt, and bravely worn: being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect pour le sport.'

This. THIS. This this this. Acknowledging what it means for a story to be a comedy:

'truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.'

Sometimes you know it's sentimental and sometimes you just don't care.

I keep being charmed by D's perspective on comedy.

'There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to overstep them.'

I love this. After all the late-Shakespearean miracles, the problematic Peregrine pulling a Hermione and all the uncomfortable, partially probed (pardon) Oedipal stuff, it fits. Disbelief only suspends so far.

There was a patter of applause that petered out as soon as people realized that everything was real.

'Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.'

Too right.

Dora's hate for Saskia is an undying treat:

'Saskia, who was well in control of the situation being, unique amongst mammals, a cold-blooded cow'

I need more Dora-hate in my life.

After the newly turned 75 year olds have dolled up horribly, gaudily, perfectly:

'We could still show them a thing or two, even if they couldn't stand the sight.'

"She wore something sheer and white and deceptively virginal, that emitted a hard glitter when she moved, a subtle, ambiguous cobweb softness veined with a secret of ice. 'Got a light?' Half trusting, half insolent, a hoarse voice, older than that pale face with its purple heart of lipstick, flourishing its rasp of gutter like a flag, with pride."

'A smile you could warm your hands on'

Poor gone Peregrine. You're my favorite.

The story's best man, the magician/uncle/freight train/fairy godfather/lepidopterist/mountain of a man Peregrine:

"Back to the jungle. Now. I'll look forward to the company of crocodiles, after the bosom of my family."

The poor darling.

Just want to record that I like "tear-stained silence." Evocative, effective partial-personification.

Seriously, I love Dora: 'When I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I'd wanted to be ephemeral, I'd wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you.'

She makes me fear (and gleefully anticipate) aging.

Ross "Irish" O'Flaherty. Some combo of Tennessee Williams (the bogus place name), Salinger, Henry Miller, and Eugene O'Neill. I think.

"Poor old Irish. I gave him all a girl can give - a little pleasure, a little pain, a carillon of laughter, a kerchief of tears. And, as for him, well, it was he who gave me the ability to compose such a sentence as that last one. Don't knock it. That's lyricism."

Interesting, Heideggerian complaint: "You feel that you could pucker up and blow away the miles between 49 Bard Road and that apartment in New York where I could be tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren't deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross."

Her 74 year old self watching her 20 something year old self: "fun was the last thing I was having, sitting there in my used body, watching it when it was new."

Poor Dora.

'Grandma read it in a book. I swear, to this day, she only did it to annoy us but, from the book, she took it into her head the notion that flowers suffered pain. How, when you cut a flower, it emits a fearful scream of anguish - happily, audible only to other flowers, but Grandma claimed her ears were sensitive enough to catch the echo'

Somehow enchanting. I love Grandma.

When Nora falls heels over head with a sexually aggressive drummer:

'sometimes, when she stripped off, she'd be black and blue. 'Love taps,' she said. I thought, preserve me from the passion of a percussionist.'

Forget me nots! My heart melts.