Michele’s Reviews > Crossing to Safety > Status Update

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces than we have no conception of, always it is temporary.”

“Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”

It’s as natural as being born..and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, here's an immortality of organic molecules..we’ll become part of the grass and trees and animals..we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive.People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes.So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it.

“There's no decent literature on how to die..Only a lot of religious gobbledygook about being gathered in to God, and a lot of biological talk about returning your elements to the earth…but it doesn't say anything about what religion is talking about, the essential you, the conscious part of you, and it doesn't teach you anything about how to make the transition from being to not-being.”

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? (Cont’d)

“Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.”

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”

I suppose he has an impulse to bed her right there in the pneumatic moss, reproducing a scene between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper that he has reread several times in a borrowed, bootlegged copy. Her eyes are laughing and alive. I suppose he reaches for her. I suppose she fends him off. That is what girls did in 1933. They walk again.