books with beautiful prose, part 1
a list of beautifully written books and some of my favorite quotes from them
While I don’t usually gravitate towards poetry, I love poetic and beautiful prose. Here are some books I love with my favorite quotes from them. I linked reviews in the title of the book (for the ones that have them)! I have about 60 books in my list right now, so I’ll be making a part 2 soon.
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
I am trying to leave a man I still love, or I am trying to stop loving a man I have left. In one of these I had succeeded, but as I lay awake, it was hard to tell in which.
It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.
Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. We learn this in the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel's arrow or drugged by a love flower, desire wounds, and I had felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise.
What good is a home once the ones you love have left it? What good is a home that has failed to keep them all safe, contained, within reach?
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, your course, is "silence." But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.
This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you’ve taught them, they’re willful. They have minds of their own. That’s the beauty of wildness.
Our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where. we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy – that constant, roving hunger – you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart first with the sun.
You laugh, and for the first time in what feels like a year, you smile.
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?
They say that her limbs clung to the soil, and that her ghastly pallor changed part of her appearance to that of a bloodless plant: but part was reddened, and a flower like a violet hid her face. She turns, always, towards the sun, though her roots hold her fast, and, altered, loves unaltered.
I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.
My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song in smooth and measured strains, from olden days when earth began to this completed time.