Savory Morsels

I’ve become a voracious reader of late. I’ve read about two dozen books over the course of the last few months, and I’ve enjoyed them all immensely. I tried to be judicious in my selections, opting for books that offer bits of wisdom, insight, solace, poetry, remembrance, instruction or understanding…with an occasional foray into pure entertainment. I have a decided preference for the more lyrical authors. I’ve taken to reading with a Hi-Liter close at hand to mark a sentence or a phrase that makes me pause and catch my breath. I delight in bits of imagery, or feelings expressed with far greater art than I could ever hope to possess. I enjoy revisiting these thoughts or images often. I like to roll the words on my tongue, ponder their meaning or their beauty, ingesting the art and the truth vibrating within. I won’t bore you, my dear reader, with book reviews or critiques. I am no critic. I will simply offer up a few savory morsels from my last read, The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer to illustrate my point:

“We are each the love of someone’s life.”
“I loved her because she was my only companion and because we grow to love the ones beside us.”
“Childhood is remembered in the marrow, not the mind.”
“All of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass.”
“You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine.”
“…and every night I had to rid the world of you just to sleep, just to survive another day.”
“…think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.”
“I wish every night was just starlight and candles and nothing to do.”
“I saw how the moon had dropped into her cup of coffee. It struggled there like a moth. Then I saw her lean forward, her mouth in a silent kiss, and as she blew on the furrowed surface to cool it, I saw the moon explode.”
“Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised.”
“I was unraveling from one end everything I wove from another.”
“…I, like her, was baffled by tangled human emotions like ours.”
“I became the widow to my own hopes.”
“We waste so much time within ourselves.”
“The heart plans nothing, does it?”
“You leaned back your head and laughed, every bell within you ringing.”
“I pity everyone who has not known you.”
“What do we abandon to claim our heart’s desire? What do we become?”
“Tell me: What is the proper wine for rapture? What is the proper fork?”
“These are what a father hoards – secrets his son shared only with him.”
“What do our lovers see when they close their eyes? What comes to them in daydreams? Only those who love artists will ever know, though it breaks our hearts to find it’s never us.”
“…the heart has more chambers than we can see…”
“You are the whole point of my life.”
“She was like no one you will ever meet. Strong, independent. I never took her for granted for a moment, or pretended I understood her, and when she wanted to go I let her go, because she was art and she was music.”
“We each have an awful bargain in our lives.”
“Life is short and full of sorrows, and I loved it. Who can say why?”
“Remember this always: there was no moment in my life I didn’t love you.”
“Perhaps all of us reach an age when we come to the end of our imagination.”
“It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one’s life for love.”

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