unearths some literary gems.
[Note: Just to show it's making an effort, this book begins with a series of missing parakeets.]
***
With each drag he sucks more life out of the office. By the end of his cigar he will have inhaled my desk, my chair, and my gold-leafed name on the door.
***
The double exclamation points speak for themselves: they look like bulging eyes under astonished eyebrows.
***
We base our opinions of present people on previous judgments of past people. So we’re always arriving at final judgments one person too late.
***
Size without presence: the closer he gets to you, the smaller and lighter he becomes, so that seated a few feet away he appears virtually transparent.
***
No one walks into a party without having a far better party going on inside his head. Every party is going to be that party until we get there. So the key to the boredom and tension at parties is that no one wants to be at the party he’s at, he wants to be at the party he’s missing.
***
Moving forward as if he’s moving backward, he hands me the paper.
***
He fits into his mood changes as if they are custom-made.
***
Seventeen East 61st Street is a townhouse stolen out of Henry James.
***
I rise like a phoenix out of my rabbit hole.
***
We exchange stares in the darkness; it is like glaring in braille.
***
Annabelle chatters on, increasingly hard to listen to, like being tuned in to two radio stations at the same time.
***
For a month I managed to get up early enough to catch the book napping, got ninety pages done that way, but then the book caught on. Now, as early as I rise, the book is up before me, fighting me from the moment my eyes open. I haven’t been able to outfox it, so I am ignoring it. Thus I have resumed the diary, hoping it will make the book feel bad.
But now I am as self-conscious on the diary as I am on the book. I have to control myself from being literary, have to fake a relaxed tone. This entry is a second draft!
***
“Why don’t you give yourself a deadline?”
“The journalist in me has asked that question; the novelist in me refuses to dignify it with an answer.”
***
“We drank a toast in your honor with hot chocolate tonight”....
Hot chocolate? Is that an innocuous remark or a put-down?
***
Tina points to a circling parakeet.
[This parakeet is fanciful, not real, and is an echo of the parakeets from hundreds of pages earlier in the book. Just to show us that the parrot theme hasn't been completely forgotten, I suppose. Toucans, pshaw!]
***
