Part police procederal, part romance, part writing lesson, with a side of academic skullduggery. All what Richard Russo does best, to bring us up to date with his beloved "Nobody's Fool" characters.

• after accidentally discharging his weapon, the judge had fixed him with his trademark baleful stare for what had felt like an eternity before turning his attention to Ollie North, the chief back then. “You know my thoughts on arming morons,” he told Ollie. “You arm one, you have to arm them all. Otherwise it’s not even good sport.
• In fact Flatt had exhibited little affection of any kind, except for an abstract concept he called “small-town justice,” which he claimed to dispense. How that differed from other kinds of justice Raymer never had the temerity to ask, but he suspected it meant “likely to be reversed in a higher court.”
• What leads you to believe they’ll be interested in any of this? (Well, if they weren’t, why had she assigned this subject to begin with? Did she imagine he was interested?)
• But her most mysterious and baffling questions always had to do with the speaker. That side of Raymer’s triangle was always so tiny, and the other two so elongated, that the resulting geometric shape resembled a boat ramp. On each of his essays she wrote Who are you? as if Douglas Raymer weren’t printed clearly at the top of the first page... Raymer had tried his best to comprehend the old lady’s triangle, though it remained as deeply mysterious to him as the Holy Trinity’s Father, Son and Holy Ghost. At least that was billed as a profound mystery that you were meant to contemplate, even while knowing that it was beyond human comprehension—a great comfort to Raymer, since it was certainly beyond his.
• A uniform, he then discovered, was the next best thing to an identity,
• Raymer repeated what Charice had told him about how these remotes work, implying that his interest was official, that he himself was concerned because “your remote could open my garage door and let you into my house.” “Except I wasn’t pointing mine at your house. You were pointing yours at mine.” “I was speaking hypothetically,” Raymer told him. “I wasn’t,” the man said.
• The cruel arithmetic of their friendship was such that while Sully was Rub’s only friend, Rub was one of Sully’s many... Indeed, every time someone in his friend’s inner circle died or moved away, it was as if Sully himself was proportionately diminished, so there was never a net gain.
• That rare lawyer who was less interested in law than justice, Wirf took even joking references to the latter seriously and could always be counted on for both perspective and sound judgment... “When I’m gone,” he’d told Sully more than once, “you’re going to discover how hard it is to find another one-legged lawyer who’s always in a good mood,” and this had proven true.
• Poor people concluded that the deck was stacked against them, rich ones that a reshuffle would ruin both them and civilization.
• What appealed to him, as near as he could tell, was its necessity. That was the thing about the work he and Rub used to do: nasty as it was, it all needed to be done. And once completed, it provided satisfaction, and even pleasure, in inverse proportion to the hardship endured.
• “Into the grave,” Charice repeated, apparently willing to concede the truth of what he was telling her but still unable to wrap her mind around what had happened. “Like…on top of the casket?
• “One minute you were standing there and the next it was—timber! You went into that hole like it was dug to your exact specifications. You were just gone. You know like when you try to stuff a cat in a bag? How there’s always a leg sticking out?
• Carl rotated the schematic, considering it from a different angle, and offered it to the mayor. “Show me on this where there’s a power line.” “Why would I show you on that when I can take you to the actual cable your guys just jacked the shit out of.
• “Well,” Gus sighed, “several things have to happen. First, some imbecile has to sever the collar ties that secure the walls to the roof.” “Why would anybody do that?” “They were working on the penthouse units, is my understanding. They meant to retie them later.” “Still,” Jerome said, “the floor joists—” “Those were compromised a couple weeks ago in order to construct the interior stairwells... “Boom,” said Gus, puffing out his cheeks. “Maybe that’s the lesson. You can skate on the first idiocy, and maybe even the second, but the third brings down the wrath of God.” He regarded Raymer then as if he might be the physical embodiment of the principle he’d just articulated.
• (In war, as in the courtroom, never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.)
• “Chief?” she said. “I ever tell you about the tattoo on my ass?” “No, Charice. That I would’ve remembered.” “Butterfly. Tiny little thing. If you don’t let me out from behind this switchboard, it’s gonna be a pterodactyl by the time I’m forty.
• Fear is a poor fuel, thin and easily burned through, even when there’s a lot of it.
• What bearing did mere facts have when it came to how you saw yourself? If Sully never thought of himself as seventy, even on days like today when he felt eighty, why shouldn’t a lonely married woman who read romance novels every night think of herself as a girl?
• At first he might credit Rub as his source, but as he grew more confident, he’d relate the story as if he himself had been the sole eyewitness. With Sully’s best efforts, Rub sometimes wished he’d been there to enjoy the events his friend was describing, until he remembered he actually had been.
• Their days would be full of long hours, plenty of time for Rub to tell Sully whatever he wanted, and Sully, chastened, would be devoted to getting him back on his feet. Well…foot. Okay, Rub wasn’t crazy about the idea of losing a leg, but if that was the price of friendship, what choice did he have but to pay it? Sully’s pal Wirf had gotten along fine on one leg, and if he could be happy on just the one, then Rub supposed he could, too.
• At some point, though, certain facts, as hard and uncomfortable as the severed nub of tree limb he was sitting on, began to intrude on his pleasant dismemberment fantasy... And even if he somehow avoided this fate and recovered, he’d be chasing Sully all over Bath on one leg instead of two.
• Rotten wood, even when painted over, has the soft, porous feel of a badly told lie,
• The kettle’s dome, which might’ve killed him, landed with a dull thud behind him, then rolled down into the ravine. Even the rain of ashes and the last of the burning embers wouldn’t have been terribly problematic if he hadn’t been looking up. But of course he was.
• It was as if mundane and mechanistic things were suddenly revealed to have been specifically designed with an eye toward maximum cruelty and guaranteed suffering. Bad enough that our relationships with the living should always be undermined by fear and venality and narcissism and a hundred other things, but it seemed especially awful that we couldn’t be faithful even to the dead. We put them in the ground with expressions of love and admiration and eternal devotion, promising never to forget, though then we did, or tried to.
• “Also the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Vietnam War,” Carl continued. “Not one of those clusterfucks could truly commence until somebody said, What the hell. We’ve come this far.”
• Because it was something the way things kept grinding with no apparent reason or need, indifferent to life and death and all else, too.
• That said, the mechanical world probably wasn’t so different from its living inhabitants, most of whom, Sully included, went about their lives, most days, taking it all for granted. His own happiness, such as it was, had always seemed rooted in his willingness to let each second, minute, hour and day predict the next, today no different from yesterday except in its particulars, which didn’t amount to much.
• “People generally do notice things,” Kurt continued, “especially when you direct their attention, but they act on very little. Then they wonder why their lives are so full of regret.”
• judging from the photo, he might as easily have been climbing up, a home-invading burglar. His bruised, swollen face looked like some sort of visual prediction of the damage done by a fall that hadn’t yet occurred. The caption read: What’s up, Chief?
• “I don’t, Roy. And I’ve tried diets. They don’t work. I bet Janey doesn’t even have to diet.” “I’m not gonna tell you again about not sayin’ her name.” “But that’s what I mean, Roy. She gets to be her and be all lucky and I don’t even get to say her name. And I’m the one bein’ nice to you.
• When it came to role-playing, Gert, as everyone knew, was without equal. All his life he’d been a sucker for similar conundrums. He leaned one elbow onto the bar to get comfortable. “My car got crushed yesterday, so for me running’s a problem... Gert’s eyes glazed over and crossed slightly as he dove deeper into his role as violent moron. “I’m scared and they gave me painkillers at the hospital, so I’m not thinking straight. I fall back on what I know."
• Then Dougie reached out with Raymer’s hand, picked up the snake, returned it to the box and secured the lid. Smith was rubbing his eyebrow, which was already ballooning impressively, and looked at Raymer with something like embarrassment. “Fuck,” he said. “I knew better than that."
• “I know. You said already you’re in love with me.” “You keep leaving out the maybe,” he told her.
• It was a shame, in fact, that there was only one belligerent asshole in the car, because it would’ve felt good to coldcock a few more. The static in his ears was almost as loud as the honking had been, but as he went back to his car he found himself happily humming a tune from a couple decades earlier and recalled the lyric: I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.

What builds or tears down our allegiance to a given novel? I have mixed feelings about Amor Towles's debut novel. The one-liners, the repartees, and cameos of a bygone New York are certainly winsome:

• an old fashioned Irish house (GOOD ALE, RAW ONIONS, NO LADIES)
• This city where all things beautiful are welcomed and measured if, if not immediately adopted, then at least tried on for size.
• If New York was a many-cogged machine, then lack of judgement was the grease that kept the gears turning for the rest of us.
• world-weariness, as if a string of successes have towed along an ugly truth or two.
• Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs.
• “I think we all have some parcel of the past which is falling into disrepair or being sold off piece by piece. It’s just that for most of us, it isn’t an orchard; it’s the way we’ve thought about something or someone."
• (Ukrainian vaudeville bar), where they could keep a watchful eye on one another. In such proximity, time slowly strengthened their sentiments, while diluting their resolve.
• The one thing for certain at Belmont was that on Wednesday at 5:00 A.M., there was no place for the common man. This was like the circles of Dante's Inferno - populated with men of varied sins, but also with the shrewdness and devotion of the damned... Hands grip cups where the absence of steam said the cup was filled with liquor.
• St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street is a pretty powerful example of early nineteenth-century American Gothic... The stained-glass windows were made by craftsmen from Chartres. Tiffany designed two of the altars and a Medici designed the third. And the Pieta in the southeast corner is twice the size of Michelangelo’s. In fact, the whole place is so well made that as the Good Lord sees about His daily business, He can pass right over St. Patrick’s confident that those inside will take pretty good care of themselves.
• As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion....if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.
• But there are tens of thousands of butterflies: men and women like Eve with two dramatically different colorings—one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage—and which can be switched at the instant with a flit of the wings.
• Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that's about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.
• If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, then there wouldn't be so much to fuss about love in the first place.
• - You're rather well read for a working-class girl.
  - Really? I've found that all my well-read friends are from the working classes.
  - Oh my. Why do you think that is? The purity of the poverty?
  - No. It's just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment.
  - Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment.
  - Not in this house.
• I suppose we don't rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment - a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.
• He always looked his best, I thought to myself, when circumstances called for him to be a boy and a man at the same time.
• Slurring is the cursive of speech...
• That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.
• Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?
• Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.
• New Eglanders respect all aspects of money but its use.
• Hiker and a talker. This is a reason of self-discovery.
• elbow to elbow, ethos to ethos / a rifle you can wear to your wedding.

大风刮去的上一篇《皇叔》弯弯绕绕多了些，CP又混乱，就没看完。这篇相比之下简单明了。

• 丙子年五月初二，本仙君踩着一朵祥云降至尚川府上空，徐风乍起，路人仰头观望，皆缩颈疾奔，摊贩手忙脚乱，本仙君模糊听得一声叫喊：“天阴有雨，赶紧收摊回家！”    世人愚钝，本仙君不与他们一般见识。
• 轻飘飘做了几千年神仙，再世为人，足踏实地头顶方圆，四肢熟悉的沉重，五味在胸尘音入耳，竟十分塌实的亲切。
• 劈里啪啦一阵，哭声引来丫鬟，丫鬟去喊家丁，家丁去喊总管和奶妈子，奶妈子扶出夫人。两个忠心耿耿的家丁壮汉抖擞出武松上山的气概从我身边挟起两位小少爷，我向他两人亲切微笑，壮汉面露惊恐之色，一路狼烟狂奔回廊下。一颗颗人头，闪在八丈二尺远的地方，看鬼魂一样看本仙君。    有眼不识真仙，本仙君也不同他们一般见识。
• 法师起身，“王爷，小公子仙君临世，当然与常人不同，古人曾道，卧虎如石。星君数年潜气钝行，世人碌碌者，却不可知。”    东郡王爷对儿子是老虎星下凡一说很是满意，小儿子之所以傻，乃是老虎星一二十年都在睡觉，这种混话他也信了。
• 天枢转世，果然还是和在天庭一样爱不动声色，端清高架子。心里闹着，脸上撑着，直把自己撑成个病秧子。
• 方才又玩得过了……    喊人、传大夫、上药、开方子、煎药、人仰马翻。    本仙君蹲在天枢床头，十分忧郁。我觉得玉帝派我下界，不是让我折腾天枢，实是让天枢折腾我。
• 晋宁的眼晶亮亮地一闪，挺起小胸脯道：“小叔叔你放心，我一定不会和别人说。我明白了，男人和女人是亲嘴，小叔叔和叔叔都是男人，就叫渡气。”
• 青衫公子站起身，本仙君惊且喜，恍若东风拂过，三千桃树，花开烂漫。   他在三千树桃花的灼灼风华中向我轻轻一笑。    “在下赵衡，见过思明公子。”       第九章    本仙君如一棵被霜打雪压的老树，忽见东风，不由自主花满枝头。    浅近些说，本仙君心花怒放了。
• 本仙君没和他客气。这几日白天折腾，晚上还要惦记天枢在旁边，翻身的时候别压着，睡着的时候别梗着颈子，打鼾把他惊着。牵三挂四，不得塌实。本仙君翻身上床，在内侧打了个呵欠，昏昏欲睡。
• 衡文道：“命格星君写册子一向爱偷懒省事，辞不达意还罔生歧义。只盼他这次写得清楚点，别节外生枝。”
• 我对他的样貌还没看熟，又呆了一呆，也笑着接道：“当真当真，我到天庭第一次喝这么痛快。”
• 所谓下棋之趣味，就是要与那对面同下的人为着一子两子的得失，三分两分的局面你争我夺。你喜我怒，你洋洋得意我森森冷笑，彼时抓耳挠腮它时冷汗潸潸踌躇难下，图得就是这个乐子。
• 天枢的双目如近看的秋水，南明的两眼是远看的秃山。这厢盛着说不尽的凄楚哀伤思慕欣喜与绵绵情意，那厢装着沉甸甸的思念与光秃秃的情。
• 我将落到地上的诗本捡起来放到桌上，没话找话地道：“没想到你看这个。我还以为你好看王摩诘与孟襄阳。”虽然本仙君在天庭时，每逢有行令联句献诗之类需弄文墨事，都要靠衡文帮我过关，但其实我做凡人的时候也念过诗的，也能和人谈谈。    慕若言道：“王诗与孟诗虽以淡泊悠远著，其实一位是富贵生闲一位是闲想着富贵。倒不如高适图名利便公然的图了，却痛快。”    我道：“也是，此公虽然言大行怯，诗写得铿锵，战场上无能。但这世上行同于言的又有几个？大多如高公尔。”
• 我陪笑道：“你莫躁，欠你的情回了天庭慢慢还，今天晚上我捅南明给你看解闷，可好么？”    衡文道：“你今儿一天都在琢磨着一刀扎在南明身上什么位置罢。”
• 我如此待天枢，他竟替我拦下刀子，一喜。    我如此待他，他竟说我不是坏人，不是我未唱够火候，就是他脑子过了火候，一忧。    至于那一愁……    背后衡文道：“你的刀在墙角的大花瓶里立着。”    本仙君立刻道：“阁下夜半入房，未能及时相迎，失礼。白日家丁活计粗重腌杂，委屈了单将军，实在不好意思。但不知单将军半夜将我的人从床上拐下来，欲做些甚。”    我含笑负手，踱到花瓶旁，拎出无鞘的长刀。
• 本仙君立在殿上，从容惮定，我站理儿“玉帝英明，宋珧此下凡界，事事都按交代做，事事都与交代不同，吃的苦受的罪也没当什么，就不提了。玉帝明鉴万事，是非对错，定能公断。”
• 天庭的四天门，南天门通如今界，西天门通过往界，东天门通未来界，北天门通随常界。    本仙君打算从西天门转回李思明还在床上诊治的时候，日游神刚将我真身提出，李思明刚咽气，本仙君在这个瞬间再附进去，衡文把那颗扎烂的心还回原样，万事大吉。
• 身上无处不痒，我伸手在脖子后挠了挠，搓出个颇可观的灰疙瘩。弹了，再搓，再弹，颇有意趣。
• 我捋须微笑，先向掌柜的微笑，再向慕若言微笑。待张口时，才察觉豆腐干还没咽，于是从容咽下，又微笑，先对掌柜的道：“举手之劳，何必客气。”再蔼声问床上的慕若言，“公子觉得身子好些了么？”
• 我与狐狸在山腰落地，参参树影深深长草，我问狐狸此山的名字，狐狸冷声道：“宣清山。”宣离的宣，衡文清君的清，本仙君一阵肉紧，道：“你未起这个名字之前，这座山叫什么。”    狐狸悻悻道：“枯藤山。”闷头走了几步，道：“你怎么知道名字是我改的？”
• 本仙君这个老壳子蹲在一旁，看着青春年少的衡文和青春年少的天枢手拉手站着，颇有种东华帝君在我眼前跳水袖舞滋味。
• 衡文似懂非懂地眨眼。天枢欲止又言道：“我和衡文下午与他们下棋，他们下不过，就拍桌子说再和我们下棋就给我们做儿子做孙子。在凡间，给人做儿子是不是一件很丢脸的事情。那你为什么……”
• 我此时像是块闷在锅里的锅贴，又被油煎又被气闷，熬得十分难受。我只能道：“你喜欢这间房，我便和你换一换，从今天中午起你就在这间房中住，我去你的房里睡罢。”
• 衡文无奈道：“命格这次是一番好意救你，你反而该谢他。你在天庭这些年，众仙与你都有些交情，不忍心见你就这么着灰飞烟灭了。因此命格才向玉帝说，虽然据说仙契线死结不是灰飞烟灭再不能解，但你这个神仙算是意外飞升，这些年没见你和天枢生情，说不定还有别的解决的法子。又因为月老说，毁他人姻缘十分造孽，会自断姻缘做为报应。于是命格就想了这么一出，天枢他向玉帝说愿意一试。南明对青童和芝兰太过狠辣，正有一笔债要还。于是，便有了你下界一场。”
• 命格星君道：“玉帝本以为，你只是乱了天枢星君和南明帝君天命的变数。没想到你还是衡文清君与那只狐狸之间的引线。”    欠的债，就必定要还。我和天枢栓在仙契线上。命格星君说，他是杜宛铭时，那一世欠了我的债。于是他在天庭护着我吃尽苦头，。狐狸对衡文一片痴心，拼了自己的性命与千年的修为。衡文欠了狐狸，而今我又欠着天枢。    原来一概的缘份，不过是一场要还的债。
• 我道：“那你记得今天跟我说的话。衡文他喝茶喜欢喝淡茶，写字时常把笔搁在笔洗里忘了收，喝酒不醉不算完，不能由着他喝。睡觉倒是没什么毛病，但记着他起床一定要喝雀舌沏的头遍茶。一看公文就忘了时辰，要时常拖他出来各处散心，他案前有个叫陆景的，时时刻刻都能拿出一堆公文让他看，勿须理会此仙。要是东华帝君碧华灵君太白星君他们找他吃酒时，留神小心着，他有些丢三落四的毛病，离席起身后看看他桌子上有没有忘记拿的扇子之类的。他不怎么吃甜东西，果仁只吃盐培的不吃蜜渍的。枕头要矮，褥子要软，茶水注意温热合宜。”
• 我这段话比方才天枢的遗言我觉得更动情些，狐狸的眼圈儿都隐约有些红了。

The parts about Sully's wretched childhood marred (as it was meant to) my complete enjoyment of the book. The bright spots: hapless Rub, Sully's elder grandson Will, and Miss Beryl.

• that pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults... What Sully feared now was that he was facing a new kind of pain, one that wouldn’t know or care when he’d had all he could take. It might never be satisfied.
• What she looked like was a complete list of a man’s past sins come to life, bent on retribution.
• Miss Beryl remembered one of her mother’s favorite quips, which she now shared with her companion. “Well,” she told Mrs. Gruber. “Either you told a lie or you ‘et’ something.” {??}
• The responsibility and burden of affection had always weighed heavily on her ex-husband. Given half a chance, he gravitated naturally to the easy camaraderie of the lunchroom, the barroom, the company of men, of another man’s wife.
• Only Will, her grandson, seemed aware of her distress, and he watched her so fearfully that she wished there was a way to reassure him that this feeling would pass, that truth was something she’d always been able to swallow and keep down.
• the old man managed to take in each person efficiently—his unhappy daughter, Vera, and her long-suffering husband, his crippled ex-son-in-law, Sully, the little boy’s father, Peter, and his large, graceless, sad wife, and the boy himself, his great-grandson, little dick in hand, so full of life and energy. Robert Halsey took them all in, felt affection for one and all, but concluded then and there that even if his next breath of pure oxygen proved to be his last, he wouldn’t trade places with any of these people,
• what to say to a kid with a perpetual frown who always watched the speedometer and reported back to his mother how fast Sully had driven. They usually went somewhere where there’d be a crowd—a movie or an amusement park—so they’d seem less alone.
• the Joyce woman who had whimpered for half an hour in the bathroom was grieving the loss of a loved one—the self she had been when she was flush with the currency of youth.
• Sully, even as a sophomore, was everything Clive Jr., an eighth-grader, aspired to be—reckless, imaginative, contemptuous of authority and, above all, indifferent to pain.
• When he thought it through objectively, Clive Jr. didn’t see what was so wrong about a young boy wanting to keep his own family intact. Yet he and his father made no mention of their visit to Miss Beryl. It remained their unspoken secret, and yet instead of drawing father and son closer together, it had driven a further wedge between them.
• Sully might even manage to kill everybody else, but it would be his own personal destiny to be thrown clear of one head-on collision after another, always the worse for the experience but never dead of it.
• Trying to get Sully to see things her way was like trying to put a cat into a bag—there was always a leg left over.
• Peter did as he was told. As things got crazier, he was actually getting the hang of coexisting with his father. Following orders was pretty much essential, far more important than understanding them. Different rules entirely from those that governed his life as an educator. Out on the blacktop the El Camino did a three-point turn and backed into the drive, right up to the gate.
• Like all the mistakes a man made in his life, which could be worried and picked at like scabs but were better left alone.
• “So I wouldn’t be you,” Peter said so quickly that Sully wondered if he’d imagined this conversation in advance and had an answer all prepared. As usual, Sully was surprised at how quickly Peter’s resentment surfaced. It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason, just that they’d be going along fine and then, without immediate cause, there it would be. “Actually, that was Mom’s reason. She was the one that wanted it.”
• “I’ve never wanted you to be more like me,” he said. “There’ve been times I wished you were less like your mother, but that’s a different issue.” Peter’s smirk was less contemptuous now. “Terrific,” he said. “She’s afraid I’ll end up like you, you’re afraid I’ll end up like her.”
• “When I could,” Sully admitted. In fact, giving his son a car he didn’t own had buoyed his spirits considerably. For much of the evening he had considered that in his son’s hour of need Sully had nothing to give him, and it was good to realize now that he hadn’t been thinking clearly. They shook hands on it more or less successfully, since irony and resentment were difficult to convey through the medium of palms.
• Sully bent down to see. DON’T REMOVE THIS DEAR, it said, and down in the corner, POLICE DEPT. The note had been scrawled in pen, and someone had inserted, in pencil, a comma between the words “this” and “dear.” Sully considered the various riddles presented by both the dead animal and the note for about thirty seconds before giving up, glad that there were some riddles in this always strange life that had nothing to do with himself, a conclusion that was probably valid in general, if not in this instance.

E. L. Konigsburg's tale is sweet, and short enough not to strain the reader's credibility. The siblings' tiffs are adorable.

• Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her pack. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.
• Jamie liked perspiration, a little bit of dirt, and complications.
• "I doubt that. Who would drop a whole candy bar and not know it? That's like leaving a statue in a taxi".
• What happened was: they became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time-- especially a brother and a sister who had always spent more time with activities than they had with each other.
• Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.
• I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.
• Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside where it counts.
• Flattery is as important a machine as the lever, isn't it, Saxonberg? Give it a proper place to rest, and it can move the world.

It's always thrilling to read about boy geniuses - sadly and unjustly girl geniuses don't appear in novels as much.

• Brain left school at six while body did time: Well that wasn’t very nice now was it? L: If someone’s about to eat you you don't have to be nice.
• Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope:
• L is up to the pentekaipentekontapus under the admiring & indulgent eyes of people who get on and are able to get off again after a few stops.
• so may salve conscience by just touching on highlights like Sound of Music cutting from Doe A Deer to seven-part harmony or heptaphony as some people (naming no names) would probably call it.
• I said politely but firmly I think if you see the film again you will find that the samurai are not, in fact, an elite band. Lesser directors have of course succumbed to the glamour of the eliteness of a band, with predictable results; not Kurosawa. She said there was no need to take that tone
• & I said politely Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought. We should draw our conclusions from the evidence available rather than from hearsay and try not to be influenced by our preconceptions. We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see.
• smiling pleasantly through 273 verses (10 + 0 + –262) of the green bottles song. Could I be sure that he would not start up again at –263 or rather would anyone familiar with the child offer even straight odds that he would not? No.
• there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.
• how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep.
• All I would have to do was write down a short passage of Greek, as if for this interested sceptic, with translation transliteration vocabulary and grammatical comments—taking pains, of course, to write the latter as if for the type of person who can’t get enough of things like the middle voice, dual number, aorist and tmesis. I am usually not very good at dealing with social dilemmas, but this seemed a stroke of genius. It would take about an hour (comparing favourably with the five-hour unwritable note)
• By the looks of things I have about three days’ grace before I start teaching Japanese to a child with no sense of proportion whatsoever.
• And DON’T YOU DARE colour in ANY OTHER BOOK without ASKING ME FIRST. That was all I said, & it was too much. A chittering Alien bursts from the breast to devour your child before your eyes. He looked down at the page
• Drums over Africa was written by an Australian named Peter McPherson
• Once you saw that you saw that you could potentially have dozens of fragments that could not be part of the finished work, and what you saw was that it was perceiving these fragments as fragments that made it possible to have a real conception of what wholeness might be in a work
• It was as if after the illusion that you could have a thing 500 ways without giving up one he said No, there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes, tears were streaming down my face as I heard these three pieces each with just one chance of being heard if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.
• I said Well do you want me to show you some kanji? He said I think I can probably do it myself. I knew what this meant, it meant for all my good intentions I had been a monster.

L takes over:

• I said so are you picking four, and Sibylla said yes because she could not wait four days for the term jinsai which was obviously an indispensable euphemism for small child.
• I have read Kon Tiki, Into the Heart of Borneo, Arabian Sands, Journey into Danger!, Quest for Adventure!, The Snow Leopard, In Patagonia, Amazon Nights, To Caucasus, Tents on the Steppe, Igloo Winter, With Camel and Compass, Among Pygmies and After Alexander.
• Sibylla put the magazine on the floor. She said, You will not be ready to know your father until you can see what’s wrong with these things... I said, It’s not fair, nobody else has to wait until they’re old enough to know who their father is. She said, We should not elevate the fortuitous to the desirable.
• I said, ‘Let’s take two people about to undergo 10 years of horrible excruciating boredom at school, A dies at the age of 6 from falling out a window and B dies at the age of 6 + n where n is a number less than 10, I think we would all agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n years.
• The hero is a man actively engaged in becoming himself—never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something.
• I said: According to one reviewer this writer I am supposed to regard from a state of grace beyond pity
• I said: Well just tell me this. He didn’t rape you did he? (Everything I know about delicacy I learned at my mother’s knee.)
• There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant—life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge,
• thought you thought disenfranchisement on grounds of age the hallmark of a BARBARIC SOCIETY. I thought of saying, How do you know something I don’t know is something I don’t want to know?
• the problem is that they are classicistic rather than classic, pursuing both truth and beauty not for themselves but because manifested in these forms in the great works of the past. It would be harder, of course, to seem as though I saw these faults from a state of grace, but maybe she would overlook that.
• You can tell just from the names of the mathematicians. Bernoulli’s equation—Euler’s equation—Gauss’s divergence theorem—I have no idea what these actually ARE, but essentially the mathematics at the heart of the subject seems to be post-Newtonian developments in calculus, 18th 19th century stuff. How hard can it be?
• could try the hunchbacked midget costume I had to wear when we went to see The Crying Game—but I thought I might have trouble getting into a bar even as a midget sensitive about his height.

There's much moral urgency in Paul Kalanithi's book.

• He had reached some compromise in his mind that fatherhood could be distilled; short, concentrated (but sincere) bursts of high intensity could equal…whatever it was that other fathers did. All I knew was, if that was the price of medicine, it was simply too high.
• For every country fact that seemed preposterous, there was one that felt solid and true. Always check your shoes for scorpions.
• Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.
• Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land resonated profoundly, relating meaninglessness and isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection.
• If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?
• And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.
• "I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment."
• (Then I learned that Virginia Woolf once boarded a battleship dressed as Abyssinian royalty, and, duly chastened
• A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning.
• Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos, and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.
• Cadavers reverse the polarity. The mannequins you pretend are real; the cadavers you pretend are fake.
• Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: “With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.”
• And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context. In the actual situations where one encounters these questions, it becomes a necessarily philosophical and biological exercise. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.
• While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves
• Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?
• Still, when you work in a hospital, the papers you file aren’t just papers: they are fragments of narratives filled with risks and triumphs.
• Some days, this is how it felt when I was in the hospital: trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, the rain of tears of the families of the dying pouring down.
• As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives—everyone dies eventually—but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness...  In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador.
• The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness.
• Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.
• During our final weekly chat, he turned to me and said, “You know, today is the first day it all seems worth it. I mean, obviously, I would’ve gone through anything for my kids, but today is the first day that all the suffering seems worth it.” How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.
• If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed.
• Most lives are lived with passivity toward death—it’s something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility.
• Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.
• What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
• My body was frail and weak—the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory—and that, too, shapes your identity.
• Day after day I kept at it, and every tiny increase in strength broadened the possible worlds, the possible versions of me.
• Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes.
• Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.
• The monolithic uncertainty of my future was deadening; everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action.
• decision: I would push myself to return to the OR. Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.
• The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church.
• Death maybe be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.
• the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.
• Emma hadn’t given me back my old identity. She’d protected my ability to forge a new one.
• --to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in... It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. {Um, where do I start...}
• My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others... From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare.
• Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So what tense am I living in now? Have I proceeded beyond the present tense and into the past perfect? The future tense seems vacant and, on others’ lips, jarring.

There's a lot more clammy heat in this book than in Edmund de Waal's previous one on netsuke. It's more about making than possessing.

• Pinch a walnut-sized piece between thumb and forefingers until it is as thin as paper until the whorls of your fingers emerge. Keep pinching. It feels endless. You feel it will get thinner and thinner until it is as thin as a gold leaf and lifts into the air. And it feels clean. Your hands feel cleaner after you have used it. It feels white.
• I want poems that compare white porcelains to smoke coiling up from a chimney, or from incense on an alter, or mist from a valley, or, at the very least, an egret in a paddy field poised.
• There are the pleasures of being envied and the pleasures of being feared and the pleasures of looking down on a sea of new possessions but of all the pleasures. More is the only thing that works.
• The connoisseurs sniff, categorise, rank, price, demote.
• Celadons, the colour caught between green and blue, get sky after rain, and kingfishers, and iced water, all of which are lyrical.
• “In many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls,” Herman Melville wrote.
• “The Auroras of Autumn” by Wallace Stevens: being visible is being white, / Is being of the solid white, the accomplishment / Of an extremist in an exercise….
• If you make God in your own image, then William's God is an interested God. Not kind, perhaps, too many bereavements have knocked away that pietism, but good on detail, and definitely good on surprise.
• All emperors look like Dorothy L. Sayers, legs planted firmly apart, hands on lap, solid, unknowable.

Of a necessity, there's a lot about doings of autocratic rulers:

• Augustus II, elector of Saxony, an omnivorous collector of both mistresses and china, wrote, “The same is true for oranges as for porcelain, that once one has the sickness of one or the other, one can never get enough of the things and wishes to have more and more.”
• The tale here comes very close to fairy story. There are tests, kilns, firing, failures. The boy is imprisoned, and then freed on condition he keep good his promise to transmute clay. Tschirnhaus invents large lenses capable of concentrating enough heat to melt Chinese porcelain. Between them, after years of error, they manage to produce one white translucent cup, whereupon Tschirnhaus dies.
• Louis XIV built a porcelain pavillion for his mistress. In it, they made love: "in a Chinese bed below a ceiling painted with Chinese birds."
• In 1909, someone writing on behalf of the boy emperor, then five years old, requests “one white porcelain vase, four white porcelain ju vessels, one white porcelain bowl, and twelve large white porcelain dishes. The vessels will be placed in front of the portrait of the late Empress Xiao Qin Xian for ritual purposes.” A response to another request arrives two years later, and it is the last imperial correspondence regarding porcelain—a staggering detail, when one realizes that such letters were exchanged for more than a millennium. Here, de Waal paraphrases: “It says that we received your letter, but we cannot fulfill a demand for one hundred seven-inch dishes glazed in sacrificial red. We no longer have the skills. So we are sending a hundred white dishes with red dragons on them.” <> “A thousand years of imperial porcelain ends on this,” De Waal writes. “For the first time in decades I feel like a cigarette.”
• The emperor Zhu Di, who seized the imperial throne in a bloody act of usurpation in 1402, slaughtering hundreds of relatives in the process, was so fascinated by its purity he commissioned a towering pagoda of white porcelain brick that rose nine storeys and was celebrated as one of the wonders of the world.
• The last section in which the author's pilgrimage to the lands and people who make porcelain takes him to Dachau where he uncovers the dark history of Allach porcelain.

Reviews are respectful but mixed, which align with my takeaways from this book:

• He applies it to delicious effect in the strongest section of “The White Road,” which describes the travails of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus — student of Spinoza, friend of Newton and Leibniz — as he rattled around Europe seeking an aristocrat to fund his research: “If you are interested in optics or mineralogy or funding a dictionary of philosophy, you are lucky to get two minutes of the attention of a margrave who lives for killing stags or boar in inventive ways.”
• De Waal juxtaposes Cookworthy’s small-time ­efforts to fire the stuff with the enterprises of Josiah Wedgwood, the potentate of English pottery, who sent a factotum all the way to a mountain in the Cherokee Nation in the Carolinas to retrieve five tons of white clay.
• De Waal is concerned also with ownership; and the undertow is one of misery and forced labour on the part of those who will never own anything much.
• De Waal can tease a lot of atmosphere out of the most unprepossessing archival research — an imperial order for “hundreds of shallow dishes for narcissi” leads him to “imagine walking down one of those endless corridors in the Forbidden City, a paced rhythm of steps and scent.” He’s not, however, a natural travel writer, and the many places he visits flicker past without making much of an impression, backdrops to his perpetual agitation.
• There was something almost holy in his earnestness: any holier and The Hare with Amber Eyes would have lost its poise and toppled into piety.
• There emerged a robust market of export ware: porcelain exclusively made in China for Europe. Today, one can still marvel at the strange game of decorative, Orientalist telephone that this development created. A porcelain ewer has the seal of Portugal painted across its bulbous body in mild blue brushstrokes—except the seal is upside down.

It's beyond dizzying, when the zoom is pulled waaaaay back like this.

• It is not unknown for a geological textbook to include snatches of the poem. It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind). That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. {盲人摸象～}
• the science seems for the moment more imaginative than descriptive. Where it is solid, it is imaginative enough. Geologists are famous for picking up two or three bones and sketching an entire and previously unheard-of creature into a landscape long established in the Picture. They look at mud and see mountains, in mountains oceans, in oceans mountains to be.
• “If you go down into the earth here to a depth that about equals the width of one of these fault blocks, the temperature is halfway between absolute zero and the melting point of the rock. The crust is brittle above that point and plastic below it. Where the brittleness ends is the bottom of the tilting fault block, which rests—floats, if you like—in the hot and plastic, slowly flowing lower crust and upper mantle. I think this is why the ranges are so rhythmic. The spacing between them seems to be governed by their depth—the depth of the cold brittle part of the crust.
• The Humboldt River, blue and full, was flowing toward us, with panes of white ice at its edges, sage and green meadow beside it, and dry russet uplands rising behind. I said I thought that was lovely. He said yes, it was lovely indeed, it was one of the loveliest angular unconformities I was ever likely to see.
• To make the rock of that lower formation and then tilt it up and wear it down and deposit sediment on it to form the rock above would require an immense quantity of time, an amount that was expressed in the clean, sharp line that divided the formations—the angular unconformity itself. You could place a finger on that line and touch forty million years.
• Black is regarded as the discoverer of carbon dioxide. He is one of the great figures in the history of chemistry. Hutton and Black were among the founders of an institution called the Oyster Club, where they whiled away an evening a week with their preferred companions—Adam Smith, David Hume, John Playfair, John Clerk, Robert Adam, Adam Ferguson, and, when they were in town, visitors from near and far such as James Watt and Benjamin Franklin.
• Some creatures, on the other hand, had appeared suddenly, had evolved quickly, had become both abundant and geographically widespread, and then had died out, or died down, abruptly. Geologists canonized them as “index fossils” and studied them in groups. Experience proved that the surest method of working out relative ages of rock was not through individual creatures but through the relating of successive strata to whole collections of creatures whose fossils were contained therein—a painstaking comparison of arrivals and extinctions that helped to characterize the divisions of the time scale and define its boundaries with precision.
• the Paleozoic era. It was a unit—well below the surface but far above the bottom—just hanging there suspended in the formless pelagics of time.
• Like the general run of meteorites, an Apollo Object could be expected to contain a percentage of iridium and other platinum-like metals at least a thousand times greater than the concentration of the same metals in the crust of the earth. In widely separated parts of the world—Italy, Denmark, New Zealand—the Berkeley researchers found a thin depositional band, often just a centimetre thick, that contains unearthly concentrations of iridium. Below that sharp line are abundant Cretaceous fossils, and above it they are gone.
• the Mesozoic, an era of burgeoning creation within deadly brackets of time.
• The opossum may be Cretaceous, certain clams Devonian, and oysters Triassic, but for each and every oyster in the sea, it seems, there is a species gone forever.
• “This stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
• It was at some moment in the Pleistocene that humanity crossed what the geologist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Threshold of Reflection,
• Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.
• “A million years is a short time—the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet’s time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”
• “If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”
• the “early late-middle Mississippian.” To say “middle Mississippian” might do, but with millions of years in the middle Mississippian there is an evident compunction to be more precise.
• I put two nickels in a slot machine and got two nickels back. The result was a certain radiance of mood.
• “Silver is our most depleted resource, because it gave itself away,” said Deffeyes, looking mournful. “You didn’t need a Ph.D. in geology to find a supergene enrichment.”
• he appeared to be the Gnome of Princeton, with evident ambition to escalate to Zurich.
• And so he had invented and machined a corer that would tap clear-plastic tubing gingerly into the earth with a micropiledriver made of nonmagnetic {洛阳铲？}
• So by looking at the paleomagnetic compasses in rock you can tell not only whether the magnetic pole was in the north or south when the rock formed but also—from the more subtle positions of the needles—the latitude of the rock at the time it formed.”
• Curves based on Paleozoic and Triassic rock in North America and in Europe looked much alike but, oddly, stood separate in the way that a single line will appear to be double in inebriate vision. The gap corresponds to the present width of the Atlantic Ocean. The opening of the Atlantic began in the Triassic.
• Eurasian Plate, a large part of which used to be known as the (heaven help us) China Plate.
• much to help lift it twenty thousand feet. Seafloor—ocean crust—is dense enough to go down a trench, but continents are too light, too buoyant.
• The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat.
• If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.
• The huge body of sediment would one day be lifted far above sea level and dissected by weather and wrinkled into mountains in the way that the skin of an apple wrinkles as the apple grows old and dry.
• The whole of plate tectonics, a story of steady-state violence along boundaries, was being brought to light largely as a result of the development of instruments of war. Earthquakes “focus” where earth begins to move,
• The profile of the spreading center in the ocean bottom off Oregon seemed remarkably familiar to someone who had done his thesis field work in Nevada. It appeared to be, in miniature, a cross section of the Basin and Range. The new crust, spreading out, had broken into fault blocks and had become a microcosm of the Basin and Range, because both were expressions of the same cause.

__ 山王庄的小香瓜很精巧，象古代武将用的铜锤。金黄瓜皮上，一牙一楞凹进去，用一只芦苇子顺着小格楞划下去，可均匀分成数等份。瓤子如同香蜜，可以直接喝进去。
__ 列位看官！不知道你们吃过撑瓜没有？长条形，金黄色，成熟后摘回来。一切两半，放在饭锅上蒸，蒸熟后把一双筷子伸进去搅，故名“搅瓜”。搅出来的丝象粉丝或者米线一样，透明的。然后再放盐、蒜泥、熬好的香油，是夏季很好的一味凉拌菜。 {spagetti squash!!}
__ 这种一震即破的瓜最好吃，瓜瓤极嫩，入口就化了，没有一点絮的感觉。也没有一般西瓜那种入口的丝络感。

__ 水面有鱼的泼刺声，新生的香蒲散发着脉脉的香气。荷叶从水里钻出来，绿中带点暗红。叶子卷得很玲珑。
__ 山被一层黛色裹住了，云从山脚下蒸腾起来，山被一层一层抬高了。远处的山象云端的大城，巍然峨然。山脚下农舍屋顶上冒出了炊烟。这些烟直直升上来，在高处遇上了风，就和其它人家烟囱冒出的烟纠缠到一起。然后又决然分开。最后越来越薄，和远处黛色混合到一起。

__ 自己舍不得吃也要给孩子带上，穷家富路。
__ 长缸豆泡了最下饭，一碗饭一根长缸豆搭在饭上，两边各长出一截。以后再偷，我就喊：知青！偷菜了——
__ 牛爱干净，把腿叉开。做个势子。扑通！扑通！在地上做个宝塔。牧童儿翻身从牛背上下来，趁着滚热的，撮将起来。过去太行山那边放牛的牧童，冬天没有鞋。看牛一拉，赶紧把脚踩进去，能得一会暖乎劲。

__ 他跟我们比力气时，只伸出两只胳膊由我们攀上，一边一个转圈，一扔就把我们扔出去了。大家把舌头都晾在空气中，倒吸一口凉气，心想哥哥啊，你该不是李元霸托生的吧？
__ 打到第六回时，张为民的怒火像火山一样爆发了。他把谢老师的手一下子拧到后面，屈起他那捣蒜小擂子一样的手指头，在谢老师头上像敲木鱼一样狂敲起来。谢老师负痛不过，嘴里喊：“张为民！你放不放手？不放手开除你！”张为民只一个劲地擂，擂痛快了才放手。这就叫卷堂大乱，跟鲁智深闹了五台山的禅林一样。

__ 等了好长时间没看到人来，心里恨得毒毒的，
__ 虽然有小驴，拉沙也是一件很重的活儿。特别是从江堤下把一车重载的沙拖上来，人畜合力要用到极致。可怜的小驴把头快勾到地上了，人把背车的挽带绷得笔直，人驴俱俯。后背上衣服早已泛出盐花，小腿上青筋凸出，簌簌地抖动。
__ 星星一颗一颗地在天上跳出来，像一个个小人，喊到一声就往外一跳。只觉得天好大，船好小，人更小。人在江上，反而话少。看着船舷外汤汤的流水，风如夜游的哨兵轻轻卷动着船上的三角形旗子，甩打甩打的。
__ 秋天，长江水浅下去，许多地方露出了河床。轮船靠近江边时像一只找不到鸡窝的鸡，在曲折的航道中穿来穿去才能靠岸。
__ 长江和县这边一到秋天麻雀特别多，麻雀像云一样从江南移到江北。麻雀知道哪里有吃的，江北的田里刚割完稻谷，麻雀像一阵急雨，从这块地倾泻到另外一块地里。

__ 他说我在故宫博物院看到一架宋琴就那么平放着，很心疼。陈列文物的人一定是个外行，古琴一定要挂起来，还要常常抚，越抚琴音越好听。
__ 他说过去在南通小城里都有个画会、诗社、琴社或者春秋雅集什么的，后来都慢慢消失了。一种社会结构没有了，伴生着的文化自然也就消亡了。自清人入关一次浩劫，然后就一路紧锣密鼓地下来，每一劫毁坏一些东西。

__ 这位画家是蒙马特高地出名的美男子，鬈发，高鼻梁。母亲是意大利人，父亲是犹太人。而且他本人还是结核病患者，尤其美，到了下午，会双腮发红，眼睛灼灼发光。这是一种垂死的美，女人最迷这个了。
__ 一个社会闲人多了或者少了，起来都不像一个正常的社会。记得我小时，夏天时候长街上晚饭后有弹月琴的，也有拉二胡的，孩子们在凉床间追打游戏。那时中国人有很多悠闲的时光，虽然穷，但不像现在这么火上房似的，现在是没来由地急。贫穷的时光中，如果米桶里还能刮出一碗米来，也不妨在夜深人静时铺张一回爱情。
__ 她就隔着窗子把花一枝一枝地扔进去了，后来碰到莫迪利亚尼，他很惊讶，他说：“你摆的花可真美，怎么进去的，有钥匙吗？”阿赫玛托娃真不愧诗人本色，偶然间扔一扔都是诗。

__ 世界之大，哪儿没有死皮赖脸的人，比如说：“齐老先生添条虾吧！”“齐先生您受累！多画条鱼吧，我内人最喜欢鱼了！”齐先生也不话，只是斜着看来客一眼，又不好当场驳人的面子，慢慢把笔墨，沉吟半晌，一笔、两笔，鱼、虾、蟹自画面跃然而出，但都不大精神，看着好像离水好几天，要翻肚子的样子。客人不解地问：这虾怎么看着像死虾？”齐老先生坐在圈椅中说：“活虾子市面上多贵啊！”主客心到神知，一拍两散。
__ 给我印象比较深的是一张包鞋纸上，有“内联升”的红色印记，齐老先生在上面画了一个持弓搭箭的人，旁边注明画时执弓的手要下移一寸还是多少，我忘记了。
__ 后来还是徐悲鸿去做工作，他才勉强强从画台的“消息”里掏出几卷画出来。他是细木匠出身，在画台里做几个暗格或者小抽斗之类的“消息”那还不是驾轻就熟。
__ 黄永玉、李可染他们老问齐白石先生如何把画画好。这个问题真是让人很烦哎！这问题真没办法能用语言说明白。齐老先生画了一辈子，就知道怎么把画画好，因为他画不坏！这问题真是要人亲命了，他们还死问，又不能直接跟他们说：“我就是天纵之才！”话不能这么说啊！齐老先生只好把笔举到空中，拿眼睛死盯着看了一会儿，慢慢说：“笔不要掉下来！”这话如同一偈，你怎么理解都行。于是两人笔不掉下来地死画，各有各造化。

__ 他的学生也学他，牙齿、舌头全黑糊糊的，像孔煤窑似的。有一次我跟其中的一个人吃饭，我就他的理想，假如发达了你怎么办？他说花钱雇个人站旁边，画画的时候把毛笔伸他嘴里舔笔，比如：“哎！张嘴！”但到目前为止，他还在自己嘴里舔笔。我本人也只有画非常工细的草虫翅膀的时候，把毛笔伸到嘴里去。否则画的墨线在生宣上极易洇开。
__ 明代的董其昌只用砚中心新磨的一点墨，笔要新发的。
__ 这种墨法他本人称之为“宿墨法”。不过天气热的时候墨中的骨胶会发酵，散发出一股恶臭。现在有许多画画的人也喜欢用宿墨法，渐成一种流行。画展上只好掩鼻而过，如入鲍鱼之肆。自从黄老先生用宿墨法以后，算是开了先河。

__ 刚有电视机那会儿，萧老喜欢瞧京戏，家人就给买了一台。开戏了！老人家高兴极了，把全家人喊来看，看到唱得精彩的地方就鼓掌叫好，跟在现场瞧戏一样。承霭、承震他们白天要工作，就先去睡了。老人家早上起来脸色就不好，说他们不懂规矩，说人家演员在台上演多累呀！你们不等人家谢幕就走了真是不懂礼数！原来他在为这个跟家人生闷气。

__ 有个弄考古的朋友，她说汉唐石狮子的头是昂昂然的，然后一步一步向低向下，到了清代机巧百出，石狮子精巧得如同趴儿狗一般，这且不说，还要让它爪子里弄着球，早前那种仰天而歌、浑然天成的气势丧失殆尽。所有伟大的时代都有一个小宇宙在烈烈燃烧。中国历史长，杀伐也多，小宇宙比较旺的人就比较容易死，剩下一批元气不大旺的或者弱萎的人群，繁殖后代，散枝开叶，然后就比较容易存活！
__ 罗梭说了几句拉斐尔的画不好，他的学生就要组团来杀他，吓得罗梭赶紧跑路了。瓦萨里喜欢留长指甲，加上喜欢男风，跟徒弟玛诺同睡，夜里身上痒就用手挠，结果挠到玛诺的腿上，玛诺就天天拿着刀追着师傅要捅死他。
我在天柱山三祖祠的大殿前曾看过一树杜鹃，花期时开得连大殿的粉墙也映红了，地上的花瓣落了厚厚一层，丝毫不知道吝惜。而且时当春末，游人稀少，不知道这花开给谁看。天才就如同一树好花。他管你呢！要开就开了，谢就谢了。卡拉瓦乔这朵花太大了，开在文艺兴的末期，连半边天都映红了。

__ 画家莫迪利亚尼穷得连雕塑的材料也买不起，夜里偷偷跑到铁路工地偷人家的枕木。枕木太重，莫迪利亚尼是个结核病患者，黄皮寡瘦，他也扛不动，只好坐在枕木上雕，挥一刀，咳几声，吐半口血。天亮了，筑路工人来了，莫迪利亚尼被惊跑了。筑路工人看着歪七扭八的枕木，心疼！看看还能用，也就将就着给埋在地下了。现在这枕木如果从地下起出来，该多值钱呀！

__ 学佛、学禅第一要义是学做人，与人为善。悟不悟的还看各人缘法，被打得鼻青眼肿的都不是好和尚。

__ 王朔在小说《看上去很美》中曾说：这种拳一般流行于幼儿园中，打这种拳，讲究的是打拳的小朋友眼睛紧闭，双拳握紧，两条胳膊以肩为圆心，向前乱抡圆圈，远看就像乌龟爬坡爬不上去乱蹬的那个样子。这种拳一般不以击中目标为目的，主要是以一种盲目的抡拳动作在气势上威吓对你有攻击企图的小朋友。如果打拳者在使出这种拳法的时候伴以大声哭叫，更可以极大地增加威吓对方的力量。
__ 左宗棠有一次闹待遇，在征伊犁的路上，忽然给皇上呈一表，说要回去参加秋闱。皇上没办法，给他一个赐同进士出身。这个事情后来被一班正途出身的人差点没挖苦死。

__ 觉睡不好，就会悲观，想打架，想咬人，想跳墙，一会儿嗒然如丧，一会儿沸反盈天。

__ 老头说做斋菜难，唱戏的腔，厨子的汤。做素菜最难是吊汤。他给我说过斋菜要用黄豆芽和菇子煨汤，煨的时候把砂罐放在最小的火头上，保持一息之火，似有似无地炖上一两天。他显过一手艺，做过一道素鱼，紫菜做的鱼皮，确实鲜嫩无比。
__ 齐如山先生说过去讲究的大馆子，厨子要知道客人坐的位置，然后以此来判定每道菜的火头大小。

__ 其实读书也要有一种机缘，小的时候如果缘好，一下子读进一本与自己性情相符的书，会养成一种口味。也不要太多太滥，一两本就好了。因为这个时候读书像庙里哑和尚撞钟，一杵是一杵，声音受用一生。
__ 躺在床上，看到窗外天上一朵云，也是孤独寂寞，云就停在窗外不动，看着看着，就在原地消散了，状如一个人的死亡。这时没来由地怕死，把毛巾毯子拉到自己下巴的地方，眼睛四下看，身上汗如浆。中午外面的蝉叫成一片，叫累了歇下来，静得能听到家里座钟一格一格地走针。
__ 一个人如果到图书馆去看看，是根本不想写书的。那里是书的国，一座迷宫，是文字的火葬场。坐拥书城，会把真实的人生丧尽。
__ 好的文字是浑成的，没办法去分析它，比如李后主的劈空一句：“春花秋月何时了，往事知多少？”动也动不得。“砌下落梅如雪乱，拂了一身还满。”明知道还要落，为什么还要拂？此便是人世。
__ 不在读书上附加什么意义，就是读书的所有意义。书店里写发财术的书全是穷鬼写的。读书就是一种爱好，像抽烟喝酒叉麻将。爱好有什么办法呢？只好愿赌服输，只求不要满盘皆输就好了。

__ 旧文人写字，笔不是全发开的，只开一半，这样笔头有支撑，写起来很得力。