"The Marriage Plot"

[fiefoe]

Books in this book：

• a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth.
• but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better. She had read Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that way.
• The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely.
• "...something, even something real and painful—like suicide—when all of the writing that’s been done on that subject has robbed you of any originality of expression?”
• She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer.
• She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
• where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold
• Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?
• the Gerty MacDowell section of Ulysses: “Then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads …”
• The austere cover bore a regiment of names.
• While, outside, the sea of faith retreated “down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.”

Franny and Zooey /  A Dance to the Music of Time / The Cloud of Unknowing / The Aspern Papers
George Herbert / Antonin Artaud / Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’

__ At Madeleine’s appearance, they stirred, rising out of the gloom like openmouthed carp.
__ He bent down, in a peaceful, leaf-eater motion
__ The vault seemed to draw him upward like liquid in a syringe.

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