LINES I LIKE 2010

A selection of lines that caught my eye while reading...

Norman Collins - London Belongs To Me

"And the people. They're London too. They're the same Londoners that they have always been, except that from time to time the proportion of refugees has altered a little. At one moment the doubtful-looking newcomers are the Huguenots. At another the Jews and it is the Huguenots who are the Londoners wondering whatever London is coming to. They're all Londoners - the French and Italians in Soho, the Chinese in Limehouse, the Scotsmen in Muswell hill and the Irish round the Docks."

"Real Londoners - some in love, some in debt, some committing murders, some adultery, some trying to get on in the world, some looking forward to a pension, some getting drunk, some losing their jobs, some dying, and some holding up the new baby."

Edgar Allan Poe - Ligeia

"There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact...that, in our endeavours to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember."

Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated

"He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later."

"The Wisps of Ardisht - that clan of artisan smokers in Rovno who smoked so much they smoked even when they were not smoking."

"Your train ride appeased you?" I asked, "Oh, God," he said, "twenty-six hours, fucking unbelievable." This girl Unbelievable must be very majestic, I thought."

"It's like your name, you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for your whole life."

"...once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it."

"I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."

James Scudamore - The Amnesia Clinic

"A chaotic bus rattled past, a burst of salsa music escaping from its windows. I thought how it might have been the same one that had dropped us off three days and a million years before."

"You're nothing but a patchwork, you know. A patchwork of what's happened to you."

"Even as I waited for the plane, I could feel my memories beginning to solidify and coalesce into picture postcards."