Sunday Salon--quotable Moore

This time of year always challenges my time management skills. I have three children who attend three different schools. That means three "Back-To-School" nights, on three different nights, among many other things. I've been thinking a lot about blogging this week, but haven't actually done any!

And my reading has suffered, too. I had big plans to start some of the books crowding my night table, but didn't start anything new. However, I did finish Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs last night. It was a bittersweet read, and it left me a little sad. It also left me impressed with Moore's skill with language. Her writing is clever, yet still emotionally full and affecting.

I'll leave you with a few quotes:

"Thanks, maybe later?" I said with the question mark our generation believed meant politeness but which baffled our parents.

Waning light rouged and bronzed the clouds so they looked like a mountain range.

"Awesome," I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding everything either "sucked" or was "awesome." We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

When I went to bed at night I suffered my first bout of insomnia. This is what death would be like, I feared: not sleep but insomnia. To sleep no more, as I had learned in Pre-1700 British Drama. I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read? I'd always been able to sleep. But now I lay there, fretful as a Bartok quartet.

Alone at dusk I was quiet; I sang nothing.

Enjoy your Sunday reading!