"To continue the evolution of English prose, A said, it is noteworthy that at this time and in the bar, the barbarous bibulous boys break down into an English that recalls the nighttime dialect of Finnegans Wake.
"Shut your obstropolos," said B. Quiet your claptrap."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 195
"Mrs. Purefoy's childbirth at the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street is a dystocia, or truly difficult labor. Almost as difficult as this chapter, said the Cicerone in the doorway to this white room of the House."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 187
"She leaned back to look at the shower of colors high in the sky, cupping one knee in her hands, and as he was the only one there to see, offered him the sight of her legs, her blue garters and white nainsook knickers, while something dark and soft slid across the lake of the sky, O! she trembled in all her limbs from leaning so far back, O! the blinding flash and a cascade of stars and dew gushed out and melted in the gray air around the main in black outlined against the rock."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 179
"And to continue showing how little he fits into this brutal, enclosed atmosphere, Bloom gives a scientific lecture to the group, transfigured into Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft (although it's not exactly the scent of flowers that comes from his cigar), explaining to them all in graphic detail and expression, corpora cavernosa, etc., why hanged men have erections.
It's not orchitis, A said, perhaps remembering Mr. Flower."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 168
I wasn't familiar with "list" in the sense of "a strip of cloth" until now:
"Speaking of Rabelaisian lists, A said, the list (using the word in its sartorial sense) with the most historical and mythical weight here is the one the Citizen is wearing, in its epic-parodic transposition.
The row of stones hanging from his belt, B recalled, on which are carved the figures of numerous heroes and historical characters."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 164
"The riddle that Lenehan the sports reporter proposes to his colleagues and friends at the newspaper, the Cicerone said—"What opera resembles a railway line?"—is remembered by Bloom on several occasions throughout the day of Ulysses.
A few paragraphs further on, in the newspaper office, Lenehan proudly tells them the answer:
"The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!"
Railing at the rails, A said.
Paronomasia, Professor Jones said."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, pp 105-106
"To see it with the eyes of a stranger, but also with those of a native shopkeeper, a bum, a housekeeper, a farmer and soldier, a priest and poet and patient and day-laborer and whore and journalist and concerned citizen and street sweeper...And with the eyes of all the dead, the vagabonds and popes, clerks and troubadours, fratres minores, prelates, goliards, painters, bankers, and truck drivers."
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 136 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
"It must be some thirty years after Sade's death that Mérimée, passing through Avignon, arranges for Enguerrand Charonton's Couronnement de la Vierge to be taken to the hospice of Villeneuve for safety; he writes: Avignon is filled with churches and palaces, all provided with battlemented and machicolated towers."
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 115 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
"A wide-arched passageway gives onto a peaceful alley-way planted almost like a garden, where a few children are chattering: "A béguinage," thinks the Fleming, but ordinary people live in the little houses."
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 67 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
"The Count lauded the men of Avignon for the way they had welcomed him, and promised them "the high esteem of all Christendom and of your own country; for you are bringing back chivalry, and Joy, and Parage.""
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 65 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
"20's Plenty, which King runs without pay, while managing his own small I.T. company, makes the case that restrained, good-natured driving in residential areas—tootling—is best achieved not by the fussy, expensive apparatus of speed bumps, chicanes, and school zones, but, rather, by area-wide speed limits of twenty miles per hour, such as were recently introduced in Portsmouth and several other British cities, thanks in part to King's activities."
"Tootling" by Ian Parker, in The New Yorker, December 6, 2010, p 31
"No significant cracks have emerged since the last restoration, when the paint surfaces were "consolidated"—their gaps filled in, Anne Grevenstein-Kruse wrote to me in an email, "with a solution of animal glue (a proteïn). After that, the surface was covered with a mixture of beeswax, colophony, and lavender oil (to soften the paint). This mixture was melted into the paint structure by using strong heating elements. The surface was then flattened with metal spatulas.""
"The Flip Side" by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, November 29, 2010, p 45
"Walnut storage from BoConcept echoes the warmth of the external iroko cladding, while the travertine flooring picks up the tones of the house's original stone walls."
Homes & Interiors Scotland, September & October 2009, p 79
"The inner passage was lined with gib-board, and narrower still: if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like an animate turnstile revolving in the dark."
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, p 75 (US edition)
"And given that I am addicted to moqueca de camarão—a rich shrimp stew, traditionally cooked with urucum berries, chili, onions, lime juice, coconut milk, and palm oil, dusted with toasted manioc flour, and served on rice—which I ate for the first time that year at a restaurant in Ipanema, I keep my tipiti in the living room as a memento mori of all the Canela who must have died, looking for ways to make their manioc roots safe and tasty."
"Down Under" by Jane Kramer, in the New Yorker, November 22, 2010, p 84
"Eleanor had grown up with little idea of what went on in a kitchen, but she was a quick study. By the time she became, as the Washington Post put it, "the first Housewife of the Nation," she had developed a straightforward message about her culinary goals. "I am doing away with all the kickshaws—no hothouse grapes—nothing out of season," she told a reporter who inquired about the "economy menus," and added that she intended to provide "good and well-cooked food." Few guests or family members felt that she succeeded."
"The First Kitchen" by Laura Shapiro, in the New Yorker, November 22, 2010, p 76
"Since June 2009, wheat, buckwheat, and rye flours have been on sale at their Greenmarket stalls, as well as corn meals, polentas, and whole grains such as emmer, barley, and oats—all grown upstate."
"Breadwinners" by Indrani Sen, in Edible Brooklyn No. 19, Fall 2010, p 43
"The marabout (what was its name, exactly?) was mostly visited by women and children. Young ones afflicted with terrible manias were brought there to have their heads knocked gently against the tomb of the saint."
The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah Kilito, translated by Robyn Creswell, p 13
"Didn't I tell you?" Monsieur Trouvé was grinning like a little boy. He had a good pair of lungs in that wide chest of his, so he continued to yell after them. "I replaced our original model with one of Eugène's bourdon tubes, activated by gunpowder charges. I did say I had taken a keen interest recently."
"He holds his head back warily, defiantly, on his shoulders, so that the furnishings in this house won't get the better of him: the dado with its raised pattern of diamonds under thick brown paint, the polished wood of the hall stand, the yellow gleams of brass among the shadows—the face of the clock, a rack for letters, a little gong hanging in a frame with a suède-covered mallet balanced across two hooks, a tall pot to hold umbrellas."
"The Trojan Prince" by Tessa Hadley, in The New Yorker, November 15, 2010, page 77
"It must take a lot of effort to keep a man like him tidy. Not to mention well tailored. He was bigger than most. She had to give credit to his valet, who must be a particularly tolerant claviger."
"Etienne swallowed the potion that had been placed in front of him, a potion very probably made of bidet water, the nectar of brothels and the hydromel of whorehouses."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 298 of the NYRB paperback
"Whereupon Themistocles decides to put his oar in, he turns toward Meussieu Pic and says, point-blank:
'You're a wit, old Pic.'
'Me, a wittol!' (he suffocates). 'But Meussieu I won't allow you to insult me like that! To say nothing of my wife! I respect the French army, Meussieu; and you, you ought to respect the sanctity of the French family. Me, a wittol, ho! At my age, to be insulted by a, by a...Ho!'
He gets up and starts waving his arms about wildly. The ladies calm him down. Madame Pic looks puzzled; fortunately, she doesn't know what a wittol is. Themistocles, alarmed at the effect he has produced, tries to justify himself.
'But it was a pun!'"
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 197 of the NYRB paperback
"Sitting on a broad, flat stone, that he had chosen with care, Etienne was following with listless eye the reduced activity of his balneal colleagues."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 169 of the NYRB paperback
"The doctor had not notified them of any contagious diseases in the area belonging to the commune; the hens wouldn't have to fear the staggers, the pigs swine fever, the turkeys the pip, the cows mammitis, the dogs rabies or the horses glanders."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 145 of the NYRB paperback
and nothing was left but coenesthetic impressions: his stomach hollowing, his temples hollowing, his fontanel hollowing, and then turning into a sort of well, of well, of well without bottom or rim, into which stones fall indefinitely, without ever coming into contact with the surface of the black water entirely and forever bereft of light and movement, the surface of this perfectly carbonic, arachnoid water, the skin of a brain.
"
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, pp 127-128 the NYRB paperback
"Ernestine, happy days are here! No more French fries and white wine! No more chemicals and suburban trains! No more of my brother's attentions and my sister-in-law's insults! No more work! No more being broke! It's gigolos for us, and bottles of kümmel!"
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 114 of the NYRB paperback
"So she put her fur wrapper back on, looked at the time on an enormous old turnip which she took out of a carpetbag, paid for her camomile tea, leaving a most ungratifying gratuity for the waiter, and left, in despair."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 29 of the NYRB paperback
Yes, I did like it - the writing was a really satisfying mix of the everyday and the lyrical. A lot of the book's a pretty straight family saga, which isn't what I usually read, but there was enough magic/mystery/literariness to keep it fun for me.
"Into that opened book leaped the first barbarian, leaped and vanished, and the next after him and the next, and then, by twos and threes and sixes and sevens, they leaped in and disappeared, amid gasping and shouting and the nearing sound of the bucina and of the trumpets of Rome."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 198 of the SeaStar Books paperback
"The Dwelling seemed to be a sort of town of rounded buildings more like lime-kilns than anything else, with arched doors leading to dark insides. They were all built of tiny stones, such as lay on the beach. Beyond the huts or houses towered the castle, a vast rough structure with towers and arches and buttresses and bastions and glacis and bridges and a great moat all around it."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 119 of the SeaStar Books paperback
"Philip straggled away to the window and looked out dismally at the soaked lawn and the dripping laburnum trees, and the row of raindrops hanging fat and full on the iron gate."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 3 of the SeaStar Books paperback edition
"Does the electric field have weak spots where fish can pass? Does a winter-time influx of road salt in the water cause the charge to fluctuate? What about when the current must be turned off for maintenance of the bars or cables? Is the rotenone chemical fish killer administered when the current is off effective without fail?"
"Fish Out of Water" by Ian Frazier, in the New Yorker, October 25, 2010, p 71
"The first concert shows the venue's variety: Ensemble East, a group that plays traditional Japanese instruments, performs works by such composers as Tadao Sawai, Michio Miyagi, and James Nyoraku Schleger (on shakuhachi)."
"Their big pile, which weighs down the middle of the island with its austere vernacular chunkiness, is dubbed 'Holland', because of some Traill's dubious notion that this green lozenge resembled the fertile polders of the Netherlands."
"Sessile oak, beech and silver birch crowd around the sandy track, the sunlight twinkles from between the interlocking boughs, the little boys cavort, the adolescents even begin to frolic a bit."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 154
Note that the Sessile Oak is a thing unto itself, but in the course of looking it up I looked up the general meaning of "sessile" too.
"How he hates the suburbs — I can see the distaste etched all over his face. I know what he feels like, how the red brick, the pantiles, the stained-glass fanlights are all bearing down on him — because I felt exactly the same way at his age, as if I was about to be suffocated by the sheer orderliness of all the neat verges and linseed-oiled garage doors."
"From the stern keep of the Norman overlord issued forth decrees and exactions; in a world of wood, wheat and water, its high stone walls were the most adamantine confirmation of the temporal order, just as the acuminate spire of the church pricked the oppressive heavens."
"Of course, he isn't literally a fishmonger (I don't believe he even likes fish), because this is a City Livery Company, and while the Fishmongers' retains more links with the trade than, say, the Goldsmiths' it is in essence a living fossil; a medieval guild, cemented to the Square Mile like an oyster, through which flows a great current of nutritious pelf."
"The garden of the house ran nearly down to the river, and a few minutes' walk away was a khlong where we could catch the longtail boats into the city centre."
"The minibar in the hotel was no help. It was called the Selfbar — so I took it personally and downed the lot: the scotches, the vodkas, the gins and the Amazonian armpit aguardientes."
"In truth, Bendor was so bizarre that it quite neutralised the effect of the LSD; and it wasn't until we were back in Bandol, at one of those café-bars that charges forty quid for a vitelline-hued cocktail in a glass the size of a vitrine, that I remembered I was hallucinating."
"The youthful populace of Dublin are being sucked out of the churches by the ideological vacuum; on to the streets, then into the bars and restaurants which have colonised the city centre. Where once burly men in soutanes enforced the creed, now burly men in black overcoats enforce the guest list."
"So measured and theatrical was the riot that I had time to appreciate the way the police formed up into small shielded testudos, lost ground, broke, then reformed, as bottles and bricks crashed down on Plexiglas."
"We went to the railway station so that I could buy a ticket for the Himigiri-Howrah Express, a mighty Aryan iron horse that would drag me clear across the north of the subcontinent to Chandigarh. I got a chitty from Window A and took it for authorisation to Window B. At Window B I received a second chitty and took it to the Sales Booth. Every single step had to be taken through a dense thicket of humanity; thorny limbs pricked me, twiggy fingers scratched me. I emerged blinking and bedevilled into the harsh light of the maidan."
"Normally, on my long-distance walks, anoesis descends within a few miles: the mental tape loop of infuriating resentments, or inane pop lyrics, or nonce phrases gives way to the greeny-beige noise of the outdoors."
"Up ahead looms the brick, oasthouse-shape of the Shot Tower, where shot was manufactured in the nineteenth century; globules of molten lead plummeting into deadly spheroids."
"I gain the crest of the hill and there it is, falling away behind me, swags and ruches of greenery and brick, under the blue-painted ceiling of its recent conversion: New London, city of the toppermost property prices. I can see a golden drop of sunlight on the glans of the Swiss Re Tower (Lord Foster's phallus, commonly known as the Gherkin), and the inverted pool table of Battersea Power Station. I can see the Hampstead massif and the Telecom Tower. I can see my life, entire, in a single saccade."
"These are, perforce, strips of biltong — the sign didn't lie. This has to be the biggest biltong emporium in the northern hemisphere. There are hundreds of strips of the stuff: chilli-flavoured biltong, garlic biltong, biltong flavoured any number of ways. How many hard-masticating South Africans must London contain in order to support this minimart full of beef jerky?"
"I left Stockwell in cagoule and cashmere pullover, but as I gain Putney Bridge I strip to my own T-shirt and sit at a zinc-topped table outside a branch of Carluccio's, sipping a latte and eating an almond pastry."
"It occurs to me that if I am akin to any literary traveller, it's Laurence Sterne, oscillating in the moment, dizzied by impressions and unable to make it from the remise door to the Calais Inn, let alone progress into France and Italy."
"In the gutter are stooks of faded flowers in cellophane funnels, together with handwritten condolence cards: the wayside shrine of contemporary folk religion."
"And so it went on: the grapes of wrath trailed across Afghanistan and Iraq, the bitter vendage of civilian deaths, then the hypostatisation of terror through the cirrhotic liver of another failed state."
"Mine are not writerly journeys in the accepted sense: Rouseeau philosophising à pied, Goethe rattling into Switzerland in a coach, Cobbett on his clopping gee-gee, assorted Borrows and Stevensons plodding with their donkeys, Greene rocking on a train, Thesiger with a camel up his arse."
"the very obvious references to eero saarinen and S.O.M. may have secured jacobsen's name as a cool modernist at the time, but they also made him look like an epigone with a deft hand at furniture design, a view of jacobsen you can still meet, not least here in denmark."
"I am not fond of jugged hare for dinner, either as a light entrée or as a pièce de résistance; but this accomplished attendant had the art of presenting you such a dish in a manner that persuaded you, for the time, that it was worthy of your serious consideration. The hare, by the way, before being subjected to the mysterious operation of jugging, might have been seen dangling from a hook in the bar of the inn, together with a choice collection of other viands."
"An English Winter Watering-Place," p 159 of the Oxford paperback edition of English Hours
"There were roads and weeds—the city's landscaping was taking root at a remote nursery—and swells of clayish soil that made bioswales of the central park."
From the Epicurious food dictionary,: "A classic English preparation that begins with cut pieces of HARE that are soaked in a red wine-juniper berry marinade for at least a day. The marinated meat is well browned, then combined in a casserole (traditionally a heatproof crock or jug) with vegetables, seasonings and stock, and baked. When the meat and vegetables are done, the juices are poured off and combined with cream and the reserved hare blood and pulverized liver. The strained sauce is served over the "jugged" hare and vegetables.
"At the top of the street, into which, with my guide-book, I relapsed, was an old market-cross of the fifteenth century—a florid, romantic little structure. It consists of a stone pavilion, with open sides and a number of pinnacles and crockets and buttresses, besides a goodly medallion of the high-nosed visage of Charles I, which was placed above one of the arches, at the Restoration, in compensation for the violent havoc wrought upon the little town by the Parliamentary soldiers, who had wrested the place from the Royalists and who amused themselves, in their grim fashion, with infinite hacking and hewing in the cathedral."
"English Vignettes" in English Hours by Henry James, p 147 of the Oxford paperback edition
"This is your first impression as you travel (naturally by the objectionable conveyance) from Ryde to Ventnor; and the fact that the train rumbles along very smoothly and stops at half a dozen little stations, where the groups on the platform enable you to perceive that the population consists almost exclusively of gentlemen in costumes suggestive of unlimited leisure for attention to cravats and trousers (an immensely large class in England), of old ladies of the species denominated in France rentières, of young ladies of the highly educated and sketching variety, this circumstance fails to reconcile you to the chartered cicatrix which forms your course."
"English Vignettes" in English Hours by Henry James, pp 142-143 of the Oxford paperback edition
"But I watched the watery sunshine upon the rugosities of its ancient masonry; I stood a while in the shade of two or three spreading yews which stretched their black arms over graves decorated for Easter, according to the custom of that country, with garlands of primrose and dog-violet; and I reflected that in a 'wild' region it was a blessing to have so quiet a place of refuge as that."
"English Vignettes" in English Hours by Henry James, p 141 of the Oxford paperback edition
"The new life and the old have melted together; there is no dividing-line. In the drawing-room wall there is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end inward, like a small casemate. You ask what it is, but people have forgotten. It is something of the monks; it is a mere detail."
"Abbeys and Castles" in English Hours by Henry James, p 134 of the Oxford paperback edition
"Who are they all, and where are they going, and whence have they come, and what smoking kitchens and gaping portals and marshalled flunkeys are prepared to receive them, from the southernmost limits of a loosely interpreted, an almost transpontine Belgravia, to the hyperborean confines of St John's Wood?"
"London" in English Hours by Henry James, p 27 of the Oxford paperback edition
"There will be snide routines about the local wine. Our table isn't ready, and I walk ahead of my daughter and take a seat at the bar. To spite her, I order a scuppernong champagne."
- From "The Landlord" by Wells Tower, in The New Yorker, September 13, 2010, p 69
I knew this word as a noun but not as a verb - until I read this:
"The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the Londoner twitted with his low standard may point to it with every confidence."
English Hours by Henry James, p 10 of the Oxford University Press paperback edition
"A member of the water lily family, junsai grows in clumps in natural ponds and irrigation reservoirs. A perennial water grass, junsai's flower is a deep maroon-red. It is the young, unfurled sprout covered in a slippery, transparent jelly, which is the culinary item prized by so many Japanese. Fresh sprouts come to market early in the summer.
Junsai and related Brasenia water plants grow in lakes, ponds and slow streams in many parts of the world, including much of North America and Europe. "
"A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at a line of empty cans."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 64
"A huge, towering zelkova tree stood just inside the front gate. People said it was at least a hundred and fifty years old. Standing at its base, you could look up and see nothing of the sky through its dense cover of green leaves."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 11
"The word comes from Old English and refers to a coastal topography behind a beach, a somewhat dunal and undulating landscape, untillable, under bushes of prickly gorse, scattered heather, and a thin turf of marram and other grasses. Scotland is necklaced by these essentially treeless linkslands, brought up from the deep by the crustal rebounding of a region once depressed by glacial ice, links about as vulnerable to sea surges as Los Angeles is to earthquakes, common grazings good for little else but the invention of public games, where marine whirlwinds could blow out the turf and create ancestral bunkers—for example, Turnberry, Muirfield, Dornoch, Crail, Carnoustie, Prestwick, Royal Troon."
"Linksland and Bottle" by John McPhee, in The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, p 50
"In Scotland, the natural courses come in three main forms: the linksland courses by the sea, the moorland courses everywhere, and the forested parkland courses of the interior, some involving eskers, drumlins, and lateral moraines, but all the result of various glacial effects."
"Linksland and Bottle" by John McPhee, in The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, pp 48-49
"In this treeless and littoral terrain, the waters beside it did not suggest to me the Savannah River, but Jerris's concentration was on the swales, hollows, and longitudinal mounds of the fairways."
"Linksland and Bottle" by John McPhee, in The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, p 48
"But whatever clever eristic moves you make, there's a problem on the horizon—extreme academe is heading our way." "Will the Book Survive Generation Text?" by Carlin Romano, in The Chronicle Review
"Between 1860 and 1863, the first stamp catalogs were issued (in Belgium, Britain, France, and the United States), specialty magazines for stamp collectors appeared in several countries, a Frenchman published the first stamp album, and another Frenchman coined the term "philately," which replaced "timbromania" as the name of this popular pastime."
Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski, p 197
"He laughs. 'I'll never understand why it is that you can build huge sculptures that withstand gale force winds, deal with dye recipes, cook kozo, and all that, and you can't do anything whatsoever with food. It's amazing.'"
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, p 81 of the Harcourt paperback edition
"By scrimping and saving, making Christmas presents for everyone herself and being very sweet and cajoling to the butcher, Kathleen managed to buy Leo raw lights every other day, and still saved enough to give him a red rubber ball for Christmas."
Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, pp 79-80 of the 2001 hardcover edition
The intranet at my workplace mentioned a fundraiser at our company's UK office that featured "Cake, gift, craft and book stalls, a tombola, nail painting" etc. I don't think I'd ever heard of a tombola before - the OED online describes it as "A kind of lottery resembling lotto," which seems slightly vague to me, though looking at the OED entry for lotto sheds some light: "A game played with cards divided into numbered and blank squares and numbered discs to be drawn on the principle of a lottery. Each player has one or more cards before him; one of the discs is drawn from a bag, and its number called; a counter is placed on the square that has the same number, the player who first gets one row covered being the winner."
"This kind of thing—a Dutchman from 1800 speaking English like Bill Sikes—goes with the fictional territory, I suppose, and Mitchell, to be fair, is alert to the misprision of translation and cultural transmission: the book has many scenes in which the fumbling Dutchmen and Japanese clink the cracked cups of their different languages together, while meaning leaks away."
"The Floating Library" by James Wood in the New Yorker, July 5, 2010, p 72
"Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio."
"She stood there with a ragged cob in her eyes and surbate hooves almost too tender to walk upon, but she was tall, and still awesome in her shabbiness."
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 130
"Always be hot up in here," the woman said and she made a half-hearted gesture over her shoulder at the spavined house, but she wasn't looking back toward the house; her gaze had drifted down first to Almon, then inched its way over to Mickey.
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 124
"This was Cincinnati—the capital of pork, the first truly American city—sprawled before the eyes of two little boys under the momentary aegis of one Mike Shaughnessy, truck driver, half-hearted Lothario, collector of children, poor Irish agnate, known in high school as that fucking Irish fuck."
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 123
"After the smoke and cordite cleared and the clowder of little-girl voices quit their chiming screams, Lazarus touched his temple, his finger finding a dab of blood no bigger than a drop of claret."
"Dayward" by ZZ Packer, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 109
" 'Mr. Dunworthy's had to turn the Senior Common Room into an office. She has no respect at all for the sported oak or the notion of knocking, so Mr. Dunworthy's had to devise an outer and inner office, though I personally think a moat would have been more effective.'"
"To enter any public space, be it a restaurant in Gion or a dark little café in the narrow streets of Shinjuku, a tiny basket or lacquer shop whose smallness is apparent as soon as you walk in the door, you have to bend over on entering and walk with your head down while contorting yourself around the shelves, all the time making sure you don't bang your head against a kakemono or knock over an entire shelf of precious ceramics, tea pots, or little saké glasses with your backpack while turning around."
Self-portrait abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by John Lambert, p 35
""... Also a silver paten and chalice, a wooden crucifix, a silver wafer box, the Epistles, the Gospels, and the regimental colors of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Seventh Battalion," he read."
"He did what he was told to do as long as he was able, picking oakum until exhaustion stopped him, or helping to push the heavy handle of the bone grinder round and round until his body failed and he had to be half carried, half dragged back to his pallet."
"Before the hard days of winter set in, he slaughtered the pig, and for a week stayed at home with the job of butchering. The dogs feasted on bones and scraps, and Pell roasted the head. Dogman salted the flitches and sold the rest."
I didn't know a hobby was a bird 'til I read this: "If the walking hadn't been so strenuous, she might have enjoyed the view more, the great rolling swards of chalk grassland stretching out golden in all directions, skies dotted with hobby and merlin, circling, anxious to be off south."
"They passed within twenty yards of each other on either side of the frumenty seller's striped tent, Pell and Bean heading toward the grounds of the cathedral, Joe Ridley to the nearest tavern."
This was a new-to-me sense of this word: "To cover, as vegetables, with earth." See a potato clamp here: http://www.self-sufficient.co.uk/Potato-Clamp-Storing-Potatoes.htm. I read about it in The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff: "With what Pell and the boys earned out of doors, and all that Lou, Bean, Ellen, and Sally accomplished at home, the pantry would be filled for winter with fruit in jars, apples set on racks, potatoes in the clamp, hanging bacon, and maize flour ground arduously by hand to save paying the miller" (p 33).
"Downriver, the great bridge brackets the receding city—Morningside and midtown and the Village valley and Wall Street. What they see in the ground glass is a fifty-fifty ratio of concentrated city and tree-covered diabase-palisade cliffs, with a fjord running through."
"Under the Cloth" in Silk Parachute by John McPhee, p 133
In the Princeton huddle before play resumed, Bill Tierney studied Damien Davis, looking beyond his eyes and into his neurocity to see if maybe Damien —once burned, twice vulnerable—would prefer that Ryan Mollett cover Powell.
- Spin Right, Shoot Left -- in The Silk Parachute by John McPhee, p 95
Just wanted to chime in that the comment weirdness seems not just to be with nested quotes - double quotation marks seem not to be working at all for me, including when used in a href links, meaning I can't currently post a comment containing a link to anything outside of Wordnik. For now I can post things-that-look-like-double-quotes using code, e.g. & # 147 to make this: “ - but just using the double-quotation-mark key on the keyboard doesn't work.
"With the other children, I would run off and play among the harebells along the old sentry path. A mass of rubble, really, but the pillar of my enchanted world."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 17
"There had apparently been vestments as well as wine in the envoy's luggage. The bishop's envoy wore a black velvet chasuble over his dazzlingly white vestments, and the monk was resplendent in yards of samite and gilt embroidery."
"Lady Eliwys brought me a brown wadmal kirtle and mustard-colored surcote to wear, and a sort of kerchief to cover my chopped-off hair (not a wimple and coif, so Eliwys must still think I'm a maiden, in spite of all Imeyne's talk about "daltrisses")."
I hadn't known the "private living quarters of the lord" sense of this word.
As in: "I remember a church, and I think this is a manor house. I'm in a bedroom or a solar, and it's not just a loft because there are stairs, so that means the house of a minor baron at least."
""I need to know the language and the customs," she said, leaning over Dunworthy's desk, "and the money and table manners and things. Did you know they didn't use plates? They used flat loaves of bread called manchets, and when they finished eating their meat, they broke them into pieces and ate them. I need someone to teach me things like that, so I won't make mistakes.""
""Somewhere in Scotland," he said bitterly. "And meanwhile, Gilchrist is sending Kivrin into a century which is clearly a ten, a century which had scrofula and the plague and burned Joan of Arc at the stake.""
"Profs who do schoolwork on Pollock look for photobooks on Orozco or Rothko (two tomfools who throw bold colors, blotch on blotch, onto tondos of dropcloth)."
According to Merriam-Webster, "a dose of a proprietary effervescent mixture used as a headache remedy, sedative, and antacid ; also : such a proprietary product".
"Zoos known to stock zoomorphs (crocs or komodos, coons or bonobos) show off odd fowl: condors, hoopoos, flocks of owls or loons (not flocks of rocs or dodos)."
"Scows from Toronto tow lots of logs thrown onto pontoons: tons of softwood, tons of cordwood — block on block of woof good for woodwork: boxwood, bowwood, dogwood, logwood (most sorts of wood sold to workfolks who work for old woodshops)."
According to the Tate: "Originally, a French term applied to the quiet domestic scenes of Bonnard and Vuillard. Since applied widely to any painting of such subject matter. An outstanding example is Gwen John."
"Sick with phthisis in this drizzling mist, I limp, sniffling, spitting bilic spit, itching livid skin (skin which is tingling with stinging pinpricks)."
"Is it this grim lich, which is writhing in its pit, lifting its lid with whitish limbs, rising, vivific, with ill will in its mind, victimizing kids timid with fright?"
"Midspring brings with it singing birds, six kinds (finch, siskin, ibis, tit, pipit, swift), whistling shrill chirps, trilling chirr chirr in high pitch."
"Greek schemers seek egress en ténèbres, then enter the melee — the welter where berserk tempers seethe whenever men's mettle, then men's fettle, gets tested; there, the Greek berserkers sever men's thews, then shred men's flesh."
"The December sleet drenches the tethered nets, then threshes the fettered pegs; hence, the deckmen wedge the kevels, then check the kedges; nevertheless, these vessels teeter."
"The steersmen steer the xebecs between steep, sheer clefts, where reefs prevent sheltered berth; there, the tempests whelm the decks, then wreck the keels — the helms, left crewless whenever the elements beset these crewmen."
"Hassan asks that a shaman abstract a talc cataplasm that can thwart a blatant rash (raw scars that can scar a man's scalp and gall a man's glans: scratch, scratch)."
"A Slav warman as gallant as Galahad (and D'Artagnan) clasps a scabbard and draws a katana that can smash a man's brassards and slash a man's flancards."
"Hawks and larks dart past tamaracks, as jackdaws and mallards flap past catalpas and land athwart a larch (sparhawks and caracaras scrawk at blackcaps and avadavats)."
"Hassan can watch as a marksman tracks a stag, a hart and a fawn, and at last bags a ram (a bwana as smart as Tarzan can trap all mammals: alpacas and llamas, caracals and pandas, aardvarks that can catch larval ants).
"Hassan can ask that a barman at a bar tap a cask and draw a man a draft (half a dram, a glass): marc, grappa and armagnac, malt, arrack and schnapps."
"Fans clap as a fat-cat jazzman and a bad-ass bassman blab gangsta rap — a gangland fad that attacks what Brahms and Franck call art: a Balkan czardas, a Tartar tandava (sarabands that can charm a saltant chap at a danza).
"A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat."
""I've said too much," she said, flustered. "It's the sherry, you see. Alf always says as 'ow sherry coshes the guard what's supposed to be keepin' watch on my tongue.""
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 275
"Later, at the police station in the village, the Spitfire pilot paid me a visit. He was with a squadron based at Catterick, and had taken his machine up to check the controls after the mechanics had made a few adjustments. He had not the slightest intention of getting into a scrap that day, he told me, but there we were, Wolfgang and I, suddenly in his gunsights over Haworth. What else could he do?
'Hell of a prang. Bad luck, old chap.' he said. 'Damned sorry about your friend.'"
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, pp 216-217
"Excitedly, I added to the mixture a couple of drops of my homemade chloroform, which, since chloroform is not miscible in water, sank promptly to the bottom."
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 106
""Stage right," I said. "Behind the black tormentor curtains."
Rupert blinked once or twice, shot me a barbed look, and clattered back up the narrow steps to the stage. For a few moments we could hear him muttering away to himself up there, punctuated by the metallic sounds of panels being opened and slammed, and switches clicked on and off."
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 34
"He saw the orthodox priest arriving from the neighboring village after a long hike over hills and through rocky gullies. His floor-length black soutane was spattered up to the knee with yellow clay and pollen from the broom blossoms."
Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke, translated by Krishna Winston, p 43
Whenever I see this word I want to say it in my head like "pole-ee-ax" even though I know it's not. I just came across it in a review in the New Yorker of a production of The Glass Menagerie.
"Her red hair is cut flat and short, and it occurs to Rose that if the girl waits long enough it'll actually come into fashion, especially if she had a tendency to hang around at the Snakepit and be a widgie. But she can't see it. Red has the look of a hopelessly sporty girl."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 294 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"She got friendly with a few decent-looking blokes who took her to the flicks at the Piccadilly or the Capitol and then shouted her a milkshake or a spider before putting her on the bus home."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 280 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
See Bodgies and Widgies: "Bodgies and Widgies refer to a youth subculture that existed in Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s, similar to the Teddy Boy culture in the UK or Greaser culture in the US. The males were called Bodgies and the females were called Widgies."
"It was the same blokes at the Embassy tonight, the larrikins in suits, the quiet movers with brandy on their breath and Brylcreem in their hair. The ones with vagrant hands, the ones with bad teeth, broken noses, feet like snowshoes, bellies like baskets."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 278 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"It's the smell of a karri forest rising into the sky and the bodies of roos and possums returning to the earth as carbon and the cooking smell falling through the dimness like this."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 184 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"They showed her where to get the best pie and chips in Murray Street, the very thought of which kept her off lunch in general, and they introduced Rose to the addiction of listening in. They were silly, dizzy scrubbers, and she liked them"
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, pp 181-182 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"It's ridiculous -- she's too old for him and he's a slow learner and a tenant and a Lamb, for gawdsake, but he's just the grousest looking boy, and his hot blue eyes make you go racy inside."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 159 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Now and then she'd find herself out the back lane against the fence with some sweetmouthed bloke whose name she could almost remember, a cove who didn't mind if she kept talking while he ran his hands about."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 153 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Ted was the old girl's favourite. Rose often saw her patting and stroking him when she was half shickered. Ted didn't seem to care what she did at all."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 142 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"The boat is a good sixteen feet, clinkerbuilt and heavy as hell. A big skiff sort of boat, and it takes about a second and a half for it to be obvious that it'll never fit across the tray of the truck."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 109 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"I didn't know you were married before, said Elaine, lips aquiver.
Eee-laine, you nong, said Hat. 1914 to 1918. She'd hafta start havin em at age twelve to get six out, not to mention one off to war. She was born the year of Federation, 1901.
Well, said Lester. Margaret River School obviously taught Hat more than groomin and deportation."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 71 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Oriel doesn't realize it, but she begins to dress Fish like an idiot, the way people clothe big sadfaced mongoloids. She hoiks his trousers up under his arms with a belt so long it flaps. She combs his hair straight down on this brow and shines his shoes till they mock him. The reason Oriel doesn't notice is that Quick gets to him early after breakfast and drags the clobber round on him, messes him up like a boy, normal and slouchy."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 70 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"By May, when a chill had come into the nights and the street was subdued and indoorsy after dark with the Lambs' chooks racked along their perch like mumbling hats, and the air so still you could hear the sea miles off and the river tide eating at the land, Lester and Oriel went to bed bonesore but grateful."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 63 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Red was just a tomboy, she didn't think about smiling or not smiling. There was a gap, now that Fish wasn't being the ratbag of the family, and Red was out to fill it. She beat boys at cricket and she terrorized the bike sheds at school with the way she could throw a punch."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 63 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"It was where you could smell that daft beanpole husband of hers baking his cakes, though, fair dinkum, you had to hand it to the coot, he could bake his way to Parliament if he set his mind to it."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 50 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"The huge livingroom window was gone and a shutter stood propped open in its place opening up on a view of that grand old room full of pineboard shelves bowing with jars and jugs, the fireplace bristling with humbugs and bullroarers and toothbusters."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 57 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"They'd worn a track across the weeds since dawn, and the cratchety tinkle of that little bell had driven her spare, but she wasn't going to go down there early and give her tenants the satisfaction of gloating."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 57 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"In the park at the end of the street the flame trees and the Moreton Bay figs covered the grass with their broad, brittle leaves that Dolly Pickles kicked up in drifts as she walked alone when the children were at school and she was waiting for the copper to boil in the laundry or she just couldn't stand to be in that big old place anymore, avoiding the plain gaze of that little Lamb woman as she went stiffbooted about her neverending business."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 52 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"That autumn the street seemed full. There were always Pickles kids and Lamb kids up one end of the street throwing boondies or chasing someone's dog."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 51 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Rose Pickles and her brothers saw them unloading the dust-white truck. They made a crowd standing about down there, and they looked so skinny and tired. They carried a big jarrah table in but no chairs. There were teachests, a clock, shovels and hoes, a couple of bashed old trunks. They all struggled and heaved up the stairs with that little woman barking instructions.
Cripes, Ted said. And I thought we looked like reffoes."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 50 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"And he'd lost his postcard from Egypt, the one he got from his dad's cousin, Earl. Back in '43 he wrote a letter to cheer up a digger. He addressed it: Earl Blunt, EGYPT, and it found him, just as he assumed it would. And a card came back, an exotic picture from another world. He'd stuck it somewhere secret and had bamboozled himself with his own cunning."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 46 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Down the middle of the yard, from the house to the back pickets, was a tin fence which cut the yard in half. The wooden frame was jarrah; it smelt of gum and was the colour of sunburn."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 44 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"She looks up and sees Lester and the boys hauling the net up onto the beach. The water is flat behind them. She can almost see the trees etched out on the other bank, the paperbarks where the dunes begin."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 28 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"This time the truck goes up the hill in reverse and the kids elbow each other and feel a right bunch of dags heading up like that, but they're the first to see the rivermouth, the oilstill river and roiling sea; it looks so like a picture they're suddenly quiet."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 26 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
Urban Dictionary says it's "Western Australian slang term for the "Southern Blue Pilchard", a small fish roughly 5-6 inches in length and commonly sold in large frozen blocks and used as bait by anglers, especially those fishing for tailor."
"When he baited up, the gang of hooks always slipped sideways in the mulie and ended up buried in his palm."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 21 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Dolly saw it was his right hand. His bloody working hand. A man could hardly pick his nose with a thumb and half a pointer. They were done for; stuffed, cactus."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 15 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Sam Pickles grew up on that racetrack, hanging around the stables or by the final turn where the Patterson's Curse grew knee high and the ground vibrated with all that passing flesh."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 11 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 1 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
"Be it salmon, skate, gammon or a silverside of beef, the ancient art of bringing something to tenderness by letting it blip and blop in not-quite-boiling water appeals not because of its robustness, but for its gentle tone."
"'Makes a nice luncheon dish,' say so many old cookery books, especially when talking of rissoles or stuffed marrow, or some other silk purse carefully hewn from a sow's ear."
"Those who peddle frozen fish clad in batter as thick as their shop's Formica counter tops, with jars of sad pickled eggs and a lone, armour-plated saveloy waiting patiently for someone drunk enough to order it, are still around."
Re: Branston Pickle: "Its manufacturers advise that their mud-hued, syrupy tracklement sits well with burgers and hot dogs, yet in truth most of it will find its way into cheese sandwiches."
"Cornwall's peel-flecked heavy cake would keep you going until you got to feast on Devon's cream-filled chudleighs, before moving swiftly along through treasures such as Somerset's crumbly catterns, Dorset apple, and the sultana-spiked Norfolk vinegar cake."
"And then, just as we Brits abandon our stew to the hungry hordes gathered at the table, the cooks of other nations will add a vital snap of freshness and vigour to lift it from its sleepy brown torpor: the French their persillade of vivid parsley, anchovy and lemon; the Moroccans a slick of tongue-tingling harissa the color of a rusty bucket; and the Italians a pool of hot, salty salsa verde pungent with basil, mustard, and mint."
"The Italians, though less likely to use alcohol, will add body to the simplest stew of boneless brisket with the introduction of a whole, cheap tongue and a gelatinous, collagen-rich cotechino sausage."
I don't think I'd ever heard "beard" used as a verb meaning "to confront boldly" until now:
"Already she was beginning to be carried away by the idea of bearding Gert Bigger in her den. She imagined herself armed with a great book from which she read strange grim-sounding incantations, magic words that would bring Gert Bigger to her knees and make her bring Mrs. Zimmermann back from . . . from wherever Gert Bigger had sent her."
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs, p 132 of the Puffin paperback edition.
"The party that night turned out to be so much fun that Rose Rita forgot all about her troubles. She even forgot that she was supposed to be mad at Lewis. Mrs. Zimmermann taught Lewis and Rose Rita a couple of new card games (klaberjass and six-pack bezique, Winston Churchill's favorite card game), and Jonathan did one of his magic illusions, where he made everyone think that they were stumping across the floor of the Atlantic in diving suits. They visited some sunken galleons and the wreck of the Titanic, and even watched an octopus fight."
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs, p 8 of the Puffin paperback edition
"As Lewis chanted, the room began to get darker. The light faded from the bright orange leaves of the maple tree outside, and now a strong wind was rattling the glass doors. Suddenly the doors flew open, and the wind got into the room. It riffled madly through the dictionary on the library table, scattered papers across the floor, and knocked all the lampshades galley-west."
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs, p 54 of the Puffin paperback edition
Lewis had the long curved parcel. When he had ripped the paper off one end, he saw the tarnished brass hilt of a sword. "Oh boy!" he said. "A real sword!" He ripped the rest of the paper off and started swinging the sword around. Fortunately, it was still in its sheath.
"Have at thee for a foul faytour!" he shouted, lunging at Rose Rita with the sword.
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs, p 19 of the Puffin paperback edition
"Mrs. Izard turned around. She faced Mrs. Zimmermann calmly. "So it's you," she said. "Well, my power has not reached its height, but I am still strong enough to deal with you. Aroint ye!"
She pointed the ivory cane at Mrs. Zimmermann. Nothing happened. She stopped smiling and dropped her cane."
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, p 152 of the Puffin Books paperback edition
"When spring came, Lewis was surprised to see that the hedge in front of the Hanchett house was wildly overgrown. It was a spiraea hedge, and had always had bristly little pink-and-white blossoms. This spring there were no blossoms on the hedge; it had turned into a dark, thorny thicket that completely hid the first floor windows and sent long waving tendrils up to scrape at the zinc gutter troughs. Burdocks and ailanthus trees had grown up overnight near the house; their branches screened the second-story windows."
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, p 122 of the Puffin Books paperback edition
"Old Isaac Izard—his name is odd, isn't it? Mrs. Zimmermann thinks that it comes from izzard, which in some parts of England is the word for zed, which is the word the English use to identify the letter Z. I go along with Mrs. Zimmermann's theory because I can't think of a better one. And besides, she is a Z-lady, so she should know."
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, p 33 of the Puffin Books paperback edition
"It was the belief that Robert had been loved, and loved for so long, by Rachel that had made her desire him, had made her reject more glittering matches; it seemed that he was making a sort of concession to her in marrying her."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 930 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"He spoke to no one but his wife; the rest of the hotel appeared not to exist for him; but whenever a waiter came to take an order, and stood close beside him, he swiftly raised his blue eyes and darted a glance at him which did not last for more than two seconds, but in its limpid penetration seemed to indicate a kind of investigative curiosity entirely different from that which might have inspired any ordinary diner scrutinising, even at greater length, a page or waiter with a view to making humorous or other observations about him which he would communicate to his friends."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 926 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"What is more, people whose own hearts are not directly involved always regard unfortunate entanglements, disastrous marriages, as though one were free to choose whom one loves, and do not take into account the exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelops so entirely and so uniquely the person with whom one is in love that the "folly" a man commits by marrying his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a rule the only poetical action that he performs in the course of his existence."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 923 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It is the wisdom inspired by the Muse whom it is best to ignore for as long as possible if we wish to retain some freshness of impressions, some creative power, but whom even those who have ignored her meet in the evening of their lives in the nave of an old country church, at a point when suddenly they feel less susceptible to the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than to the thought of the vicissitudes of fortune which those carvings have undergone, passing into a famous private collection or a chapel, from there to a museum, then returning at length to the church, or to the feeling that as they walk around it they may be treading upon a flagstone almost endowed with thought, which is made of the ashes of Arnauld or Pascal, or simply to deciphering (forming perhaps a mental picture of a fresh-faced country girl) on the brass plate of a wooden prie-dieu the names of the daughters of the squire or the notable—the Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well: the Muse of History."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 919 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And then, you've talked so often to Saint-Loup about the hawthorns and lilacs and irises at Tansonville, he'll see what you meant now."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 918 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But even in the case of a man of real merit, it is a quality not to be despised by the person who admits him into his private life, and one that makes him particularly useful if he can also play whist."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 915 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"People still remembered that the most grandiose and glittering receptions in Paris, as brilliant as those given by the Princesse de Guermantes, had been those of Mme de Marsantes, Saint-Loup's mother."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 912 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"After walking across the garden of the Arena in the glare of the sun, I entered the Giotto chapel, the entire ceiling of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant daylight has crossed the threshold with the human visitor in order to give its pure sky a momentary breather in the coolness and shade, a sky merely of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the glitter of the sunlight, as in those brief moments when, though no cloud is to be seen, the sun has turned its gaze elsewhere and the azure, softer still, grows deeper."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 878 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Finally, before leaving the picture, my eyes came back to the shore, swarming with the everyday Venetian life of the period. I looked at the barber wiping his razor, at the negro humping his barrel, at the Muslims conversing, at the noblemen in wide-sleeved brocade and damask robes and hats of cerise velvet, and suddenly I felt a slight gnawing at my heart."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 877 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And during the few minutes that the Prince was standing beside their table, M. de Norpois never ceased for an instant to keep his azure pupils trained on Mme de Villeparisis, with the mixture of indulgence and severity of an old lover, but principally from fear of her committing one of those verbal solecisms which he had relished but which he dreaded."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 858 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But at the same time (because of the always urban character of the impressions which Venice gives almost in the open sea, on those waters whose ebb and flow makes itself felt twice daily, and which alternately cover at high tide and uncover and low tide the splendid outside stairs of the palaces), as we should have done in Paris on the boulevards, in the Champs-Elysées, in the Bois, in any wide and fashionable avenue, we passed the most elegant women in the hazy evening light, almost all foreigners, who, languidly reclining against the cushions of their floating carriages, followed one another in procession, stopped in front of a palace where they had a friend to call on, sent to inquire whether she was at home, and while, as they waited for the answer, they prepared to leave a card just in case, as they would have done at the door of the Hôtel de Guermantes, turned to their guidebooks to find out the period and the style of the palace, being shaken the while, as upon the crest of a blue wave, by the wash of the glittering, swirling water, which took alarm at finding itself pent between the dancing gondola and the resounding marble."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 852-853 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"When, at ten o'clock in the morning, my shutters were thrown open, I saw blazing there, instead of the gleaming black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, the golden angel on the campanile of St Mark's. Glittering in a sunlight which made it almost impossible to keep one's eyes upon it, this angel promised me, with its outstretched arms, for the moment when I appeared on the Piazzetta half an hour later, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 844 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The spray of syringa made me profoundly sad, as did also the thought that Albertine could have believed, and said, that I was treacherous and hostile; and most of all, perhaps, certain lies so unexpected that I had difficulty in grasping them."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 828 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Then I thought again of the evening of the syringa, and remembered that about a fortnight later, as my jealousy kept changing its object, I had asked Albertine whether she had ever had relations with Andrée, and she had replied: "Oh! never! Of course, I adore Andrée; I have a deep affection for her, but as I might have for a sister, and even if I had the tastes which you seem to suppose, she's the last person I should have thought of in that connexion. I can swear to you by anything you like, the honour of my aunt, the grave of my poor mother." I had believed her."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 827 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"At all events, nobody could ever mention syringa again in her hearing without her turning crimson and putting her hand over her face in the hope of hiding her blushes."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 813 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But we lost our heads all the same, so that to conceal our embarrassment we both of us, without having a chance to consult each other, had the same idea: to pretend to dread the scent of syringa which as a matter of fact we adored."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 812 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The memory of Albertine had become so fragmentary that it no longer caused me any sadness and was no more now than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announces a change of key."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 809 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The persistence within me of an old impulse to work, to make up for lost time, to change my way of life, or rather to begin to live, gave me the illusion that I was still as young as in the past; and yet the memory of all the events that had succeeded one another in my life (and also of those that had succeeded one another in my heart, for when one has greatly changed, one is misled into supposing that one has lived longer) in the course of those last months of Albertine's existence, had made them seem to me much longer than a year, and now this forgetfulness of so many things, separating me by gulfs of space from quite recent events which they made me think remote, because I had had what is called "the time" to forget them, by its fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all the landmarks—distorted, dislocated my sense of distance in time, contracted in one place, distended in another, and made me suppose myself now further away from things, now much closer to them, than I really was."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 802-803 of the Modern Library paperback edition
""Oh! not in the least," exclaimed Mme de Guermantes, who had a keen sense of these provincial differences and drew portraits that were sober and restrained but coloured by her husky, golden voice, beneath the gentle efflorescence of her violet-blue eyes."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 794 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"As for Gilberte, she was all the more glad to find the subject being dropped, in that she herself was only too anxious to drop it, having inherited from Swann his exquisite tact combined with a delightful intelligence that was recognised and appreciated by the Duke and Duchess, who begged her to come again soon."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 786 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"However, when Swann was dead, it happened that her determination not to know his daughter had ceased to provide Mme de Guermantes with all the satisfactions of pride, independence, "self-government" and cruelty which she was capable of deriving from it and which had come to an end with the passing of the man who had given her the exquisite sensation that she was resisting him, that he could not compel her to revoke her decrees."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 780 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 775 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Those passages which, when I wrote them, were so colourless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that the reading of them was a torture to me, had only accentuated in me the sense of my own impotence and of my incurable lack of talent."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 770 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Which of us has not experienced in the course of his life exquisite uncertainties more or less similar to this? A charitable friend, to whom one describes a girl one has seen at a ball, concludes from the description that she must be one of his friends and invites one to meet her. But among so many others, and on the basis of a mere verbal portrait, is there not a possibility of error? The girl you are about to see may well turn out to be a different girl from the one you desire."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 761 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind. For this very reason one bases upon them projects which have all the fervour of thought; but thought languishes and memory decays: the day would come when I would readily admit the first comer to Albertine's room, as I had without the slightest regret given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts that I had received from Gilberte."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 751-752 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Gradually, as the love that Albertine may have felt for certain women ceased to cause me pain, it attached those women to my past, made them somehow more real, as the memory of Combray gave to buttercups and hawthorn blossom a greater reality than to unfamiliar flowers."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 746 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Hearing it from a neighbouring room without being able to see, one may mistake for uncontrollable laughter the noise which is forced by pain from a patient being operated on without an anaesthetic; and as for the noise emitted by a mother who has just been told that her child has died, it can seem to us, if we are unaware of its origin, as difficult to translate into human terms as the noise emitted by an animal or by a harp. It takes us a little time to realise that those two noises express what, by analogy with the (very different) sensations we ourselves may have felt, we call pain; and it took me some time, too, to understand that this noise expressed what, by analogy with the (very different) sensations I myself had felt, I called pleasure; and the pleasure must have been very great to overwhelm to this extent the person who was expressing it and to extract from her this strange utterance which seemed to describe and comment on all the phases of the exquisite drama which the young woman was living through and which was concealed from my eyes by the curtain that is for ever lowered for other people over what happens in the mysterious intimacy of every human creature."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 741-742 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Alas, remembering my own agitation whenever I had caught sight of a girl who attracted me, sometimes when I had merely heard her spoken of without having seen her, my anxiety to look my best, to show myself to advantage, my cold sweats, I had only, to torture myself, to imagine the same voluptuous excitement in Albertine, as though by means of the apparatus which, after the visit of a certain practitioner who had shown some scepticism about her malady, my aunt Léonie had wished to see invented, and which would enable the doctor to undergo all the sufferings of his patient in order to understand better."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 734 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"If the strength of my feelings made me regard as untruthful and colourless the expressions of men who had no true happiness or sorrow in their lives, on the other hand the most insignificant lines which could, however remotely, be related either to Normandy, or to Touraine, or to hydrotherapeutic establishments, or to Léa, or to the Princesse de Guermantes, or to love, or to absence, or to infidelity, at once brought back before my yes the image of Albertine, without my having the time to turn away from it, and my tears started afresh."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 704 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Then my tenderness could revive anew, but, simultaneously with it, a sorrow at being parted from Albertine which made me perhaps even more wretched than I had been during the recent hours when it had been jealousy that tormented me. But the latter suddenly revived at the thought of Balbec, because of the vision which all at once reappeared (and which until then had never made me suffer and indeed appeared one of the most innocuous in my memory) of the dining-room at Balbec in the evening, with all that populace crowded together in the dark on the other side of the window, as in front of the luminous wall of an aquarium, watching the strange creatures moving around in the light but (and this I had never thought of) in its conglomeration causing the fisher-girls and other daughters of the people to brush against girls of the bourgeoisie envious of that luxury, new to Balbec, from which, if not their means, at any rate parsimony and tradition excluded their parents, girls among whom there had certainly been almost every evening Albertine whom I did not know and who doubtless used to pick up some little girl whom she would meet a few minutes later in the dark, upon the sands, or else in a deserted bathing hut at the foot of the cliff."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 702-703 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It is indeed probable that for Albertine, even if they had been true, even if she had admitted them, her own misdeeds (whether her conscience had thought them innocent or reprehensible, whether her sensuality had found them exquisite or somewhat insipid) would not have been accompanied by that inexpressible sense of horror from which I was unable to detach them."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 697 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The truth is that this woman has only raised to life by a sort of magic countless elements of tenderness existing in us already in a fragmentary state, which she has assembled, joined together, effacing every gap between them, and it is we ourselves who by giving her her features have supplied all the solid matter of the beloved object."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 679 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"When we speak of the "niceness" of a woman, we are doing no more perhaps than project outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel in seeing her, like children when they say: "My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorns." Which explains, incidentally, why men never say of a woman who is not unfaithful to them: "She is so nice," and say it so often of a woman by whom they are betrayed."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 670 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Either swift-moving and bent over the mythological wheel of her bicycle, strapped on rainy days inside the warrior tunic of her waterproof which moulded her breasts, her head turbaned and dressed with snakes, when she spread terror through the streets of Balbec; or else on the evenings when we had taken champagne into the woods of Chantepie, her voice provocative and altered, her face suffused with warm pallor, reddened only on the cheekbones, and when, unable to make it out in the darkness of the carriage, I drew her into the moonlight in order to see it more clearly, the face I was now trying in vain to recapture, to see again in a darkness that would never end. A little statuette on the drive to the island in the Bois, a still and plump face with coarse-grained skin at the pianola, she was thus by turns rain-soaked and swift, provoking and diaphanous, motionless and smiling, an angel of music."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 659 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But much later, when I went back gradually, in reverse order, over the times through which I had passed before I had come to love Albertine so much, when my healed heart could detach itself without suffering from Albertine dead, then I was able to recall at length without suffering that day on which Albertine had gone shopping with Françoise instead of remaining at the Trocadéro; I recalled it with pleasure as belonging to an emotional season which I had not known until then; I recalled it at last exactly, no longer injecting it with suffering, but rather, on the contrary, as we recall certain days in summer which we found too hot while they lasted, and from which only after they have passed do we extract their unalloyed essence of pure gold and indestructible azure."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 656 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"At last it was dark in the apartment; I stumbled against the furniture in the hall, but in the door that opened on to the staircase, in the midst of the darkness I had thought to be complete, the glazed panel was translucent and blue, with the blueness of a flower, the blueness of an insect's wing, a blueness that would have seemed to me beautiful had I not felt it to be a last glint, sharp as a steel blade, a final blow that was being dealt me, in its indefatigable cruelty, by the day."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 649 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"How often had I crossed, on the way to fetch Albertine, how often had I retrodden, on the way back with her, the great plain of Cricqueville, sometimes in foggy weather when the swirling mists gave us the illusion of being surrounded by a vast lake, sometimes on limpid evenings when the moonlight, dematerialising the earth, making it appear from a few feet away as celestial as it is, in the daytime, in the distance only, enclosed the fields and the woods with the firmament to which it had assimilated them in the moss-agate of a universal blue!"
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 648 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"She left the room, then returned, but I turned sharply away under the impact of the painful discharge of one of the thousand invisible memories which incessantly exploded around me in the darkness: I had noticed that she had brought me cider and cherries, things which a farm-lad had brought out to us in the carriage, at Balbec, "kinds" in which I should have made the most perfect communion, in those days, with the prismatic gleam in shuttered dining-rooms on days of scorching heat."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 646 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Now this love, born first and foremost of a need to prevent Albertine from doing wrong, this love had thereafter preserved the traces of its origin. Being with her mattered little to me so long as I could prevent the fugitive creature from going to this place or to that."
abrupt reaction of pain."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 585 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen."
abrupt reaction of pain."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 571-572 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 564 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I rang for Françoise to ask her to buy me a guidebook and a timetable, as I had done as a boy when already I wanted to prepare in advance a journey to Venice, the fulfilment of a desire as violent as that which I felt at this moment. I forgot that in the meantime, there was a desire which I had attained without any satisfaction—the desire for Balbec—and that Venice, being also a visible phenomenon, was probably no more able than Balbec to fulfil an ineffable dream, that of the Gothic age made actual by a springtime sea, that now teased my mind from moment to moment with an enchanted, caressing, elusive, mysterious, confused image."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 558 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Now that Albertine no longer appeared to be angry with me, the possession of her no longer seemed to me a treasure in exchange for which one is prepared to sacrifice every other. For perhaps one would have done so only to rid oneself of a grief, an anxiety, which are now appeased. One has succeeded in jumping through the calico hoop through which one thought for a moment that one would never be able to pass."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 556 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, an urbane and refined civilisation, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a sombre azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 556 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But to me (just as an aroma, unpleasing perhaps in itself, of naphthalene and vetiver would have thrilled me by bringing back to me the blue purity of the sea on the day of my arrival at Balbec), the smell of petrol which, together with the smoke from the exhaust of the car, had so often melted into the pale azure on those scorching days when I used to drive from Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise to Gourville, since it had accompanied me on my excursions during those summer afternoons when I left Albertine painting, called into blossom now on either side of me, for all that I was lying in my darkened bedroom, corn-flowers, poppies and red clover, intoxicated me like a country scent, not circumscribed and fixed like that of the hawthorns which, held in by its dense, oleaginous elements, hangs with a certain stability about the hedge, but like a scent before which the roads sped away, the landscape changed, stately houses came hurrying to meet me, the sky turned pale, forces were increased tenfold, a scent which was like a symbol of elastic motion and power and which revived the desire that I had felt at Balbec to climb into the cage of steel and crystal, but this time no longer to pay visits to familiar houses with a woman I knew too well, but to make love in new places with a woman unknown."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 554-555 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"In my bedroom, where on the contrary it was cooler, when the unctuous air had succeeded in glazing and isolating the smell of the wash-stand, the smell of the wardrobe, the smell of the sofa, simply by the sharpness with which they stood out, vertical and erect, in adjacent but distinct slices, in a pearly chiaroscuro which added a softer glaze to the shimmer of the curtains and the blue stain armchairs, I saw myself, not by a mere caprice of my imagination but because it was physically possible, following, in some new suburban quarter like that in which Bloch's house at Balbec was situated, the streets blinded by the sun, and finding in them not the dull butchers' shops and the white freestone facings, but the country dining-room which I could reach in no time, and the smells that I would find there on my arrival, the smell of the bowl of cherries and apricots, the smell of cider, the smell of gruyère cheese, held in suspense in the luminous coagulation of shadow which they delicately vein like the heart of an agate, while the knife-rests of prismatic glass scatter rainbows athwart the room or paint the oilcloth here and there with peacock-eyes."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 553-554 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But even allowing for her lies, it was incredible how spasmodic her life was, how fugitive her strongest desires. She would be mad about a person whom, three days later, she would refuse to see. She could not wait for an hour while I sent out for canvas and colours, for she wished to start painting again. For two whole days she would be impatient, almost shed the tears, quickly dried, of an infant that has just been weaned from its nurse. And this instability of her feelings with regard to people, things, occupations, arts, places, was in fact so universal that, if she did love money, which I do not believe, she cannot have loved it for longer than anything else."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 552 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Looking back, I find it difficult to describe how densely her life was covered in a network of alternating, fugitive, often contradictory desires. No doubt falsehood complicated this still further, for, as she retained no accurate memory of our conversations, if, for example, she had said to me: "Ah! that was a pretty girl, if you like, and a good golfer," and, when I had asked the girl's name, had answered with that detached, universal, superior air of which no doubt there is always enough and to spare, for all liars of this category borrow it for a moment when they do not wish to answer a question, and it never fails them: "Ah, I'm afraid I don't know" (with regret at her inability to enlighten me), "I never knew her name, I used to see her on the golf course, but I didn't know what she was called"—if, a month later, I said to her: "Albertine, you remember that pretty girl you mentioned to me, who used to play golf so well," "Ah, yes," she would answer without thinking, "Emilie Daltier, I don't know what's become of her." And the lie, like a line of earthworks, was carried back from the defence of the name, now captured, to the possibilities of meeting her again."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 551 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But I hesitated for an instant, for the sky-blue border of her dress added to her face a beauty, a luminosity, without which she would have seemed to me harder."
birds, symbols of death and resurrection."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 538 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I kissed her then a second time, pressing to my heart the shimmering golden azure of the Grand Canal and the mating birds, symbols of death and resurrection."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 538 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan's wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternatively life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same transmutations which, before an advancing gondola, change into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 531 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Her throat, the curve of which, seen from my bed, was strong and full, at that distance and in the lamplight appeared pinker, less pink however than her face, bent forward in profile, which my gaze, issuing from the innermost depths of myself, charged with memories and burning with desire, invested with such a brilliancy, such an intensity of life that its relief seemed to stand out and turn with the same almost magic power as on the day, in the hotel at Balbec, when my vision was clouded by my overpowering desire to kiss her; and I prolonged each of its surfaces beyond what I was able to see and beneath what concealed it from me and made me feel all the more strongly—eyelids which half hid her eyes, hair that covered the upper part of her cheeks—the relief of those superimposed planes; her eyes (like two facets that alone have yet been polished in the matrix in which an opal is still embedded), become more resistant than metal while remaining more brilliant than light, disclosed, in the midst of the blind matter overhanging them, as it were the mauve, silken wings of a butterfly placed under glass; and her dark, curling hair, presenting different conformations whenever she turned to ask me what she was to play next, now a splendid wing, sharp at the tip, broad at the base, black, feathered and triangular, now massing the contours of its curls in a powerful and varied chain, full of crests, of watersheds, of precipices, with its soft, creamy texture, so rich and so multiple, seeming to exceed the variety that nature habitually achieves and to correspond rather to the desire of a sculpture who accumulates difficulties in order to emphasise the suppleness, the vibrancy, the fullness, the vitality of his creation, brought out more strongly, but interrupting in order to cover it, the animated curve and, as it were, the rotation of the smooth, roseate face, with its glazed matt texture as of painted wood."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 515-516 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 505 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"She chose pieces which were either quite new or which she had played to me only once or twice, for, beginning to know me better, she was aware that I liked to fix my thoughts only upon what was still obscure to me, and to be able, in the course of these successive renderings, thanks to the increasing but, alas, distorting and alien light of my intellect, to link to one another the fragmentary and interrupted lines of the structure which at first had been almost hidden in mist."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 501 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It was no longer the same Albertine, because she was not, as at Balbec, incessantly in flight upon her bicycle, impossible to find owing to the number of little watering-places where she would go to spend the night with friends and where moreover her lies made it more difficult to lay hands on her; because, shut up in my house, docile and alone, she was no longer what at Balbec, even when I had succeeded in finding her, she used to be upon the beach, that fugitive, cautious, deceitful creature, whose presence was expanded by the thought of all those assignations which she was skilled in concealing, which made one love her because they made one suffer and because, beneath her coldness to other people and her casual answers, I could sense yesterday's assignation and tomorrow's, and for myself a sly, disdainful thought; because the sea breeze no longer puffed out her skirts; because, above all, I had clipped her wings, and she had ceased to be a winged Victory and become a burdensome slave of whom I would have liked to rid myself."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 500-501 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"So that, as I raised my eyes for one last look from the outside at the window of the room in which I should presently find myself, I seemed to behold the luminous gates which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the inflexible bars of gold."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 445 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The carriage drove off. I remained for a moment alone on the pavement. It was true that I endowed those luminous streaks which I could see from below, and which to anyone else would have seemed quite superficial, with the utmost plenitude, solidity, and volume, because of all the significance that I placed behind them, in a treasure unsuspected by the world which I had hidden there and from which those horizontal rays emanated, but a treasure in exchange for which I had forfeited my freedom, my solitude, my thought."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 444-445 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon's troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt's Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good."
-- Claudia Roth Pierpont, in "Found in Translation" in The New Yorker's January 18, 2010 issue.
"From his smile, a tribute to the defunct salon which he saw with his mind's eye, I understood that what Brichot, perhaps without realising it, preferred in the old drawing-room, more than the large windows, more than the gay youth of his hosts and their faithful, was that unreal aspect (which I myself could discern from certain similarities between La Raspelière and the Quai Conti) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else, the actual, external aspect, verifiable by everyone, is but the prolongation, the aspect which has detached itself from the outer world to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives as it were a surplus-value, in which it is absorbed into its habitual substance, transforming itself—houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at suppers which we recall—into that translucent alabaster of our memories of which we are incapable of conveying the colour which we alone can see, so that we can truthfully say to other people, when speaking of the past, that they can have no conception of them, that they are unlike anything they have seen, and that we ourselves cannot inwardly contemplate without a certain emotion, reflecting that it is on the existence of our thoughts that their survival for a little longer depends, the gleam of lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of arbours that will never bloom again."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 379 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The electric lights would have fused, the pastries would not have arrived in time, the orangeade would have given everybody a stomach-ache. She was the one person not to have here. At the mere sound of her name, as in a fairy-tale, not a note would have issued from the brass; the flute and the oboe would have suddenly lost their voices."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 367 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And no doubt they ought to have forgone the voluptuous pleasure of that sacrilege, but it did not express the whole of their natures."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 348 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But very soon, the triumphant motif of the bells having been banished, dispersed by others, I succumbed once again to the music; and I began to realise that if, in the body of this septet, different elements presented themselves one after another to combine at the close, so also Vinteuil's sonata and, as I later discovered, his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside the triumphal and consummate masterpiece now being revealed to me."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 335 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The cellist was hunched over the instrument which he clutched between his knees, his head bowed forward, his coarse features assuming an involuntary expression of disgust at the more mannerist moments; another leaned over his double bass, fingering it with the same domestic patience with which he might have peeled a cabbage, while by his side the harpist, a mere child in a short skirt, framed behind the diagonal rays of her golden quadrilateral, recalling those which, in the magic chamber of a sibyl, arbitrarily denote the ether according to the traditional forms, seemed to be picking out exquisite sounds here and there at designated points, just as though, a tiny allegorical goddess poised before the golden trellis of the heavenly vault, she were gathering, one by one, its stars."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 334 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"My joy at having rediscovered it was enhanced by the tone, so friendly and familiar, which it adopted in addressing me, so persuasive, so simple, and yet without subduing the shimmering beauty with which it glowed."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 332 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"As when, in a stretch of country which one thinks one does not know and which in fact one has approached from a new direction, after turning a corner one finds oneself suddenly emerging on to a road every inch of which is familiar, but one had simply not been in the habit of approaching it that way, one suddenly says to oneself: "Why, this is the lane that leads to the garden gate of my friends the X----s; I'm only two minutes from their house," and there, indeed, is their daughter who has come out to greet one as one goes by; so, all of a sudden, I found myself, in the midst of this music that was new to me, right in the heart of Vinteuil's sonata; and, more marvellous than any girl, the little phrase, sheathed, harnessed in silver, glittering with brilliant sonorities, as light and soft as silken scarves, came to me, recognisable in this new guise."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 331-332 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Mme Verdurin sat alone, the twin hemispheres of her pale, slightly roseate brow magnificently bulging, her hair drawn back, partly in imitation of an eighteenth-century portrait, partly from the need for coolness of a feverish person reluctant to reveal her condition, aloof, a deity presiding over the musical rites, goddess of Wagnerism and sick-headaches, a sort of almost tragic Norn, conjured up by the spell of genius in the midst of all these "bores," in whose presence she would scorn even more than usual to express her feelings upon hearing a piece of music which she knew better than they."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 331 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Does a toque really suit that enormous head of hair which a kakochnyk would set off to full advantage?"
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 294 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 227 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Before that hour drew near, we had a spell of chiaroscuro, because after we had driven as far as the Seine, where Albertine admired, and by her presence prevented me from admiring, the reflexions of red sails upon the wintry blue of the water, and a tiled house nestling in the distance like a single red poppy against the clear horizon of which Saint-Cloud seemed, further off still, to be the fragmentary, friable, ribbed petrifaction, we left our motor-car and walked a long way."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 227 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It was definitive, for the lady had returned perhaps to Balbec, had registered perhaps, on the luminous and echoing beach, the absence of Albertine; but she was unaware that the girl was living with me, was wholly mine."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 226 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The cooking and eating of food thus became deeply implicated in the cultural politics of bhadralok nationalism."
-- from the abstract of "Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal" by Jayanta Sengupta, in Modern Asian Studies volume 44, issue 1: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X09990072
"'All the poetry that the old quarters contain has been squeezed out to the last drop, but if you look at some of the houses that have been built lately for well-to-do tradesmen in the new districts, where the stone is all freshly cut and still to white, don't they seem to rend the torrid midday air of July, at the hour when the shopkeepers go home to lunch in the suburbs, with a cry as sharp and acidulous as the smell of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the darkened dining-room, where the prismatic glass knife-rests throw off a multicoloured light as beautiful as the windows of Chartres?'"
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 218 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I had barely time to make out, being separated from them by the glass of the car as effectively as I should have been by that of my bedroom window, a young fruit-seller, or a dairymaid, standing in the doorway of her shop, illuminated by the sunshine like a heroine whom my desire was sufficient to launch upon exquisite adventures, on the threshold of a romance which I should never know."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 216 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Our motor-car sped along the boulevards and the avenues, whose rows of houses, a pink congelation of sunshine and cold, reminded me of my visits to Mme Swann in the soft light of her chrysanthemums, before it was time to ring for the lamps."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 216 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The other musician, he who was delighting me at the moment, Wagner, retrieving some exquisite fragment from a drawer of his writing-table to introduce it, as a retrospectively necessary theme, into a work he had not even thought of at the time he composed it, then having composed a first mythological opera, and a second, and afterwards others still, and perceiving all of a sudden that he had written a tetralogy, must have felt something of the same exhilaration as Balzac when the latter, casting over his books the eye at once of a stranger and of a father, finding in one the purity of Raphael, in another the simplicity of the Gospel, suddenly decided, shedding a retrospective illumination upon them, that they would be better brought together in a cycle in which the same characters would reappear, and touched up his work with a swift brush-stroke, the last and the most sublime."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 205 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"However much she tried to conceal her awareness of it, it bathed her, enveloped her, vaporous, voluptuous, made her whole face glow."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 193 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I remembered the distress that I felt when I saw her face subjected to an active scrutiny, like that of a painter preparing to make a sketch, entirely enveloped in it, and, doubtless on account of my presence, submitting to this contact without appearing to notice it, with a passivity that was perhaps clandestinely voluptuous."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 192 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Surrounding both myself and Albertine there had been this morning (far more than the sunny day) that environment which itself is invisible but through the translucent and changing medium of which we saw, I her actions, she the importance of her own life—that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure, the season, for our days have their own singularity, physical and moral."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 191 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 185 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"In doing so I was like Elstir, who, obliged to remain closeted in his studio, on certain days in spring when the knowledge that the woods were full of violets gave him a hunger to see some, used to send his concierge out to buy him a bunch; and then it was not the table upon which he had posed the little floral model, but the whole carpet of undergrowth where in other years he had seen, in their thousands, the serpentine stems bowed beneath the weight of their tiny blue heads, that Elstir would fancy that he had before his eyes, like an imaginary zone defined in his studio by the limpid odour of the evocative flower."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 178 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Besides, in the state of limpid unreason that precedes these heavy slumbers, if fragments of wisdom float there luminously, if the names of Taine and George Eliot are not unknown, the waking state remains none the less superior to the extent that it is possible to continue it every morning, but not to continue the dream life every night."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 155-156 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The iron shutters of the baker's shop and of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over every possibility of feminine bliss, were now being raised, like the canvas of a ship that is getting under way and about to set sail across the transparent sea, on to a vision of young shopgirls."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 144 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Then her sleep would seem to me a marvellous and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 144 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"When Albertine came back to my room, she was wearing a black satin dress which had the effect of making her seem paler, of turning her into the pallid, intense Parisian woman, etiolated by lack of fresh air, by the atmosphere of crowds and perhaps by the practice of vice, whose eyes seemed the more uneasy because they were not brightened by any colour in her cheeks."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 127-128 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Between the two Balbec settings, so different one from the other, there was an interval of several years in Paris, the long expanse of which was dotted with all the visits that Albertine had paid me. I saw her in the different years of my life occupying, in relation to myself, different positions which made me feel the beauty of the intervening spaces, that long lapse of time during which I had remained without seeing her and in the diaphanous depths of which the roseate figure that I saw before me was carved with mysterious shadows and in bold relief. This was due also to the superimposition not merely of the successive images which Albertine had been for me, but also of the great qualities of intelligence and heart, and of the defects of character, all alike unsuspected by me, which Albertine, in a germination, a multiplication of herself, a fleshy efflorescence in sombre colours, had added to a nature that formerly could scarcely have been said to exist, but was now difficult to plumb."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 83 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The fugitive and fragmentary pleasure, compounded of mystery and sensuality, which I had felt at Balbec, on the night when she had come to sleep at the hotel, had been completed and stabilised, filling my hitherto empty dwelling with a permanent store of domestic, almost conjugal, ease that radiated even into the passages and upon which all my senses, either actively or, when I was alone, in imagination as I awaited her return, peacefully fed."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 69 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I do not say that a day will not come when, even to these luminous girls, we shall assign sharply defined characters, but that will be because they will have ceased to interest us, because their entry upon the scene will no longer be, for our heart, the apparition which it expected to be different and which, each time, leaves it overwhelmed by fresh incarnations."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 79 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"We have been told that some pretty girl is tender, loving, full of the most delicate feelings. Our imagination accepts this assurance, and when we behold for the first time, beneath the woven girdle of her golden hair, the rosy disc of her face, we are almost afraid that this too virtuous sister, cooling our ardour by her very virtue, can never be to us the lover for whom we have been longing. What secrets, however, we confide to her from the first moment, on the strength of that nobility of heart, what plans we make together! But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury. As for the successive facets which after pulsating for some days the roseate light, now eclipsed, presents to us, it is not even certain that a momentum external to these girls has not modified their aspect, and this might well have happened with my band of girls at Balbec."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 77-78 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"On this particular evening, Mme de Guermantes had given me, knowing that I was fond of them, some branches of syringa which had been sent to her from the South. When I left her and went upstairs to our flat, Albertine had already returned, and on the staircase I ran into Andrée, who seemed to be distressed by the powerful smell of the flowers that I was bringing home."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 63-64 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis who signs himself—as he was christened, as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis, with the same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in vermilion or ultramarine, in a Book of Hours or in a stained-glass window."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 39 of the Modern Library paperback edition
I had no recollection of having looked this word up before, but apparently I did! Yet again I encountered it in the sense of "fatten" and was surprised. In The Captive by Proust: "Then, like a famished convalescent already battening upon all the dishes that are still forbidden him ..."
"The sun's rays fell upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me glow like crystal."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 25 of the Modern Library paperback edition
yarb, excellent! I started The Captive in September but didn't get very far, then kept getting distracted by library books. Now I'm on vacation, which means lots of reading time.
"The windows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might not be visible from without, were not smooth and transparent but crinkled with an artificial and transparent hoar-frost. All of a sudden, the sun would colour this muslin glass, gild it, and, gently disclosing in my person an earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicate me with memories, as though I were in the heart of the country amidst golden foliage in which even a bird was not lacking."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 3 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Fifty years before, the glassmaking priest and alchemist Antonio Neri had been enticed into the Antwerp house of the Portuguese nobleman Emanuel Zimines and persuaded to write out his spagyrical secrets in a book published in Florence in 1612 called The Art of Glass."
"Virginia Woolf had once described the riverbanks as being on fire on either side of the Cam, but there was no such fire here now. Or at least not yet. There was red—rowan berries, rose hips, pyracanthas—but the red sat against the astonishing palette of autumn green like the sparks of a newly lit fire, like drops of crimson blood in the hedgerows."
"OK. How did he make red?" Was she laughing at me?
"Can't quite remember. Yes, I can." Blurred words came into focus. "Sheep's blood drained into a bladder, hung out to dry in the sun to make a powder, then mixed with alum water when needed. There was another one in which you boil brasill, whatever that is, and then he writes that if you would have it a 'sad red,' mingle it with potash water; if a light red, temper it with white lead. Christ, I've only read the transcription of that notebook once and I remember it all. What do you think a 'sad red' is?"
"My epiphenomenal faces retract, and no longer a metal dancer at the hub of a wheel, I take a step, diminish in size, stumble, stoop, fumble on the floor for my robe, laugh a silly laugh, thoroughly un-tranced."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 130 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"A final flight, short and narrow, as though it were the last resistance to gravity the structure could come up with, passes through glass doors to an open balcony overlooking a charming old garden of chinaberries and variegated mosses and birches peeling in papery white tatters around a pool that undoubtedly spells out a word like heart or mind but has been allowed to revert so thoroughly to nature that its letters, like the snow-weathered features of a marble bust, have lapsed into incoherence."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 69 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"Too many things were happening at once. Quentin's stomach clenched when he realized an elf had singled Alice out and was advancing across the dry basin toward her, twirling a long straight knife—were they called poniards?—in each hand."
"Magic," Richard announced slowly, flushed, "is the tools. Of the Maker." He almost never drank, and two glasses of viognier had put him well over his limit. He looked first left and then right to make sure the whole table was listening. What a fatuous ass."
"In the middle distance beyond the wide lawn a large house stood, all honey- colored stone and gray slate, adorned with chimneys and gables and towers and roofs and sub- roofs. In the center, over the main house, was a tall, stately clock tower that struck even Quentin as an odd addition to what otherwise looked like a private residence. The clock was in the Venetian style: a single barbed hand circling a face with twenty- four hours marked on it in Roman numerals. Over one wing rose what looked like the green oxidized- copper dome of an observatory. Between house and lawn was a series of inviting landscaped terraces and spinneys and hedges and fountains. Between house and lawn was a series of inviting landscaped terraces and spinneys and hedges and fountains."
"To keep the rest of the government informed, and to avoid turf battles, in June Holbrooke and Lieutenant General Doug Lute, the President's adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, started a weekly Monday-evening meeting at the State Department for all the relevant agencies. Lute called it the 'shura.'"
- "The Last Mission" by George Packer, The New Yorker, September 28, 2009, p 47
Of Canvey Island: "A place, in William Harrison's words, 'which some call marshes onlie, and liken them to an ipocras bag, some to a vice, scrue, or wide sleeve, because the are verie small at the east end and large at the west'."
-Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, p 441
"A spiced wine taken at the end of a meal as a digestive. The spices were filtered through a jelly bag known to apothecaries as a manicum hippocraticum - the sleeve of Hippocrates. This piece of apparatus gave the drink its name." -- from historicfood.com, which also has recipes.
"The first reference to a stone bridge across the Thames occurs in a document of AD 958 when Eadwig granted to his thegn, Eadrig, the lands "first to the stone bridge and from the stone bridge eastwards along the Thames until it comes to the boundary of the people of King's Hone." King's Hone is now known as Kingston Bagpuize, and the site of the stone bridge is that of the present Radcot Bridge."
- in Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, p 132
"The main thrust of the river flow is known to hydrologists as the "thalweg"; it does not move in a straight and forward line but, mingling with the inner flow and the variegated flow of the surface and bottom waters, takes the form of a spiral or helix."
"The low cholesterol salt didn't save him, naturally. And neither did the disappearance of the plump Montecristo No. 2s and H. Upmanns, replaced by slim panatellas and Hamlets. Less smoke, same addiction, same awful outcome give or take a few months."
- The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon Garfield, p 29
"Interior spaces bleed freely into the gardens beyond through projections of wall, soffit and floor, while the forces of nature are freely admitted into the building through expansive apertures, in such a way as neither to render the building fully as an instrument, nor dissolve it into the landscape." (p 279)
John Sadar (2008). The healthful ambience of Vitaglass: light, glass and the curative environment. Architectural Research Quarterly, 12 , pp 269-281
"Worked to the bone, clad in rags, fed on husks and draff, infected by tropical fever, he sank into dumb beastliness. For two years his only consolation was a book, a tattered Geometry, and — picture this — when night fell he would repair to the beach and trace out on the sand Euclid's ideal forms by the pure light of the African moon."
"'You're drunk, sir," Newton said quite loudly. He was on his feet and was just about to speak even more loudly when he realised that people were looking at him and that the occasion was solemn, so he managed to restrain himself and merely bore down on the astonished Mr Teale and hissed in his ear, 'You're drunk, you swiving bastard, you poxed-up fucking son of a whore.'"
"Plodding along between high banks of lacy cow parsley, the mare shook her head just once as a hungry cleg found its way into the velvety coolness of her ear."
"Really, it was no concern of hers that Mr Cowper's relatives were girning yet again over the cost of his upkeep; it was one thing for a man to have a lackey — and Sam Roberts was an excellent servant — but it was piling Ossa on Pelion for them to learn that he also had a half-orphan boy attending on him."
"When she was ill in December, quite seriously so, with a quinsy, I wrote the following little hymn. I began to compose it one morning, before daybreak, but fell asleep at the end of the first two lines. When I waked again the third and fourth were whispered to my heart in a way which I have often experienced."
"A piece of verse on the bottom of a page in the newspaper was ringed with red crayon. In the margin, written in black ink, were the words, 'A cricket is a stool but a fool wrote this. And the nobility, where is that?' The verse was headed, 'A Receipt to Cure a Love Fit'.
Tie one end of a rope fast over a beam,
And make a slip-noose at the other extreme;
Then just underneath let a cricket be set,
On which the lover must manfully get;
Then over his head let the snecket be got,
And under one ear be well settled the knot.
The cricket kicked down, let him take a fair swing,
And leave all the rest of the work to the string."
"'You're not selfish, Mister C; you're bothered, that's all. Think about money, think about happiness, think even about me. They're prizes worth having, ain't they?' She kissed him on the cheek, then broke away to continue her inspection, opening the door to the bedroom. 'Hey, lookee here! The monk's cell. Is this where you gamahuche the boys?'
He didn't know what the word meant, nor did he want to. He waited for a moment, then went in after her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, head bent, hands in her lap, and when she spoke her voice was different."
"What a funereal sight the camp at Norman Cross had been! A monumental collection of five or six tall wooden casernes, and in each one a thousand Frenchmen, starving, fed on rotten carrion flesh and bread the hounds would not eat; and the guards, battalions of them, were constantly searching their quarters at bayonet point in case the prisoners had somehow procured for themselves any of the comforts of existence, the which being found they burned in great bonfires in the barrack square beneath the glaring eyeballs and the cursing mouths of the captives."
"We might be forgiven for envisaging Birmingham already as mainly a town of metal trades. The smiths, lorimers, and nailers probably made more noise and show, but wills and tax-assessments tell us that the wealthiest townsmen were still tanners and butchers, as in many other Midland towns."
W. G. Hoskins (1956). English Provincial Towns in the Early Sixteenth Century. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series), 6 , pp 1-19
doi:10.2307/3678838
The OED online (definition from the second edition, 1989) says it is "A maker of bits and metal mountings for horses' bridles; also, a spurrier, and (generally) a maker of small iron ware and a worker in wrought-iron. "
I can see how the academic righteousness can be annoying -- it's like any buzzword, like saying "weltaunschauung" instead of "worldview" just to be pretentious. But the concept of "please don't assume everyone is straight, and please don't assume everyone believes in a binary system of gender, and please don't ignore my identity/relationships just 'cause they're not like yours" seems a useful one.
"Not only did I no longer feel the anxious dread of loneliness which had gripped my heart the first evening; I had no longer any need to fear its reawakening, nor to feel myself a homesick stranger in this land productive not only of chestnut-trees and tamarisks, but of friendships which from beginning to end of the route formed a long chain, interrupted like that of the blue hills, hidden here and there in the anfractuosity of the rock or behind the lime-trees of the avenue, but delegating at each stopping-place an amiable gentleman who came to punctuate my journey with a cordial handclasp, to prevent me from feeling its length, to offer if need be to continue it with me."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 696 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I was so pleased to hear that you have definitely chosen this neighbourhood to set up your taber . . ."
She was going to say "tabernacle" but it occurred to her that the word was Hebraic and discourteous to a Jew who might see some innuendo in it. And so she pulled herself up in order to choose another of the expressions that were familiar to her, that is to say a ceremonious expression: "to set up, I should say, your penates." (It is true that these deities do not appertain to the Christian religion either, but to one which has been dead for so long that it no longer claims any devotees whose feelings one need be afraid of hurting.
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 595-596 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I should have preferred not to set out so early; the luminous and burning air provoked thoughts of indolence and cool retreats. It filled my mother's room and mine, according to their exposure, at varying temperatures, like rooms in a Turkish bath."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 534 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But Brichot was determined that I should have my share in the entertainment, and having learned, from those oral examinations which he conducted like nobody else, that the best way to flatter the young is to lecture them, to make them feel important, to make them regard you as a reactionary: 'I have no wish to blaspheme against the Gods of Youth,' he said, with that furtive glance at myself which an orator turns upon a member of his audience when he mentions him by name, 'I have no wish to be damned as a heretic and renegade in the Mallarméan chapel in which our new friend, like all the young men of his age, must have served the esoteric mass, at least as an acolyte, and have shown himself deliquescent or Rosicrucian.'"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 482-483 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"From the height we had now reached, the sea no longer appeared, as it did from Balbec, like an undulating range of hills, but on the contrary like the view, from a mountain-peak or from a road winding round its flank, of a blue-green glacier or a glittering plain situated at a lower level."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 401 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Often, in the hall of the Casino, when two girls were smitten with mutual desire, a sort of luminous phenomenon occurred, as it were a phosphorescent trail flashing from one to the other."
"I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 339 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 338 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But I could not bear to have before my eyes those sea vistas on which my grandmother used to gaze for hours on end; the fresh image of their heedless beauty was at once supplemented by the thought that she could not see them; I should have liked to stop my ears against their sound, for now the luminous plenitude of the beach carved out an emptiness in my heart; everything seemed to me to be saying, like those paths and lawns of a public garden in which I had once lost her, long ago, when I was still a little child: 'We haven't seen her,' and beneath the roundness of the pale vault of heaven I felt crushed as though beneath a huge bluish bell enclosing an horizon from which my grandmother was excluded."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 219 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I ceased for some time to see Albertine, but continued, failing Mme de Guermantes who no longer spoke to my imagination, to visit other fairies and their dwellings, as inseparable from themselves as is the pearly or enamelled valve or the crenellated turret of its shell from the mollusc that made it and shelters inside it."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 190 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Thus, from that nocturnal Paris out of whose depths the invisible message had already wafted into my very room, delimiting the field of action of a faraway person, what was now about to materialise, after this preliminary annunciation, was the Albertine whom I had known long ago beneath the sky of Balbec, when the waiters of the Grand Hotel, as they laid the tables, were blinded by the glow of the setting sun, when, the glass panels having been drawn wide open, the faintest evening breeze passed freely from the beach, where the last strolling couples still lingered, into the vast dining-room in which the first diners had not yet taken their places, and when, in the mirror placed behind the cashier's desk, there passed the red reflexion of the hull and, lingering long, the grey reflexion of the smoke of the last steamer for Rivebelle."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 181-182 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"This effort on the part of the old feeling to combine and form a single element with the other, more recent, which had for its voluptuous object only the coloured surface, the flesh-pink bloom of a flower of the sea-shore, was one that often results simply in creating (in the chemical sense) a new body, which may last only a few moments."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 179-180 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"As I listened to these words of excuse, uttered as though she did not intend to come, I felt that, with the longing to see again the velvet-soft face which in the past, at Balbec, used to direct all my days towards the moment when, by the mauve September sea, I should be beside that roseate flower, a very different element was painfully endeavouring to combine."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 179 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And I sat there, unable to take my eyes from the strip which persisted in remaining dark; I bent my whole body forward to make certain of noticing any change; but, gaze as I might, the the vertical black band, despite my impassioned longing, did not give me the intoxicating delight that I should have felt had I seen it changed by a stroke of sudden and significant magic to a luminous bar of gold."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 174 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Such (meta)satire not only labels Osborne a carnival agelast or unlaughing lenten hypocrite (Bakhtin 212-13) like Carroll's Queen of Hearts, but also suggests the dystopian undercurrents of carnival that post-Bakhtinians like Michael André Bernstein stress: 'when the tropes of Saturnalian reversal of all values spill over into daily life, they usually do so with a savagery that is the grim underside of their exuberant affirmations' (6)."
Mark M. Hennelly (2009). ALICE'S ADVENTURES AT THE CARNIVAL. Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 , pp 103-128 (p 106)
"'You won't come with us to the ball?' he asked me. 'I can lend you a Venetian cloak and I know someone who will be deucedly glad to see you there—Oriane for one, that goes without saying—but the Princesse de Parme. She never tires of singing your praises, and swears by you. It's lucky for you—since she's a trifle mature— that she is a model of virtue. Otherwise she would certainly have taken you on as a cicisbeo, as they used to say in my young days, a sort of cavaliere servente.'"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 168 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But what peace of mind, after having been perpetually troubled by my restless desires for so many fugitive creatures whose very names I often did not know and who were in any case so hard to find, harder still to get to know, impossible perhaps to conquer, to have drawn from all that scattered, fugitive, anonymous beauty two choice specimens duly labelled, whom I was at least certain of being able to procure when I wished!"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 166-167 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Tossing her head like a royal palfrey embarrassed by its halter of pearls, of an incalculable value but an inconvenient weight, she let fall here and there a soft and charming gaze, of an azure which, as it gradually began to fade, became more caressing still, and greeted most of the departing guests with a friendly nod."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 163 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And, indeed, on a chair drawn up to the glittering inaugural table, M. de Charlus in person, never touching a card, oblivious of what was going on around him, incapable of observing that I had entered the room, seemed precisely a magician applying all the force of his will and reason to drawing a horoscope."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 119 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The similarity between the evanescent greetings of the Duchesse de Lambresac and those of my grandmother's friends had begun to arouse my interest by showing me how in all narrow and closed societies, be they those of the minor gentry or of the great nobility, the old manners persist, enabling us to recapture, like an archaeologist, something of the upbringing, and the ethos it reflects, that prevailed in the days of the Vicomte d'Arlincourt and Loiisa Puget."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 110 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"At Combray and in Paris, all my grandmother's friends were in the habit of greeting one another at a social gathering with as seraphic an air as if they had caught sight of someone of their acquaintance in church, at the moment of the Elevation or during a funeral, and were offering him a languid greeting which ended in prayer."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 110 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Her lists were made up and closed, so that while she wandered slowly through the Princess's rooms dropping into one ear after another: 'You won't forget tomorrow,' she had the ephemeral glory of averting her eyes, while continuing to smile, if she caught sight of some ugly duckling who was to be avoided or some country squire for whom the bond of a schoolboy friendship had secured admission to 'Gilbert's,' and whose presence at her garden-party would be no gain."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 96 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I had plenty of time (as he was pretending to be absorbed in a fictitious game of whist which enabled him to appear not to notice people) to admire the deliberate, artful simplicity of his evening coat which, by the merest trifles which only a tailor's eye could have picked out, had the air of a 'Harmony in Black and White' by Whistler; black, white and red, rather, for M. de Charlus was wearing, suspended from a broad ribbon over his shirt-front, the cross, in white, black and red enamel, of a Knight of the religious Order of Malta."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 70-71 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I was yielding to a purely sensual desire, although we were at that torrid period of the year when sensuality, released, is more readily inclined to visit the organs of taste, and seeks coolness above all. More than for the kiss of a girl, it thirsts for orangeade, for a bath, or even to gaze at that peeled and juicy moon that was quenching the thirst of heaven."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 61 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"In offering me this greeting, she executed around me, holding me by the hand, a graceful pirouette, by the whirl of which I felt myself swept away."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 51 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But now the guests for the reception were beginning to arrive and the lady of the house was seated not far from the door—erect and proud in her quasi-regal majesty, her eyes ablaze with their own incandescence—between two unattractive highnesses and the Spanish Ambassadress."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 48 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"When I followed my instinct only, the jellyfish used to revolt me at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard them, like Michelet, from the standpoint of natural history and aesthetics, I saw an exquisite blue girandole. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea?"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 36 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But the latter has obtained promotion, has been transferred to the other end of the country; the solitary will no longer be able to go and ask him the times of the trains or the price of a first-class ticket, and, before retiring to dream, Griselda-like, in his tower, loiters upon the beach, a strange Andromeda whom no Argonaut will come to free, a sterile jellyfish that must perish on the sand, or else he stands idly on the platform until his train leaves, casting over the crowd of passengers a look that will seem indifferent, disdainful or abstracted to those of another race, but, like the luminous glow with which certain insects bedeck themselves in order to attract others of their species, or like the nectar which certain flowers offer to attract the insects that will fertilise them, would not deceive the connoisseur (barely possible to find) of a pleasure too singular, too hard to place, which is offered him, the confrère with whom our specialist could converse in the strange tongue—in which at best some ragamuffin on the platform will put up a show of interest, but for material gain alone, like those people who, at the Collège de France, in a room in which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures without an audience, attend his course only for the sake of keeping warm."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 36 of the Modern Library paperback edition
Wiktionary says "1. (archaic) townsman, citydweller (term of contempt)" (here)
As in: "'To return to young men not of the lower orders,' the Baron went on, 'at the present moment my head has been turned by a strange little fellow, an intelligent little cit who shows with regard to myself a prodigious want of civility'."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 16 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Certainly, the affairs of this sort of which I have been a spectator have always been, as far as their setting is concerned, of the most imprudent and least probable character, as if such revelations were to be the reward of an action full of risk, though in part clandestine."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 10 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The Sophists, however, functioned something like the chautauquas and public lecturers in nineteenth-century America, who went from place to place delivering talks to audiences hungry for information and ideas."
- Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, p 15 of the Verso paperback edition (2006)
Cardamine californica, or California Toothwort. In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes: "I wasn't sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine that can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers." (p 5)
"The sidewalks were gray and uneven, and the sky looked like a mirror without a tain, the place where everything should have been reflected but where, in the end, nothing was."
-"Meeting with Enrique Lihn" by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, in the New Yorker, Dec 22 and 29, 2008, pp 80-81
"Today, the meaning of annoy is mild – 'vex, irritate'. But when the word first came into English from French in the fourteenth century, it had a much stronger sense – 'to be hateful or odious' to someone. By the time of the Civil War it had developed meanings of 'injure, harm', especially in a military context."
Talking about possible sources for the word "hobbit," David Crystal writes that "it might be a shortened form of hobbity-hoy, a variant form of hobbledehoy."
"–ril is not an expected word-ending. There are probably fewer than a dozen words in English ending in –ril. Most are unusual words, such as umbril and courbaril. Only four – April, Avril, peril, and nostril – are at all common."
David Crystal says that an isogram isn't necessarily a word in which no letter is repeated, but a letter in which the letters have the same frequency. "But to the ludic linguist, Wilmcote is a first-order isogram, or heterogram. Not a very interesting one, admittedly, but a first-order isogram nonetheless.
An isogram is a word in which the letters turn up an equal number of times. In a first-order isogram, each letter appears just once: dialogue is an example. In a second-order isogram, each letter appears twice: deed is an example. Longer examples are hard to find: they include Vivienne, Caucasus, intestines, and (important for a phonetician to know this) bilabial. In a third-order isogram, each letter appears three times. These are very rare, unusual words such as deeded ('conveyed by deed'), sestettes (a variant spelling of sextets), and geggee ('victim of a hoax)."
David Crystal says that an isogram isn't necessarily a word in which no letter is repeated, but a letter in which the letters have the same frequency. "But to the ludic linguist, Wilmcote is a first-order isogram, or heterogram. Not a very interesting one, admittedly, but a first-order isogram nonetheless.
An isogram is a word in which the letters turn up an equal number of times. In a first-order isogram, each letter appears just once: dialogue is an example. In a second-order isogram, each letter appears twice: deed is an example. Longer examples are hard to find: they include Vivienne, Caucasus, intestines, and (important for a phonetician to know this) bilabial. In a third-order isogram, each letter appears three times. These are very rare, unusual words such as deeded ('conveyed by deed'), sestettes (a variant spelling of sextets, and geggee ('victim of a hoax)."
"I relaxed. The Shakespeare vexillographic canon would be complete.
Interesting coinage, vexillology, 'the study of flags'. It dates only from the 1950s. The vexillum was a type of banner used by the Roman legions. It wasn't flown from the top of a pole, as modern flags are. Rather, its top side was fastened to a crossbar fixed across the top of a spear."
"Dogberry is an old name for a kind of shrub (the wild cornel) and Verges is probably a dialect form of verjuice, meaning 'sour-faced'. Costard is a large apple, thus a word often applied to heads – in effect, 'bighead'."
"Nickname comes from an Old English expression, an eke name. Eke meant 'also'. It was your 'other' name. Over time, the n of an got transferred to the beginning of eke. An eke became a neke. The pronunciation changed, and the spelling, and eventually we get the modern word."
"There is an annual census of the swan population on parts of the River Thames called 'Swan Upping' – 'upping' because the birds are picked 'up' out of the water. It dates from the twelfth century and takes place during the third week of July."
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal -- in an account of an old man who'd been a coal miner in Durham, and remembered the dialect they used in the pits: "In his account he used several general words from the local dialect, such as grathely ('tidy') and ettle ('arrange'), both Old Norse words that came into English in the Middle Ages" (p 86).
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal: "It is from Old English, steor + ling, 'spotted'. In the eighteenth century, two men who slept with the same woman were said to be brother-starlings. In the nineteenth century, the police used to refer to someone under surveillance as a starling – a person who had been 'spotted', a 'marked man'." (p 81)
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal: "For instance, there was a survey of bird-names done in Yorkshire in the 1950s. It turned out that the local word for 'starling' was cheppy in the extreme north-west of the county, but jibby in the coastal areas of the North and East Ridings. If you went into the Wolds, the Vale of Pickering, or the North Riding moors, it was called jibby. In the upper valleys of the Wharfe, Aire, and Calder it was shebby. And in the Vale of York, Hambleton, Ampleforth, and the Cleveland Hills it was shippy." (p 81)
"In 1981 a farmer found a gold bracteate – a kind of medallion, fashioned with eyelets so that it could be worn around the neck – at Undley Common, near Lakenheath in Suffolk."
David Crystal writes of a toll-board sign in Porthmadog in Wales from the early nineteenth century, which begins thus: "For every Horse or other Beast of Draught drawing any Coach, Sociable, Berlin, Landau, Chariot, Vis-a-Vis, Chaise, Calash, Chais-marine, Curricle, Chair, Gig, Whisky, Caravan, Hearse, Litter, Waggon, Wain, Cart, Dray, or other Carriage, any Sum not exceeding One Shilling:"
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal: "Cob – or cobb, as it is sometimes spelled – is a curious word. It has a remarkable range of senses, some dating back to the fifteenth century. At one time or another it has referred to a well-built man, a type of gull, a herring, a male swan, a stout horse, and a spider (think of cobweb). Small haystacks, loaves of bread, certain types of nut, the tops of maize shoots, and even testicles have also been called cobs, as have Spanish dollars (the famous 'pieces of eight'), lumps of building material for walls, and small rounded stones for roadways, more commonly called cobble stones." (p 36)
And: "To give someone a cob can mean to hit them. To have a cob on is to be in a bad mood. To get a cob on is to become sulky." (p 37)
David Crystal writes about the origin of blurb in By Hook or By Crook. Crystal tells the Gelett Burgess story and writes: "In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, he defined his own term:
1 A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.
As in "to scare the living daylights out of" someone. David Crystal writes about this in By Hook or By Crook as follows: "The plural of daylight is known from the eighteenth century. Henry Fielding is the first recorded user, in Chapter 10 of his novel Amelia. During a lively piece of prison table-talk we hear one woman say of another, who has called her a 'good woman': 'Good woman! I don't use to be so treated. If the lady says such another word to me, d—n me, I will darken her daylights.' 'Black her eyes,' we would say these days. Daylights was slang for 'eyes'." (p 71)
Crystal goes on to talk about how "daylights" then came to mean other vital organs, not just they eyes, and says that "the living daylights" "seems to have arisen in the late nineteenth century. It became popular about fifty years later" (ibid.).
David Crystal writes: "And I hadn't realized that classic crooks have hooks at both ends, one larger than the other. One is large enough to catch hold of a sheep's neck; the other end is smaller, for catching hold of the hind foot. He called it a 'leg cleek." (pp 8-9)
And then: "It seems to have been a Scottish word originally, in the fifteenth century. A hook for catching hold of something, or pulling something, or hanging something up. Fishermen used it a lot. And then it turned up again in the nineteenth century, in gold, referring to a type of club." (p 9)
And: "In parts of Scotland, to this day, if someone calls you cleeky, they mean you're grasping, captious." (p 9)
And: "And in the jazz era it turned up again, meaning a wet blanket at a party, a party-pooper. Beatniks in the US used it in the 1960s for any sad or melancholy person." (p 9)
If you can't tell, I just started reading By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, and am loving it so far.
"The gamps and bonnets, the white gym-shoes, the bottles and the mildew king, the singing mortuary man, the Rose of Tralee, swam together in the snuggery ..." - Dylan Thomas in "Old Garbo," in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, p 96 of the New Directions Paperbook edition
Dylan Thomas, in "Old Garbo," in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, writes: "Most of the boys were there already. Some wore the outlines of moustaches, others had sideboards and crimped hair, some smoked curved pipes and talked with them gripped between their teeth, there were pin-stripe trousers and hard collars, one daring bowler." (p 89 of the New Directions Paperbook edition)
Dylan Thomas uses this, presumably in the sense of "a container that is usually woven and has handles," in "Old Garbo" in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog:
"I made my way through the crowds: the Valley men, up for the football; the country shoppers; the window-gazers; the silent, shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in isolation in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women in black, brooched dresses carrying frails; smart girls in shining mackintoshes and splashed stockings; little dandy lascars, bewildered by the weather; business men with wet spats; through a mushroom forest of umbrellas; and all the time I thought of the paragraphs I would never write. I'll put you all in a story by and by." (pp 88-89 of the New Directions Paperbook edition)
The OED online says: "A difficult or disagreeable person, esp. a child. Sometimes used as a scolding term of reproach. (In quots. only from the writings of Dylan Thomas.)"
"anything attached to another thing of the same kind, an appendix: a companion picture, poem, etc." (from the Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, New Edition, 1983)
As in "In a pendant essay called "The Procession of Flowers," Higginson followed the seasons of New England from the first flowering arbutus among the lingering snows of April to the late-blooming fall blossoms heralding the coming of winter."
-- A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, p 18
"Adrift in a new world of often devastating change, they found meaning in the shifting light on a river at dawn, or the evanescent flash of a hummingbird's flight."
- A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, p 4
"She never left the house except to tend the hyacinths and heliotrope in her garden, or to cut back the cascading honeysuckle, which, as her niece next door observed, 'lured the hummingbirds all day'."
from A Summer of Hummingbirds" by Christopher Benfey, p 3
"This book is about a cluster of American artists and writers adrift during the seismic upheaval of the Civil War and its wrenching aftermath."
and
"Who could have less in common than Mark Twain, adrift on the Mississippi, and Emily Dickinson, secluded in her father's house on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts?"
-- from A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, pp 2-3
"When all was said, the stories I had heard at Mme de Guermantes's, very different in this respect from what I had felt in the case of the hawthorns, or when I tasted a madeleine, remained alien to me."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 756 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"All apartments in Paris that you would long to live in belong to the domaine privé. This is to say not that they all belong to the city government but that they can be obtained only through membership in one or another of the political or literary or fashionable keiretsus that dominate Paris."
"But as these faces, different in this respect from those of the party around me, were not overlaid for me by any residue of physical experience or social mediocrity, they remained, in their handsome outlines and rainbow iridescence, homogeneous with those names which at regular intervals, each of a different hue, detached themselves from the genealogical tree of Guermantes, and disturbed with no foreign or opaque matter the translucent, alternating, multicoloured buds which like the ancestors of Jesus in the old Jesse windows, blossomed on either side of the tree of glass."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 744 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Old friends of M. and Mme Guermantes came in to see them after dinner, 'with the tooth-picks' as Mme Swann would have said, without being expected, and took in winter a cup of lime-blossom tea in the lighted warmth of the great drawing-room, in summer a glass of orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden outside."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 703of the Modern Library paperback edition
"'Don't listen to him, Ma'am, he's having you on; she's as stupid as a (h'm) goose,' came in a loud and husky voice from Mme de Guermantes, who, a great deal more 'old world' even than the Duke when she wasn't trying, often deliberately sought to be, but in a manner entirely different from the deliquescent, lace jabot style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, with a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 664-665 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"A certainty of taste in the domain not of aesthetics but of behaviour, which when he was faced by a novel combination of circumstances enabled the man of breeding to grasp at once—like a musician who has been asked to play a piece he has never seen—the attitude and the action required and to apply the appropriate mechanism and technique, and then allowed this taste to be exercised without the constraint of any other consideration by which so many young men of the middle class would have been paralysed from fear both of making themselves ridiculous in the eyes of strangers by a breach of propriety and of appearing over-zealous in those of their friends, and which in Robert's case was replaced by a lofty disdain that certainly he had never felt in his heart but had received by inheritance in his body, and that had fashioned the attitudes of his ancestors into a familiarity which, they imagined, could only flatter and enchant those to whom it was addressed; together with a noble liberality which, far from taking undue heed of his boundless material advantages (lavish expenditure in this restaurant had succeeded in making him, here as elsewhere, the most fashionable customer and the general favourite, a position underlined by the deference shown him not only by the waiters but by all its most exclusive young patrons), led him to trample them underfoot, just as he had actually and symbolically trodden upon those crimson benches, suggestive of some ceremonial way which pleased my friend only because it enabled him more gracefully and swiftly to arrive at my side: such were the quintessentially aristocratic qualities that shone through the husk of his body—not opaque and dim as mine would have been, but limpid and revealing—as, through a work of art, the industrious, energetic force which has created it, and rendered the movements of that light-footed course which Robert had pursued along the wall as intelligible and charming as those of horsemen on a marble frieze."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 566-567 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"If I had sought to reproduce in a piece of writing the material in which my most insignificant memories of Rivebelle appeared to me to be carved, I should have had to vein with pink, to render at once translucent, compact, cool and resonant, a substance hitherto analogous to the sombre, rugged sandstone of Combray."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 545 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Weary, resigned, occupied for several hours still with its immemorial task, the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade, and it saddened me to think that I was to be left alone with a thing that knew me no more than would a seamstress who, installed by the window so as to see better while she finishes her work, pays no attention to the person present with her in the room."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 479 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The grey light, falling like a fine rain, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared in a silvery sheen."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 474 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But in order that I should not be disappointed by the words that I should hear uttered by a person who called herself Mme de Guermantes, even if I had not been in love with her, it would not have sufficed that those words be shrewd, beautiful, and profound, they would have had to reflect that amaranthine colour of the closing syllable of her name, that colour which on first seeing her I had been disappointed not to find in her person and had fancied as having taken refuge in her mind."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 280 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But I responded to her complaints only with a languid smile; all the more indifferent to these predictions in that whatever happened in would be fine for me; already, I could see the morning sun shining on the slope of Fiesole, and I warmed myself smilingly in its rays; their strength obliged me to half-open and half-shut my eyelids, which, like alabaster lamps, were filled with a roseate glow."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 195 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"One morning, after several weeks of showers and storms, I heard in my chimney—instead of the formless, elastic, sombre wind which stirred in me a longing to go to the sea—the cooing of the pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 186-187 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky but held back by the chill of those last autumn mornings, so luminous and so cold, which herald winter, in order to look at the trees on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few strokes of gold or pink which seemed to have been left in the air, on an invisible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like a chrysalis in the process of metamorphosis, I was a dual creature whose different parts were not adapted to the same environment; for my eyes, colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on the other hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 111 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I walked down a long gallery which displayed to me successively all that it had to offer me if I could not sleep, an armchair placed in a corner, a spinet, a blue porcelain vase filled with cinerarias on a console table, and, in an old frame, the phantom of a lady of long ago with powdered hair mingled with blue flowers, holding in her hand a bunch of carnations."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 105 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And the room was prolonged in depth by two closets as wide as itself, one of which had hanging from its wall, to scent the occasion on which one had recourse to it, a voluptuous rosary of orris-roots; the doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this innermost retreat, were not content with tripling its dimensions without spoiling its harmonious proportions, and not only allowed my eyes to enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but added further to the pleasure of my solitude—which, while still inviolable, was no longer shut in—the sense of liberty."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 104 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The man who has become completely deaf cannot even heat a pan of milk by his bedside without having to keep an eye open to watch, on the tilted lid, fr the white hyperborean reflexion, like that of a coming snowstorm, which is the premonitory sign it is wise to obey by cutting off (as the Lord stilled the waves) the electric current; for already the fitfully swelling egg of the boiling milk is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong undulations, puffs out and fills a few drooping sails that had been puckered by the cream, sending a nacreous spinnaker bellying out in the hurricane, until the cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is exorcised in time, will make them all twirl round on themselves and scatter like magnolia petals."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 94-95 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I gazed on this momentary apotheosis with a perturbation which was partly soothed by feeling that I myself was unknown to the Immortals; the Duchess had indeed seen me once with her husband, but could surely have kept no memory of that, and I was not distressed that she should find herself, owing to the position that she occupied in the box, gazing down upon the nameless, collective madrepores of the audience in the stalls, for I was happily aware that my being was dissolved in their midst, when, at the moment in which, by virtue of the laws of refraction, the blurred shaped of the protozoon devoid of any individual existence which was myself must have come to be reflected in the impassive current of those two blue eyes, I saw a ray illumine them: the Duchess, goddess turned woman, and appearing in that moment a thousand times more lovely, raised towards me the white-gloved hand which had been resting on the balustrade of the box and waved it in token of friendship; my gaze was caught in the spontaneous incandescence of the flashing eyes of the Princess, who had unwittingly set them ablaze merely by turning her head to see who it might be that her cousin was thus greeting: and the latter, who had recognized me, poured upon me the sparkling and celestial shower of her smile."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 68-69 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Perhaps Mme de Guermantes would smile next day when she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, which the Princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that the latter had been none the less quite lovely and marvellously got up; and the Princess, whose own tastes found something a little cold, a little austere, a little "tailor-made" in her cousin's way of dressing, would discover in this strict sobriety an exquisite refinement."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 63 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Within the boundaries of their domain, however, the radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile up at the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or towards some aquatic demi-god whose skull was a polished stone on to which the tide had washed a smooth covering of seaweed, and his gaze a disc of rock crystal."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 44-45 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they embroidered, and, raising themselves toward the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 44 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Then in the depths of this name the castle mirrored in its lake had faded, and what now became apparent to me, surrounding Mme de Guermantes as her dwelling, had been her house in Paris, the Hôtel de Guermantes, limpid like its name, for no material and opaque element intervened to interrupt and occlude its transparency."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 9 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"A two-dimensional castle, no more indeed than a strip of orange light, from the summit of which the lord and his lady disposed of the lives and deaths of their vassals, had given place—right at the end of the "Guermantes Way" along which, on so many summer afternoons, I followed with my parents the course of the Vivonne—to that land of bubbling streams where the Duchess taught me to fish for trout and to know the names of the flowers whose red and purple clusters adorned the arches of the neighbouring gardens; then it had been the ancient heritage, the poetic domain from which the proud race of Guermantes, like a mellow crenellated tower that traverses the ages, had risen already over France, at a time when the sky was still empty at those points where later were to rise Notre-Dame of Paris and Notre-Dame of Chartres; a time when on the summit of the hill of Laon the nave of its cathedral had not yet been poised like the Ark of the Deluge on the summit of Mount Ararat, crowded with Patriarchs and Judges anxiously leaning from its windows to see whether the wrath of God has yet subsided, carrying with it specimens of the plants that will multiply on the earth, brimming over with animals which have even climbed out through the towers, between which oxen grazing calmly on the roof look down over the plains of Champagne; when the traveller who left Beauvais at the close of day did not yet see, following him and turning with his road, the black, ribbed wings of the cathedral spread out against the golden screen of the western sky."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 6-7 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But even apart from rare moments such as these, in which suddenly we feel the original entity quiver and resume its form, carve itself out of syllables now dead, if in the dizzy whirl of daily life, in which they serve only the most practical purpose, names have lost all their colour, like a prismatic top that spins too quickly and seems only grey, when, on the other hand, we reflect upon the past in our day-dreams and seek, in order to recapture it, to slacken, to suspend the perpetual motion by which we are borne along, gradually we see once more appear, side by side but entirely distinct from one another, the tints which in the course of our existence have been successively presented to us by a single name."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 5-6 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And the name Guermantes of those days is also like one of those little balloons which have been filled with oxygen or some other gas; when I come to prick it, to extract its contents from it, I breathe the air of the Combray of that year, of that day, mingled with a fragrance of hawthorn blossom blown by the wind from the corner of the square, harbinger of rain, which now sent the sun packing, now let it spread itself over the red woolen carpet of the sacristy, clothing it in a bright geranium pink and in that, so to speak, Wagnerian sweetness and solemnity in joy that give such nobility to a festive occasion."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 5 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"By and by, after a few years, Mack and Raiss let me share in the profits in my district, a tiny share, but enough to give me some surplus income, which I invested in a little island smack in the Amazon, where I planted rubber trees and tobacco, coffee and cocoa, and drew a high yield of balata gum and oil from the juicy kernels of the babassu palm, which I rafted down to Pará."
"The Americas were my district, a territory where you made a pile of money in a month of sweat and lost it in a night of gambling and women, where the Southern Cross blinked out its torrid message in the hot sky—WELCOME TO SOUTH AMERICA, CONTINENT OF CONTRASTS AND ROMANCE—not my kind of territory at first, hard and gritty and tough on the liver for a pure white man, yet once it got in your blood, you couldn't get over it even if you lived five lives more, because that macumba magic gets under the skin, those nights on the sand of the copacabana with the jet black mountains at your back and that purple ocean before your eyes, savage and sexy like a jaguar prowling for porterhouse steaks in a summer rain, or out there on the grassy flatness they call the pampas, under the stars so close down to a man he can touch 'em with his fingertips, so close he'd have to crawl on his belly just to get to his blanket spaced between sky and earth ... Well, sirs, a man gets to love it so much it near spoils 'im for any other life."
"Perhaps this new Viennese science would explain my shirking of a higher education as a revenge against my hypereducated parents, whom by this stage in my life I presumably would have or should have detested, and the proponents of this science would be in some part correct, for detest them I did, but not for their negligence of me when a child or for their benign and distinctly algid treatment of me during my adolescence, but for reasons I shall not enter into here, and as for education and learning, why, I revered these, in spite of their being the trademarks, so to speak of my parents' whole being, so I would not likely have denied myself the education open to me merely to do these parents spiritual injury."
"I suppose I passed my youth in the amateur fashion common to certain youths born to a gracious life, to the luxury, calm, and voluptuousness of my generation—never mind which precisely—of European bourgeoisie who estivated on the North Sea or Atlantic coast rather than the Mediterranean or by placid Alpine lakes rather than along the lagoons and grand hotels of Venice."
"Once, in the middle of dessert, he attacked Pimento with a carving knife he had tucked away in his belt. 'Avast! Pirates larboard. Repel boarders,' he shouted, lunging at the surprised man's throat, just as some lemon sherbet was coolly passing down it."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, pp 75-76
"Things for us here are elemental. We require the elimination of the latifundia and the ownership of huge estates by absentee landlords; we must return to the communal system of our ancestors."
"He wanted, so he said, to sort the labels into order, but it was very difficult: of course, there was chronological order, but he found it poor, even poorer than alphabetical order. He had tried by continents, then by country, but that didn't satisfy him. What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else: for example, the could have some detail in common, a mountain or volcano, an illuminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of a groom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface, or similar slogans ("Pearl of the Ocean", "Diamond of the Coast"), or a relationship based not on similarity but on opposition or association: a minute village by an Italian lake followed by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, skiers followed by swimmers, fireworks by candlelit dinner, railway by aeroplane, baccarat by chemin de fer, etc."
of rhinestone, the Online Etymology Dictionary says this: 1888, a loan-translation of Fr. caillou du Rhin "Rhine pebble," so called because they were made near Strasburg, on the River Rhine (q.v.).
I came across it in Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos: p 28: "It was not until later that he started to make rings: he took small stones — agate, cornelian, Ptyxes, Rhine pebbles, sunstones — and mounted them on delicate rings made of minutely plaited silver threads."
"And so it was not with the pleasure which otherwise I should doubtless have felt that I suddenly discerned at my feet, crouching among the rocks for protection against the heat, the marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and whom he had surprised there, beneath a dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted, the marvellous shadows, sheltering furtively, nimble and silent, ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to the rock or the seaweed over whose torpid slumbers they seemed to be keeping vigil, beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean, motionless lightfoot guardians darkening the water's surface with their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 689 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Now in the little lounge what is left is what remains when there's nothing left: flies, for instance, or advertising bumph slipped under the door by students, proclaiming the benefits of a new toothpaste or offering twenty-five centimes' reduction to every buyer of three packets of washing powder, or old issues of Le Jouet Français, the review he took all his life and to which his subscription didn't run out until a few months after his death, or those things without meaning that lie around on floors and in cupboard corners, you never know how they got there nor why they stayed: three faded flowers of the field; bendy sticks with probably calcinated threads etiolating at each end, an empty Coke bottle, a cake box, opened, still keeping its false raffia string and its legend "Aux Délices de Louis XV, Pastrycooks and Candymakers since 1742" forming a fine oval shape surrounded by a garland and flanked by four puffy-cheeked putti, or behind the door to the landing a kind of cast-iron coatstand, with a mirror cracked roughly Y-shaped into three unequal surface portions, and in the edge of which there is still stuck a postcard showing an incontrovertibly Japanese woman athlete holding a flaming torch at arm's length."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 27
"The walls are covered in hessian, once blue, now returned to an almost colourless condition except in the places where the furniture and the pictures have protected it from the light."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 25
"In all the local cafés he gave out his visiting card, which described him as "Head of Practical Services at the Ecole Pyrotechnique," and he offered his services generously; he obtained innumerable orders for superactive hair and carpet shampoos, stain-removers, energy-saving devices, cigarette filters, martingales for 421, cough potions, and other miracle products."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 23
"Some believed it was a monastery built by two monks to escape from the Moors; other saw it as a Visigoth citadel; still others held it to be a Hispano-Roman oppidum sometimes called Lucus Asturum, sometimes Ovetum; and finally there were those who said that it was Pelage himself (called Don Pelayo by the Spaniards, who believed him to have been King Rodriguez's old lance-bearer at Jerez, and Belaï al-Roumi by the Arabs since he was supposed to be of Roman extraction) who had founded the city."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, pp 9-10
"Beaumont belonged to that school of medievalists which described itself as "materialist" and which prompted a professor of the history of religion, for example, to go through the accounts of the Vatican chancery with the sole aim of proving that in the first half of the twelfth century the consumption of parchment, lead, and sigillary ribbon so far exceeded the amount justified by the number of officially declared and registered bulls that even allowing for possible meltings and probable muddles one had to conclude that a relatively large number of bulls (and we are talking about bulls, not briefs, since only bulls were sealed with lead, briefs being sealed with wax) had been kept confidential if not clandestine."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, pp 8-9
"From the property angle, the deal is a good one, the area is decent, the façade is of ashlar, the staircase is OK despite the agedness of the lift, and the woman is now coming to inspect in greater detail the condition of the flat itself, to draw up a more detailed plan of the accommodation with, for instance, thicker lines to distinguish structural walls from partitions and arrowheaded semicircles to show which way the doors open, and to decide on the work needed, to make a preliminary costing for the complete refurbishment: the partition wall between the toilet and the boxroom to be knocked down, allowing the installation of a bathroom with a slipper-bath and WC; the kitchen tiles to be renewed; a wall-mounted gas-fired boiler (giving both central heating and hot water) to replace the old coal-fired boiler; the woodblock floor with its zigzag moulding to be lifted and replaced by a layer of cement, a felt underlay, and a fitted carpet."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 5
"The woman is looking at a plan held in her left hand. It's just a sheet of paper, whose still visible creases attest to its having been folded in four, fixed by a paperclip to a thick cyclostyled volume — the terms of co-ownership relating to the flat this woman is about to visit."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 4
"A woman of about forty is climbing the stairs; she is wearing a long imitation-leather raincoat and on her head a kind of felt hat shaped like a sugar-loaf, something like what one imagines a goblin's hat to be, divided into red and grey squares."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 4
"And so it was not with the pleasure which otherwise I should doubtless have felt that I suddenly discerned at my feet, crouching among the rocks for protection against the heat, the marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and whom he had surprised there, beneath a dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted, the marvellous shadows, sheltering furtively, nimble and silent, ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to the rock or the seaweed over whose torpid slumbers they seemed to be keeping vigil, beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean, motionless lightfoot guardians darkening the water's surface with their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 689 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And it's the same with women's clothes on board a yacht; what's really charming are those light garments, uniformly white, cotton or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against the blue of the sea show up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread sail."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 654 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The ships were massive, built like pieces of architecture, and seemed almost amphibious, like lesser Venices set in the heart of the greater, when, moored to the banks by gangways decked with crimson satin and Persian carpets, they bore their freight of ladies in cerise brocade and green damask close under the balconies incrusted with multicoloured marble from which other ladies leaned to gaze at them, in gowns with black sleeves slashed with white pearls or bordered with lace."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 653 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"One morning, not long after Andreé had told me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach tossing up and catching again at the end of a string a weird object which gave her a look of Giotto's 'Idolatry'; it was called, as it happened, a 'diabolo,' and has so fallen into disuse now that, when they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the commentators of future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be in front of the allegorical figures in the Arena Chapel, what it is that she is holding."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 637 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The blinds were closed almost everywhere round the studio, which was fairly cool and, except in one place where daylight laid against the wall its brilliant but fleeting decoration, dark; one small rectangular window alone was open, embowered in honeysuckle and giving onto an avenue beyond a strip of garden; so that the atmosphere of the greater part of the studio was dusky, transparent and compact in its mass, but liquid and sparkling at the edges where the sunlight encased it, like a lump of rock crystal of which one surface, already cut and polished, gleams here and there like a mirror with iridescent rays."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 565 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But her words remained so indistinct and the sound which was all that I caught was prolonged so sweetly and seemed to me so musical that it was as if, among the dim branches of the trees, a nightingale had begun to sing."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 537-538 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Often, since even after dinner there might still be a little light left outside, this long corridor was left unlighted, and, skirted by the trees that overhung it on the other side of the glass, it suggested a pleached alley in a wooded and shady garden."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 537 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"A few hours later, during dinner, which, naturally, was served in the dining-room, the lights would be turned on, even when it was still quite light out of doors, so that one saw before one's eyes, in the garden, among summerhouses glimmering in the twilight like pale spectres of evening, arbours whose glaucousverdure was pierced by the last rays of the setting sun and which, from the lamp-lit room in which one was dining, appeared through the glass no longer—as one would have said of the ladies drinking tea in the afternoon along the blue and gold corridor—caught in a glittering and dripping net, but like the vegetation of a pale and green aquarium of gigantic size lit by a supernatural light."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 536 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The result of which, apart from ubiquitous draughts, was sudden and intermittent bursts of sunshine, a dazzling and changeable light that made it almost impossible to see the tea-drinkers, so that when they were installed there, at tables crowded pair after pair the whole way along the narrow gully, shimmering and sparkling with every movement they made in drinking their tea or in greeting one another, it resembled a giant fish-tank or bow-net in which a fisherman has collected all his glittering catch, which, half out of water and bathed in sunlight, coruscate before one's eyes in an ever-changing iridescence."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 536 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I had more pleasure on the evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by the horizon, appeared so much the same colour as its background, as in an Impressionist picture, that it seemed also to be of the same substance, as though its hull and the rigging in which it tapered into a slender filigree had simply been cut out from the vaporous blue of the sky."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 525 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Close to the shore, patches of vapour, soot-black but with the burnish and consistency of agate, visibly solid and palpable, were trying to rise one above another over the sea in ever wider tiers, so that the highest of them, poised on the top of the twisted column and overreaching the centre of gravity of those which had hitherto supported them, seemed on the point of bringing down in ruin this lofty structure already half-way up the sky, and precipitating it into the sea."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 523 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Presently the days grew shorter and at the moment when I entered the room the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff, geometrical, fleeting, effulgent figure of the sun (like the representation of some miraculous sign, of some mystical apparition) lowering over the sea on the edge of the horizon like a sacred picture over a high altar, and while the different parts of the western sky exposed in the glass fronts of the low mahogany bookcases that ran along the walls, which I carried back in my mind to the marvellous painting from which they had been detached, seemed like those different scenes executed long ago for a confraternity by some old master on a reliquary, whose separate panels are now exhibited side by side in a gallery, so that the visitor's imagination alone can restore them to their place on the predella of the reredos."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 522-523 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"For what princely traveller, sojourning here incognito, could they be intended, those plums, glaucous, luminous and spherical as was at that moment the circumfluent sea, those transparent grapes clustering on the shrivelled wood, like a fine day in autumn, those pears of a heavenly ultramarine?"
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 377-378 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It brightened; the sky turned to a glowing pink which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent sheen of night, beneath a firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 317 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And I realised that it was for herself that she obeyed these canons in accordance with which she dressed, as though yielding to a superior wisdom of which she herself was the high priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep buttoned up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unobserved, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer has devoted infinite labour although they may never reach the ears of the public: or, in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, and would lengthily gaze at, for my own pleasure or from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strap, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like those Gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as the bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, overlooking the whole town, between the soaring towers."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 293-294 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Suddenly, on the gravelled path, unhurrying, cool, luxuriant, Mme Swann would appear, blossoming out in a costume which was never twice the same but which I remember as being typically mauve; then she would hoist and unfurl at the end of its long stalk, just at the moment when her radiance was at its zenith, the silken banner of a wide parasol of a shade that matched the showering petals of her dress."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 290 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"It was enough to fill me with longing for country scenes that, overhanging the loose snowdrifts of the muff in which Mme Swann kept her hands, the guelder-rose snow-balls (which served very possibly in the mind of my hostess no other purpose than to compose, on the advice of Bergotte, a "Symphony in White with her furniture and her garments) should remind me that the Good Friday music in Parsifal symbolises a natural miracle which one could see performed every year if one had the sense to look for it, and assisted by the acid and heady perfume of other kinds of blossom which, although their names were unknown to me, had brought me so often to a standstill on my walks round Combray, should make Mme Swann's drawing room as virginal, as candidly in blossom without the least trace of verdure, as overladen with genuine scents of flowers, as was the little lane by Tansonville."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 289 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"When spring arrived, and with it the cold weather, during an icy Lent and the hailstorms of Holy Week, as Mme Swann declared that it was freezing in her house, I used often to see her entertaining her guests in her furs, her shivering hands and shoulders buried beneath the gleaming white carpets of an immense rectangular muff and a cape, both of ermine, which she had not taken off on coming in from her drive, and which suggested the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest, which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had succeeded in melting. And the all-embracing truth about these glacial but already flowering weeks was suggested to me in this drawing room, which soon I should be entering no more, by other more intoxicating forms of whiteness, that for example of the guelder-roses clustering, at the summits of their tall bare stalks, like the rectilinear trees in pre-Raphaelite paintings, their balls of blossom, divided yet composite, white as annunciating angels and exhaling a fragrance as of lemons."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 288 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf covers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains and topaz chestnuts there would be on the dress itself some design carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin buttons which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the jewels, gave the impression—having otherwise no possible justification—of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition, commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or a philopena."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 268-269 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And finally, beyond the winter-garden, through the various kinds of arborescence which from the street made the lighted window appear like the glass front of one of those children's playthings, pictured or real, the passer-by, drawing himself up on tiptoe, would generally observe a man in a frock-coat, a gardenia or a carnation in his buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely outlined like two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the drawing-room atmosphere clouded by the samovar—then a recent importation—with steam which may escape from it still today, but to which, if it does, we have grown so accustomed now that no one notices it."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 229-230 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And yet one did not find in Bergotte's speech a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written sentence the appearance of its words."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 173 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"For years I had believed that the notion of going to Mme Swann's was a vague, chimerical dream to which I should never attain; after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing-room, it was the time when I did not yet know her that had become chimerical and vague like a possibility which the realisation of an alternative possibility has destroyed."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 151 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"And not only does one not grasp at once and remember works that are truly rare, but even within those works (as happened to me in the case of Vinteuil's sonata) it is the least precious parts that one at first perceives. So much so that I was mistaken not only in thinking that this work held nothing further in store for me (so that for a long time I made no effort to hear it again) from the moment Mme Swann had played me its most famous passage (I was in this respect as stupid as people are who expect to feel no astonishment when they stand in Venice bfore the façade of Saint Mark's, because photography has already acquainted them with the outline of its domes); far more than that, even when I had heard the sonata from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 141 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I encountered no one at first but a footman who, after leading me through several large drawing-rooms, showed me into one that was quite small, empty, its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of afternoon. I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire, preciously ensconced behind a crystal screen, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled from time to time its dangerous rubies."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 136 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"Even in Bergotte's books, all those Chinese puzzles of form, all those subtleties of a deliquescent mandarin seem to me to be quite futile."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 62 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"To add his own contribution to the pleasures of the repast, M. de Norpois entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his diplomatic colleagues, quoting now some ludicrous period uttered by a politician notorious for long sentences packed with incoherent images, now some lapidary epigram of a diplomat sparkling with Attic salt."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 40 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"The cold spiced beef with carrots made its appearance, couched by the Michelangelo of our kitchen upon enormous crystals of aspic, like transparent blocks of quartz."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 39 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"I felt it in the little square that lay in front of the theatre, in which, in two-hours' time, the bare boughs of the chestnut-trees would gleam with a metallic lustre as the lighted gas-lamps showed up every detail of their structure; and before the ticket attendants, whose selection, advancement and ultimate fate depended upon the great artist—for she alone held power in this administration at the head of which ephemeral and purely nominal managers followed one after the other in an obscure succession—who took our tickets without even glancing at us, so preoccupied were they in seeing that all Mme Berma's instructions had been duly transmitted to the new members of the staff, that it was clearly understood that the hired applause must never sound for her, that the windows must all be kept open so long as she was not on stage and every door closed tight the moment she appeared, that a bowl of hot water must be concealed somewhere close to her to make the dust settle."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 22 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"But what I demanded from this performance—as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from pleasure: verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me by any trivial incident—even though it were to cause me bodily suffering—of my otiose existence."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 17 of the Modern Library paperback edition
"As I later discovered, St. Oswald's specialized in architectural sadism—even the new science lab (pride of the establishment) featured brown glass and breeze-block walls dating from 1958, height of the ugly unfriendly architecture movement."
"They made a great pet of the creature—naturally, it was called Fiddle. Though it remained bad-tempered, captious, and unfriendly, it never went short of food."
-- Diana Wynne Jones, Charmed Life, in The Chronicles of Chrestomanci (p 16)
"In place of the abstract expressions 'the time when I was happy,' 'the time when I was loved,' which he had often used before then without suffering too much since his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips—the address 'Maison Dorée; embossed on the note-paper on which he had read 'My hand trembles so as I write to you'—the contraction of her eyebrows when she said pleadingly: 'You won't leave it too long before getting in touch with me?'; he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he used to have singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little seamstress; could feel the showers which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all the network of mental habits, of seasonal impressions, of sensory reactions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes in which his body found itself inextricably caught."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, pp 375-376 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"Whereas upon that pestilential but longed-for staircase to the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the building, one saw in the evening outside every door-mat in readiness for the morning round, on the splendid but despised staircase which Swann was now climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled and doing homage for them to the guests, a concierge, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the bourgeois service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in observing to the letter all the instructions they had been given before being allowed to don the brilliant livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway with a pompous splendour tempered by democratic good-fellowship, like saints in their niches, while a gigantic usher, dressed in Swiss Guard fashion like the beadle in a church, struck the floor with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 354 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of offending her, or from reluctance to appear retrospectively to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If she had cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: 'It's most unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've not been disturbed as they were the other night. i think, though, that this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than the others?' Or else, if she had none: 'Oh! no cattleyas this evening; then there's no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements.'"
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 255 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"But when her footman came into the room bringing, one after another, the innumerable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this winter afternoon the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate, more human—filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight—she had kept a sharp eye on the servant, to see that he set them down in their appointed places."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 241 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable—did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 228 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"And it had been a source of keen pleasure to him when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge upward in plashing waves of sound, multiform but invisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 227 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely care while, a little farther again, others, pressed close together in a veritable floating flower-bed, suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this watery garden—this celestial garden, too, for it gave the flowers a soil of a color more precious, more moving than their own, and, whether sparkling beneath the water-lilies in the afternoon in a kaleidoscope of silent, watchful, and mobile contentment, or glowing, towards evening, like some distant haven, with the roseate dreaminess of the setting sun, ceaselessly changing yet remaining always in harmony, around the less mutable colours of the flowers themselves, with all that is most profound, most evanescent, most mysterious—all that is infinite—in the passing hour, it seemed to have made them blossom in the sky itself."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 185 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"I knew that Mlle Swann used often to go and spend a few days at Laon; for all that it was many miles away, the distance was counterbalanced by the absence of any intervening obstacle, and when, on hot afternoons, I saw a breath of wind emerge from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally come to rest, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to unite us; I would imagine that the same breath of wind had passed close to her, that it was some message from her that it was whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would kiss it as it passed."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 159 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"And so it was that, at the foot of the path which led down to the artificial lake, there might be seen, in its two tiers woven of forget-me-nots and periwinkle flowers, a natural, delicate, blue garland encircling the water's luminous and shadowy brow, while the iris, flourishing its sword-blades in regal profusion, stretched out over agrimony and water-growing crowfoot the tattered fleurs-de-lis, violet and yellow, of its lacustrine sceptre."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 149 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"'There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend' he said to my father, 'a blue, especially, more floral than aerial, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky.' "
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 142 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"From gates far apart the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up an antiphonal barking such as I still hear at times of an evening, and among which the Boulevard de la Gare (when the public gardens of Combray were constructed on its site) must have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their alternate challenge and response, I can see it again with its lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 124 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"It was in the "Month of Mary" that I remember first having fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 121 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of these two runagates, in an article by my revered master, old Lecomte, beloved of the immortal gods."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 97 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out as though from a beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and after having risked her life a hundred times over, would reappear bringing us, together with a jug of liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least a thousand of them, pouring along without a break from the direction of Thiberzy and Méséglise."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 96 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in the garden at Combray, carefully purged by me of every commonplace incident of my personal existence, which I had replaced with a life of strange aspirations and adventures in a land watered with living streams, you still recall that life to me when I think of you, and you embody it in effect by virtue of having gradually encircled and enclosed it—while I went on with my reading and the heat of the day declined—in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and dappled with foliage, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, pp 94-95 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"It was hardly light enough for me to read, and my sense of the day's brightness and splendour was derived solely from the blows struck down below, in the Rue de la Cure, by Camus (whom Françoise had assured that my aunt was not "resting" and that he might therefore make a noise) upon some dusty packing-cases which, reverberating in the sonorous atmosphere that accompanies hot weather, seemed to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and also from the flies who performed for my benefit, in their tiny chorus, as it were the chamber music of summer, evoking it quite differently from a snatch of human music which, heard by chance in high summer, will remind you of it later, whereas the music of the flies is bound to the season by a more compelling tie—born of the sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them, containing something of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our memory, but guarantees their return, their actual, circumjacent, immediately accessible presence."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 89 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"Every morning I would hasten to the Morris column to see what new plays it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the day-dreams with which these announcements filled my imagination, day-dreams which were conditioned by the associations of the words forming the titles of the plays, and also by the colour of the bills, still damp and wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 79 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"I shall never forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons, between which, when one looks up at it from the fine garden which descends in terraces to the river, the gothic spire of a church (itself hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the effect of crowning and completing their façades, but in a style so different, so precious, so annulated, so pink, so polished, that one sees at once that it no more belongs to them than would the purple, crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with glossy colour to a pair of handsome, smooth pebbles between which it had been washed up on the beach."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, pp 70-71 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vichy-Célestins, might be found her prayer-books and her medical prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed, of her duties to soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and for vespers."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 56 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (and though I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden ..."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 51 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which the glow of a Bengal light or a searchlight beam will cut out and illuminate in a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness ..."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 46 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 30 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance of his steed's, overcame every material obstacle—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking it as an ossature and embodying it in himself: even the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float irresistibly his red cloak or his pale face, which never lost its nobility or its melancholy, never betrayed the least concern at this transvertebration."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 10 of the Vintage International paperback edition
"What rebellious thoughts of the cool river, and some shady bathing-place beneath willow trees with branches dipping in the water, kept tempting and urging that sturdy boy, who, with his shirt-collar unbuttoned and flung back as far as it could go, sat fanning his flushed face with a spelling-book, wishing himself a whale, or a tittlebat, or a fly, or anything but a boy at school on that hot, broiling day!"
It seems like this is more often spelled as roister and therefore "roistering" but there's this, from The Old Curiosity Shop:
"This candid declaration tended rather to increase than restrain Mr Quilp's eccentricities, and Richard Swiveller, astonished to see him in such a roystering vein, and drinking not a little himself, for company, — began imperceptibly to become more companionable and confiding, so that, being judiciously led on by Mr Quilp, he grew at last very confiding indeed." (p 227 in the Penguin English Library edition)
"This important step secured, with the assistance of a man of law whom he brought with him for the purpose, the dwarf proceeded to establish himself and his coadjutor in the house, as an assertion of his claim against all comers; and then set about making his quarters comfortable after his own fashion." (p 137 of the Penguin English Library edition)
"The dwarf muttering a terrible oath looked round as if for some weapon with which to inflict condign punishment upon his disobedient wife." (p 96 in the Penguin English Library edition)
'An author,' says Fielding, in his introduction to 'Tom Jones,' 'ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. Men who pay for what they eat, will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn their dinner without control.'
-- from the Preface to the Original Edition of 'The Old Curiosity Shop,' 1841
"When Sterling appears later, lugging an aluminum case bursting with spondulics ..." -- "Pay and Play" by John Lahr, in The New Yorker, October 15, 2007 (p 102)
"The house was even darker then, with the shutters locked and shades made of cambric pulled down over the shelves of bottles and jars. I thought such pi-jaw hardly necessary. For most of my first week, the shop might just as well have been closed." (p 68)
I knew batten in the sense of "batten down the hatches" but not in the sense of, as m-w.com puts it, "to grow prosperous especially at the expense of another."
See the "Northumbrian language" section of this Northumberland cultural heritage page. (I came across this word while reading Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow.)
I'd been familiar with this word in the "biting" or "caustic" sense, but not as a substance used to fix dyes. (From Sea Room by Adam Nicolson: "In order to reduce the liquidity of the animal end, the householders 'attended on their cows with large vessels to throw out the wash' - or to keep it as mordant for dyes - 'but still it must be wet and unwholesome" (pp 241-242)
"The great Casino in the midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness of the Campagna." (p. 167)
(though I came across it in a footnote to James's Italian Hours)
"There are chance anfractuosities of ruin in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the rugged face of an Alpine cliff."
"The modern tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies the place, but he does n't fill it, and he has guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers." (p 46)
"After a timeless minute or two my sprawling maja drew in her leg and turned on her side again and fell asleep with a shocking suddenness—her gentle snores were the sound of a small, soft engine trying and failing repeatedly to start—and I sat up, carefully, as if something delicately poised inside me might shatter at the slightest violent movement." (p 86)
"The juxtaposition of textures, of the silky, flowing hair with the heavy, sweaty bodies, says something. We think of the blessed damozel leaning down from Heaven. But we don't stop thinking that the scene is also pretty bizarre, and that double meaning is echt Bausch."
From "City Lights" by Joan Acocella
The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006 and Jan. 1, 2007, p 142
"This was a normal rite of passage then: from being rickety-gnashered to fully porcelained in one leap, to all that buccal sliding and clacking, to social embarrassment and the foaming glass on the bedside table."
From "The Past Conditional" by Julian Barnes
The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006 and Jan. 1, 2007, p 56
Comments by knitandpurl
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knitandpurl commented on the word yashmak
"In a mirage of palm trees, the Cicerone said, an opulent Molly makes her apparition in Turkish costume and yashmak."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 217
December 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word obstropolos
"To continue the evolution of English prose, A said, it is noteworthy that at this time and in the bar, the barbarous bibulous boys break down into an English that recalls the nighttime dialect of Finnegans Wake.
"Shut your obstropolos," said B. Quiet your claptrap."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 195
December 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word dystocia
"Mrs. Purefoy's childbirth at the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street is a dystocia, or truly difficult labor. Almost as difficult as this chapter, said the Cicerone in the doorway to this white room of the House."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 187
December 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word opoponax
"And the smell, A said, because he sniffs the cheap rose perfume on Gerty's piece of cotton wool, and thinks of the one Molly uses.
Opoponax! B exclaimed. And at the opening of his waistcoat he also smells the lemon scent of his cake of soap."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 181
December 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word nainsook
"She leaned back to look at the shower of colors high in the sky, cupping one knee in her hands, and as he was the only one there to see, offered him the sight of her legs, her blue garters and white nainsook knickers, while something dark and soft slid across the lake of the sky, O! she trembled in all her limbs from leaning so far back, O! the blinding flash and a cascade of stars and dew gushed out and melted in the gray air around the main in black outlined against the rock."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 179
December 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word orchitis
"And to continue showing how little he fits into this brutal, enclosed atmosphere, Bloom gives a scientific lecture to the group, transfigured into Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft (although it's not exactly the scent of flowers that comes from his cigar), explaining to them all in graphic detail and expression, corpora cavernosa, etc., why hanged men have erections.
It's not orchitis, A said, perhaps remembering Mr. Flower."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 168
December 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word list
I wasn't familiar with "list" in the sense of "a strip of cloth" until now:
"Speaking of Rabelaisian lists, A said, the list (using the word in its sartorial sense) with the most historical and mythical weight here is the one the Citizen is wearing, in its epic-parodic transposition.
The row of stones hanging from his belt, B recalled, on which are carved the figures of numerous heroes and historical characters."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 164
December 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word paronomasia
"The riddle that Lenehan the sports reporter proposes to his colleagues and friends at the newspaper, the Cicerone said—"What opera resembles a railway line?"—is remembered by Bloom on several occasions throughout the day of Ulysses.
A few paragraphs further on, in the newspaper office, Lenehan proudly tells them the answer:
"The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!"
Railing at the rails, A said.
Paronomasia, Professor Jones said."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, pp 105-106
December 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word pisiform
"The kidney! B remembered. Bloom starts down the stairs like a startled stag.
The pisiform shape of that gland reminds me of something... said Professor Jones."
The House of Ulysses by Julián Ríos, translated by Nick Caistor, p 68
December 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word goliard
"To see it with the eyes of a stranger, but also with those of a native shopkeeper, a bum, a housekeeper, a farmer and soldier, a priest and poet and patient and day-laborer and whore and journalist and concerned citizen and street sweeper...And with the eyes of all the dead, the vagabonds and popes, clerks and troubadours, fratres minores, prelates, goliards, painters, bankers, and truck drivers."
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 136 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
December 24, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word machicolated
"It must be some thirty years after Sade's death that Mérimée, passing through Avignon, arranges for Enguerrand Charonton's Couronnement de la Vierge to be taken to the hospice of Villeneuve for safety; he writes: Avignon is filled with churches and palaces, all provided with battlemented and machicolated towers."
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 115 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
December 24, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word béguinage
"A wide-arched passageway gives onto a peaceful alley-way planted almost like a garden, where a few children are chattering: "A béguinage," thinks the Fleming, but ordinary people live in the little houses."
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 67 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
December 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word parage
"The Count lauded the men of Avignon for the way they had welcomed him, and promised them "the high esteem of all Christendom and of your own country; for you are bringing back chivalry, and Joy, and Parage.""
Arriving in Avignon by Daniël Robberechts, translated by Paul Vincent, p 65 of the Dalkey Archive Press paperback
December 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chicane
"20's Plenty, which King runs without pay, while managing his own small I.T. company, makes the case that restrained, good-natured driving in residential areas—tootling—is best achieved not by the fussy, expensive apparatus of speed bumps, chicanes, and school zones, but, rather, by area-wide speed limits of twenty miles per hour, such as were recently introduced in Portsmouth and several other British cities, thanks in part to King's activities."
"Tootling" by Ian Parker, in The New Yorker, December 6, 2010, p 31
December 12, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word colophony
"No significant cracks have emerged since the last restoration, when the paint surfaces were "consolidated"—their gaps filled in, Anne Grevenstein-Kruse wrote to me in an email, "with a solution of animal glue (a proteïn). After that, the surface was covered with a mixture of beeswax, colophony, and lavender oil (to soften the paint). This mixture was melted into the paint structure by using strong heating elements. The surface was then flattened with metal spatulas.""
"The Flip Side" by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, November 29, 2010, p 45
December 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spikenard
"The sweet-woody animal odor of spikenard."
Seedlip and Sweet Apple by Arra Lynn Ross, p 17
December 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word seedlip
There's a book of poems by Arra Lynn Ross called Seedlip and Sweet Apple.
December 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word iroko
"Walnut storage from BoConcept echoes the warmth of the external iroko cladding, while the travertine flooring picks up the tones of the house's original stone walls."
Homes & Interiors Scotland, September & October 2009, p 79
December 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word gib-board
"The inner passage was lined with gib-board, and narrower still: if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like an animate turnstile revolving in the dark."
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, p 75 (US edition)
December 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word urucum
"And given that I am addicted to moqueca de camarão—a rich shrimp stew, traditionally cooked with urucum berries, chili, onions, lime juice, coconut milk, and palm oil, dusted with toasted manioc flour, and served on rice—which I ate for the first time that year at a restaurant in Ipanema, I keep my tipiti in the living room as a memento mori of all the Canela who must have died, looking for ways to make their manioc roots safe and tasty."
"Down Under" by Jane Kramer, in the New Yorker, November 22, 2010, p 84
November 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word urucum
aka annatto or achiote - see this page for more
November 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kickshaw
"Eleanor had grown up with little idea of what went on in a kitchen, but she was a quick study. By the time she became, as the Washington Post put it, "the first Housewife of the Nation," she had developed a straightforward message about her culinary goals. "I am doing away with all the kickshaws—no hothouse grapes—nothing out of season," she told a reporter who inquired about the "economy menus," and added that she intended to provide "good and well-cooked food." Few guests or family members felt that she succeeded."
"The First Kitchen" by Laura Shapiro, in the New Yorker, November 22, 2010, p 76
November 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word emmer
"Since June 2009, wheat, buckwheat, and rye flours have been on sale at their Greenmarket stalls, as well as corn meals, polentas, and whole grains such as emmer, barley, and oats—all grown upstate."
"Breadwinners" by Indrani Sen, in Edible Brooklyn No. 19, Fall 2010, p 43
November 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word agnatic
"For them, going to the cinema was to perform a ritual, to share a common sentiment, to feel in concert and confirm their agnatic solidarity."
The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah Kilito, translated by Robyn Creswell, p 88
November 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word marabout
"The marabout (what was its name, exactly?) was mostly visited by women and children. Young ones afflicted with terrible manias were brought there to have their heads knocked gently against the tomb of the saint."
The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah Kilito, translated by Robyn Creswell, p 13
November 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bourdon
"Didn't I tell you?" Monsieur Trouvé was grinning like a little boy. He had a good pair of lungs in that wide chest of his, so he continued to yell after them. "I replaced our original model with one of Eugène's bourdon tubes, activated by gunpowder charges. I did say I had taken a keen interest recently."
Blameless by Gail Carriger, p 131
November 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word dado
"He holds his head back warily, defiantly, on his shoulders, so that the furnishings in this house won't get the better of him: the dado with its raised pattern of diamonds under thick brown paint, the polished wood of the hall stand, the yellow gleams of brass among the shadows—the face of the clock, a rack for letters, a little gong hanging in a frame with a suède-covered mallet balanced across two hooks, a tall pot to hold umbrellas."
"The Trojan Prince" by Tessa Hadley, in The New Yorker, November 15, 2010, page 77
November 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the user knitandpurl
yarb, thanks - you're right that a Witch Grass list would be fun - maybe if I re-read it ... :)
November 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word squiffy
"'I would have you know I was perfectly safe in that hive. It was only when I left that things went all'—she waved a hand airily—'squiffy'."
Soulless by Gail Carriger, p 105
November 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word claviger
"It must take a lot of effort to keep a man like him tidy. Not to mention well tailored. He was bigger than most. She had to give credit to his valet, who must be a particularly tolerant claviger."
Soulless by Gail Carriger, p 13
November 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word catawampus
"He looked up from his examinations, his face all catawampus from the glassicals."
Soulless by Gail Carriger, p 12
November 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hydromel
"Etienne swallowed the potion that had been placed in front of him, a potion very probably made of bidet water, the nectar of brothels and the hydromel of whorehouses."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 298 of the NYRB paperback
November 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word nubecula
"At dawn the passenger trains started running again, damp and cold, their windows foggy and whitish, like eyes covered in nubeculae."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 222 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word wittol
"Whereupon Themistocles decides to put his oar in, he turns toward Meussieu Pic and says, point-blank:
'You're a wit, old Pic.'
'Me, a wittol!' (he suffocates). 'But Meussieu I won't allow you to insult me like that! To say nothing of my wife! I respect the French army, Meussieu; and you, you ought to respect the sanctity of the French family. Me, a wittol, ho! At my age, to be insulted by a, by a...Ho!'
He gets up and starts waving his arms about wildly. The ladies calm him down. Madame Pic looks puzzled; fortunately, she doesn't know what a wittol is. Themistocles, alarmed at the effect he has produced, tries to justify himself.
'But it was a pun!'"
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 197 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word zygomatic
"But zygomatic muscles are sufficiently stretched, and gullets sufficiently sonorous, for us to be able to state that sympathy and cordiality reign."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 187 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word crepitate
"Applause crepitates, the magician bows, and the wedding party has still not arrived."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 181 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chine
Pause for laughter.
Q. What's the difference between an asthmatic pork-butcher and a party given by intellectuals?
A. One's all chine and wheeze, and the other's all wine and cheese.
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 174 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word balneal
"Sitting on a broad, flat stone, that he had chosen with care, Etienne was following with listless eye the reduced activity of his balneal colleagues."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 169 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glanders
"The doctor had not notified them of any contagious diseases in the area belonging to the commune; the hens wouldn't have to fear the staggers, the pigs swine fever, the turkeys the pip, the cows mammitis, the dogs rabies or the horses glanders."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 145 of the NYRB paperback
November 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word coenesthetic
"He drew a vertical line,
and nothing was left but coenesthetic impressions: his stomach hollowing, his temples hollowing, his fontanel hollowing, and then turning into a sort of well, of well, of well without bottom or rim, into which stones fall indefinitely, without ever coming into contact with the surface of the black water entirely and forever bereft of light and movement, the surface of this perfectly carbonic, arachnoid water, the skin of a brain.
"Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, pp 127-128 the NYRB paperback
November 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kümmel
"Ernestine, happy days are here! No more French fries and white wine! No more chemicals and suburban trains! No more of my brother's attentions and my sister-in-law's insults! No more work! No more being broke! It's gigolos for us, and bottles of kümmel!"
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 114 of the NYRB paperback
November 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word triturate
"They're triturating each other."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 100 of the NYRB paperback
November 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word malaxate
"They're malaxating each other's ribs."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 100 of the NYRB paperback
November 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word labefy
"Yes, I'm labefying my crumpet with all these nigmenogs," replies Théo volubly.
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 80 of the NYRB paperback
November 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word galimatias
"It's all amphigories and dillydallying," she told herself, "rigamarole and bibble-babble, balderdash and fiddle-faddle, gibberish and galamatias."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 76 of the NYRB paperback
November 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word furunculous
"I'm wondering whether it wouldn't also be human to apply a similar treatment to you; you would thus be spared a furunculous and degraded youth."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 53 of the NYRB paperback
November 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word marc
"At the back, the kitchen (?), another table where two women and a man are playing cards and sipping some marc. No one else."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 33 of the NYRB paperback
November 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word turnip
A (clunky) watch - see http://thesaurus.com/browse/clock
"So she put her fur wrapper back on, looked at the time on an enormous old turnip which she took out of a carpetbag, paid for her camomile tea, leaving a most ungratifying gratuity for the waiter, and left, in despair."
Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright, p 29 of the NYRB paperback
November 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hurdle
I knew of hurdles in the sense of something-one-jumps-over, but didn't know it was a kind of fence actually used for livestock.
"I was learning how to make leather rope and tan leather and weave hurdles, and a dozen other useful things."
The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones, p 26
October 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the list cloudstreet
Yes, I did like it - the writing was a really satisfying mix of the everyday and the lyrical. A lot of the book's a pretty straight family saga, which isn't what I usually read, but there was enough magic/mystery/literariness to keep it fun for me.
October 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bucina
See buccina.
"Into that opened book leaped the first barbarian, leaped and vanished, and the next after him and the next, and then, by twos and threes and sixes and sevens, they leaped in and disappeared, amid gasping and shouting and the nearing sound of the bucina and of the trumpets of Rome."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 198 of the SeaStar Books paperback
October 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glacis
"The Dwelling seemed to be a sort of town of rounded buildings more like lime-kilns than anything else, with arched doors leading to dark insides. They were all built of tiny stones, such as lay on the beach. Beyond the huts or houses towered the castle, a vast rough structure with towers and arches and buttresses and bastions and glacis and bridges and a great moat all around it."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 119 of the SeaStar Books paperback
October 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word laburnum
"Philip straggled away to the window and looked out dismally at the soaked lawn and the dripping laburnum trees, and the row of raindrops hanging fat and full on the iron gate."
The Magic City by E. Nesbit, p 3 of the SeaStar Books paperback edition
October 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word rotenone
"Does the electric field have weak spots where fish can pass? Does a winter-time influx of road salt in the water cause the charge to fluctuate? What about when the current must be turned off for maintenance of the bars or cables? Is the rotenone chemical fish killer administered when the current is off effective without fail?"
"Fish Out of Water" by Ian Frazier, in the New Yorker, October 25, 2010, p 71
October 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word shakuhachi
"The first concert shows the venue's variety: Ensemble East, a group that plays traditional Japanese instruments, performs works by such composers as Tadao Sawai, Michio Miyagi, and James Nyoraku Schleger (on shakuhachi)."
The New Yorker, October 25, 2010, p 20
October 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word polder
"Their big pile, which weighs down the middle of the island with its austere vernacular chunkiness, is dubbed 'Holland', because of some Traill's dubious notion that this green lozenge resembled the fertile polders of the Netherlands."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 228
October 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word animadvert
"If I animadvert on Rackham it's because of what happened to Mr & Mrs Ralph this week."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 197
October 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word flocculent
"Tully, northern Queensland, Australia. The sugar mill belches smoke as thick and flocculent as candyfloss."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 194
October 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word sessile
"Sessile oak, beech and silver birch crowd around the sandy track, the sunlight twinkles from between the interlocking boughs, the little boys cavort, the adolescents even begin to frolic a bit."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 154
Note that the Sessile Oak is a thing unto itself, but in the course of looking it up I looked up the general meaning of "sessile" too.
October 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word pantile
"How he hates the suburbs — I can see the distaste etched all over his face. I know what he feels like, how the red brick, the pantiles, the stained-glass fanlights are all bearing down on him — because I felt exactly the same way at his age, as if I was about to be suffocated by the sheer orderliness of all the neat verges and linseed-oiled garage doors."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 154
October 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word gurn
"Four or five video screens dangle from the dark ceiling of the shop, and four or five Britney Spears jiggle and jive and gurn."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 152
October 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word acuminate
"From the stern keep of the Norman overlord issued forth decrees and exactions; in a world of wood, wheat and water, its high stone walls were the most adamantine confirmation of the temporal order, just as the acuminate spire of the church pricked the oppressive heavens."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 145
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word pelf
"Of course, he isn't literally a fishmonger (I don't believe he even likes fish), because this is a City Livery Company, and while the Fishmongers' retains more links with the trade than, say, the Goldsmiths' it is in essence a living fossil; a medieval guild, cemented to the Square Mile like an oyster, through which flows a great current of nutritious pelf."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 138
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word khlong
"The garden of the house ran nearly down to the river, and a few minutes' walk away was a khlong where we could catch the longtail boats into the city centre."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 130
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word aguardiente
"The minibar in the hotel was no help. It was called the Selfbar — so I took it personally and downed the lot: the scotches, the vodkas, the gins and the Amazonian armpit aguardientes."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 123
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word maqui
"But eventually strolls in pine-scented woods and thyme-reeking maquis palled."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 113
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word vitelline
"In truth, Bendor was so bizarre that it quite neutralised the effect of the LSD; and it wasn't until we were back in Bandol, at one of those café-bars that charges forty quid for a vitelline-hued cocktail in a glass the size of a vitrine, that I remembered I was hallucinating."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 113
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word wonga
"Money: this is the true Blarney Stone of Dublin — kiss it and you'll talk all night. The city is awash with wonga."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 104
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word soutane
"The youthful populace of Dublin are being sucked out of the churches by the ideological vacuum; on to the streets, then into the bars and restaurants which have colonised the city centre. Where once burly men in soutanes enforced the creed, now burly men in black overcoats enforce the guest list."
Psychogeograpy by Will Self, 102
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word testudo
"So measured and theatrical was the riot that I had time to appreciate the way the police formed up into small shielded testudos, lost ground, broke, then reformed, as bottles and bricks crashed down on Plexiglas."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 101
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word caries
"The dentist and I sat in his dusty surgery under a diorama of curiously garish posters depicting dental caries."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 93
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word titchy
"It was the second batch of majoun that decided me. The first was forgivably small, but the second was titchy."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 93
October 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chillum
"The Buddhist knelt and prayed angrily, while I shared a chillum with a crusty sadhu."
Psychogeography by Will Self, p 85
October 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word maidan
"We went to the railway station so that I could buy a ticket for the Himigiri-Howrah Express, a mighty Aryan iron horse that would drag me clear across the north of the subcontinent to Chandigarh. I got a chitty from Window A and took it for authorisation to Window B. At Window B I received a second chitty and took it to the Sales Booth. Every single step had to be taken through a dense thicket of humanity; thorny limbs pricked me, twiggy fingers scratched me. I emerged blinking and bedevilled into the harsh light of the maidan."
Psychogeography by Will Self, p 85
October 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word anoesis
"Normally, on my long-distance walks, anoesis descends within a few miles: the mental tape loop of infuriating resentments, or inane pop lyrics, or nonce phrases gives way to the greeny-beige noise of the outdoors."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 39-40
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word oasthouse
"Up ahead looms the brick, oasthouse-shape of the Shot Tower, where shot was manufactured in the nineteenth century; globules of molten lead plummeting into deadly spheroids."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 36
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word saccade
"I gain the crest of the hill and there it is, falling away behind me, swags and ruches of greenery and brick, under the blue-painted ceiling of its recent conversion: New London, city of the toppermost property prices. I can see a golden drop of sunlight on the glans of the Swiss Re Tower (Lord Foster's phallus, commonly known as the Gherkin), and the inverted pool table of Battersea Power Station. I can see the Hampstead massif and the Telecom Tower. I can see my life, entire, in a single saccade."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 31
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word farouche
"I've never liked Richmond Park's contrived ambience of the farouche — a centuries' old shtick."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 30
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word biltong
"These are, perforce, strips of biltong — the sign didn't lie. This has to be the biggest biltong emporium in the northern hemisphere. There are hundreds of strips of the stuff: chilli-flavoured biltong, garlic biltong, biltong flavoured any number of ways. How many hard-masticating South Africans must London contain in order to support this minimart full of beef jerky?"
Psychogeography by Will Self, p 30
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cagoule
"I left Stockwell in cagoule and cashmere pullover, but as I gain Putney Bridge I strip to my own T-shirt and sit at a zinc-topped table outside a branch of Carluccio's, sipping a latte and eating an almond pastry."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 28
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word remise
"It occurs to me that if I am akin to any literary traveller, it's Laurence Sterne, oscillating in the moment, dizzied by impressions and unable to make it from the remise door to the Calais Inn, let alone progress into France and Italy."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 23
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word stook
"In the gutter are stooks of faded flowers in cellophane funnels, together with handwritten condolence cards: the wayside shrine of contemporary folk religion."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 21
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hypostatisation
"And so it went on: the grapes of wrath trailed across Afghanistan and Iraq, the bitter vendage of civilian deaths, then the hypostatisation of terror through the cirrhotic liver of another failed state."
Psychogeography by Will Self, 17
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word gee-gee
"Mine are not writerly journeys in the accepted sense: Rouseeau philosophising à pied, Goethe rattling into Switzerland in a coach, Cobbett on his clopping gee-gee, assorted Borrows and Stevensons plodding with their donkeys, Greene rocking on a train, Thesiger with a camel up his arse."
Psychogeography by Will Self, p 12
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word epigone
"the very obvious references to eero saarinen and S.O.M. may have secured jacobsen's name as a cool modernist at the time, but they also made him look like an epigone with a deft hand at furniture design, a view of jacobsen you can still meet, not least here in denmark."
See
October 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word periphrasis
"as the animals grow tired of our zen mistakes—
sitting Indian-style in airliner seats
that have washed up on the shore,
calling the snake a rope and the rope a belt—
initiates of a time periphrasis so elaborate
that even Virgil gets a little cross"
from Postpoem by Rick Snyder, in Escape from Combray, p 9
October 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word jugged hare
"I am not fond of jugged hare for dinner, either as a light entrée or as a pièce de résistance; but this accomplished attendant had the art of presenting you such a dish in a manner that persuaded you, for the time, that it was worthy of your serious consideration. The hare, by the way, before being subjected to the mysterious operation of jugging, might have been seen dangling from a hook in the bar of the inn, together with a choice collection of other viands."
"An English Winter Watering-Place," p 159 of the Oxford paperback edition of English Hours
October 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bioswale
"There were roads and weeds—the city's landscaping was taking root at a remote nursery—and swells of clayish soil that made bioswales of the central park."
In Utopia by J.C. Hallman, p 225
October 6, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word terebinth
"The vegetation on the trail—terebinth and spiny hawthorn—was dry and gnarled."
"The Unconsoled" by George Packer, p 61 of the September 27, 2010 edition of The New Yokrer
October 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word jugged hare
From the Epicurious food dictionary,: "A classic English preparation that begins with cut pieces of HARE that are soaked in a red wine-juniper berry marinade for at least a day. The marinated meat is well browned, then combined in a casserole (traditionally a heatproof crock or jug) with vegetables, seasonings and stock, and baked. When the meat and vegetables are done, the juices are poured off and combined with cream and the reserved hare blood and pulverized liver. The strained sauce is served over the "jugged" hare and vegetables.
© Copyright Barron's Educational Services, Inc. 1995 based on THE FOOD LOVER'S COMPANION, 2nd edition, by Sharon Tyler Herbst."
October 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word crocket
"At the top of the street, into which, with my guide-book, I relapsed, was an old market-cross of the fifteenth century—a florid, romantic little structure. It consists of a stone pavilion, with open sides and a number of pinnacles and crockets and buttresses, besides a goodly medallion of the high-nosed visage of Charles I, which was placed above one of the arches, at the Restoration, in compensation for the violent havoc wrought upon the little town by the Parliamentary soldiers, who had wrested the place from the Royalists and who amused themselves, in their grim fashion, with infinite hacking and hewing in the cathedral."
"English Vignettes" in English Hours by Henry James, p 147 of the Oxford paperback edition
September 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cicatrix
"This is your first impression as you travel (naturally by the objectionable conveyance) from Ryde to Ventnor; and the fact that the train rumbles along very smoothly and stops at half a dozen little stations, where the groups on the platform enable you to perceive that the population consists almost exclusively of gentlemen in costumes suggestive of unlimited leisure for attention to cravats and trousers (an immensely large class in England), of old ladies of the species denominated in France rentières, of young ladies of the highly educated and sketching variety, this circumstance fails to reconcile you to the chartered cicatrix which forms your course."
"English Vignettes" in English Hours by Henry James, pp 142-143 of the Oxford paperback edition
September 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word rugosity
"But I watched the watery sunshine upon the rugosities of its ancient masonry; I stood a while in the shade of two or three spreading yews which stretched their black arms over graves decorated for Easter, according to the custom of that country, with garlands of primrose and dog-violet; and I reflected that in a 'wild' region it was a blessing to have so quiet a place of refuge as that."
"English Vignettes" in English Hours by Henry James, p 141 of the Oxford paperback edition
September 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word casemate
"The new life and the old have melted together; there is no dividing-line. In the drawing-room wall there is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end inward, like a small casemate. You ask what it is, but people have forgotten. It is something of the monks; it is a mere detail."
"Abbeys and Castles" in English Hours by Henry James, p 134 of the Oxford paperback edition
September 28, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word alembicated
"He was indeed a wonderful mixture of the universal and the alembicated."
"Browning in Westminster Abbey by Henry James, in English Hours, p 34 of the Oxford University Press paperback
September 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word transpontine
"Who are they all, and where are they going, and whence have they come, and what smoking kitchens and gaping portals and marshalled flunkeys are prepared to receive them, from the southernmost limits of a loosely interpreted, an almost transpontine Belgravia, to the hyperborean confines of St John's Wood?"
"London" in English Hours by Henry James, p 27 of the Oxford paperback edition
September 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word scuppernong
"There will be snide routines about the local wine. Our table isn't ready, and I walk ahead of my daughter and take a seat at the bar. To spite her, I order a scuppernong champagne."
- From "The Landlord" by Wells Tower, in The New Yorker, September 13, 2010, p 69
September 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word twit
I knew this word as a noun but not as a verb - until I read this:
"The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the Londoner twitted with his low standard may point to it with every confidence."
English Hours by Henry James, p 10 of the Oxford University Press paperback edition
September 12, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word globeflower
Wikipedia says: "The Globe-flower (Trollius europaeus) is a perennial plant of the family Ranunculaceae.
It grows up to 60 cm high with a bright yellow, globe-shaped flower up to 3 cm across."
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word globeflower
"I sipped my tea and looked at the strangely random garden with its funny mix of yellow globeflowers and pink azaleas and tall, green nandins."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 285
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word balmacaan
"She wore a man's wrinkled, white balmacaan coat, a thin yellow sweater, blue jeans, and two bracelets on one wrist."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 220
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word junsai
According to http://www.tasteofculture.com/display-text.php?pd_key=85,
"A member of the water lily family, junsai grows in clumps in natural ponds and irrigation reservoirs. A perennial water grass, junsai's flower is a deep maroon-red. It is the young, unfurled sprout covered in a slippery, transparent jelly, which is the culinary item prized by so many Japanese. Fresh sprouts come to market early in the summer.
Junsai and related Brasenia water plants grow in lakes, ponds and slow streams in many parts of the world, including much of North America and Europe. "
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word junsai
"I nodded, swallowing a mouthful of clear soup with fresh junsai greens."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 68
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word sabot
"A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at a line of empty cans."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 64
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word zelkova
"A huge, towering zelkova tree stood just inside the front gate. People said it was at least a hundred and fifty years old. Standing at its base, you could look up and see nothing of the sky through its dense cover of green leaves."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, p 11
September 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word links
"The word comes from Old English and refers to a coastal topography behind a beach, a somewhat dunal and undulating landscape, untillable, under bushes of prickly gorse, scattered heather, and a thin turf of marram and other grasses. Scotland is necklaced by these essentially treeless linkslands, brought up from the deep by the crustal rebounding of a region once depressed by glacial ice, links about as vulnerable to sea surges as Los Angeles is to earthquakes, common grazings good for little else but the invention of public games, where marine whirlwinds could blow out the turf and create ancestral bunkers—for example, Turnberry, Muirfield, Dornoch, Crail, Carnoustie, Prestwick, Royal Troon."
"Linksland and Bottle" by John McPhee, in The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, p 50
September 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word drumlin
"In Scotland, the natural courses come in three main forms: the linksland courses by the sea, the moorland courses everywhere, and the forested parkland courses of the interior, some involving eskers, drumlins, and lateral moraines, but all the result of various glacial effects."
"Linksland and Bottle" by John McPhee, in The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, pp 48-49
September 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word swale
"In this treeless and littoral terrain, the waters beside it did not suggest to me the Savannah River, but Jerris's concentration was on the swales, hollows, and longitudinal mounds of the fairways."
"Linksland and Bottle" by John McPhee, in The New Yorker, September 6, 2010, p 48
September 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word eristic
"But whatever clever eristic moves you make, there's a problem on the horizon—extreme academe is heading our way." "Will the Book Survive Generation Text?" by Carlin Romano, in The Chronicle Review
September 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word timbromania
"Between 1860 and 1863, the first stamp catalogs were issued (in Belgium, Britain, France, and the United States), specialty magazines for stamp collectors appeared in several countries, a Frenchman published the first stamp album, and another Frenchman coined the term "philately," which replaced "timbromania" as the name of this popular pastime."
Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski, p 197
August 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kozo
"He laughs. 'I'll never understand why it is that you can build huge sculptures that withstand gale force winds, deal with dye recipes, cook kozo, and all that, and you can't do anything whatsoever with food. It's amazing.'"
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, p 81 of the Harcourt paperback edition
August 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word abaca
"Clare comes in carrying an armful of abaca fiber."
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, p 106 of the Harcourt paperback edition
August 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word lights
"By scrimping and saving, making Christmas presents for everyone herself and being very sweet and cajoling to the butcher, Kathleen managed to buy Leo raw lights every other day, and still saved enough to give him a red rubber ball for Christmas."
Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, pp 79-80 of the 2001 hardcover edition
July 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word jiggery-pokery
"'Look here,' he said, 'I'm beginning to think there's been some jiggery-pokery somewhere.'"
Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, p 73 of the 2001 hardcover edition
July 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tombola
The intranet at my workplace mentioned a fundraiser at our company's UK office that featured "Cake, gift, craft and book stalls, a tombola, nail painting" etc. I don't think I'd ever heard of a tombola before - the OED online describes it as "A kind of lottery resembling lotto," which seems slightly vague to me, though looking at the OED entry for lotto sheds some light: "A game played with cards divided into numbered and blank squares and numbered discs to be drawn on the principle of a lottery. Each player has one or more cards before him; one of the discs is drawn from a bag, and its number called; a counter is placed on the square that has the same number, the player who first gets one row covered being the winner."
July 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word misprision
"This kind of thing—a Dutchman from 1800 speaking English like Bill Sikes—goes with the fictional territory, I suppose, and Mitchell, to be fair, is alert to the misprision of translation and cultural transmission: the book has many scenes in which the fumbling Dutchmen and Japanese clink the cracked cups of their different languages together, while meaning leaks away."
"The Floating Library" by James Wood in the New Yorker, July 5, 2010, p 72
July 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word husting
"Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio."
"The Data-Driven Life" by Gary Wolf (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all)
July 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word leister
" ... the vinegared
and leistered sealed in tins, delicious with saltines,"
"The Sink" by Catherine Bowman in The New Yorker, June 28, 2010, p 36
July 14, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word lemures
" fermented lemures, fiery spectres,
embottled spirit vapors swirling in the crude"
"The Sink" by Catherine Bowman in The New Yorker, June 28, 2010, p 36
July 14, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word lemniscus
"... socket wrenches, lost twine, wire lei,
sink-funk, steel-wool lemnisci, leitmotifs
of oily sacraments ... "
"The Sink" by Catherine Bowman in The New Yorker, June 28, 2010, p 36
July 14, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word rowel
"They were the eyes of a dwindling life, of a horse accustomed to the rowel on her silver bit, to a man's grim hand on her headstall."
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 131
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word surbate
"She stood there with a ragged cob in her eyes and surbate hooves almost too tender to walk upon, but she was tall, and still awesome in her shabbiness."
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 130
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spavined
"Always be hot up in here," the woman said and she made a half-hearted gesture over her shoulder at the spavined house, but she wasn't looking back toward the house; her gaze had drifted down first to Almon, then inched its way over to Mickey.
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 124
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word agnate
"This was Cincinnati—the capital of pork, the first truly American city—sprawled before the eyes of two little boys under the momentary aegis of one Mike Shaughnessy, truck driver, half-hearted Lothario, collector of children, poor Irish agnate, known in high school as that fucking Irish fuck."
"Twins" by C.E. Morgan in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 123
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word viga
"He walked under the vigas of the porch and knocked."
"The Kid" by Salvatore Scibona, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 118
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chamisa
"The chamisa pollen caught in his nose and broke his heart."
"The Kid" by Salvatore Scibona, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 118
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cantillate
"She cantillated the name as if she either knew a Clarissa or were trying to remember if she did."
"Dayward" by ZZ Packer, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 111
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word clowder
"After the smoke and cordite cleared and the clowder of little-girl voices quit their chiming screams, Lazarus touched his temple, his finger finding a dab of blood no bigger than a drop of claret."
"Dayward" by ZZ Packer, in The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010, page 109
July 13, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fichu
"One was very likely in a crotchet and a fichu. The other's a spinster of the sparse, sharp-nosed sort, all blue stockings and social causes."
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, p 57
July 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word sported oak
" 'Mr. Dunworthy's had to turn the Senior Common Room into an office. She has no respect at all for the sported oak or the notion of knocking, so Mr. Dunworthy's had to devise an outer and inner office, though I personally think a moat would have been more effective.'"
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, p 21
The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang says a sported oak = a sporting door, which is "a door closed against intruders: university."
July 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kakemono
"To enter any public space, be it a restaurant in Gion or a dark little café in the narrow streets of Shinjuku, a tiny basket or lacquer shop whose smallness is apparent as soon as you walk in the door, you have to bend over on entering and walk with your head down while contorting yourself around the shelves, all the time making sure you don't bang your head against a kakemono or knock over an entire shelf of precious ceramics, tea pots, or little saké glasses with your backpack while turning around."
Self-portrait abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by John Lambert, p 35
July 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word paten
""... Also a silver paten and chalice, a wooden crucifix, a silver wafer box, the Epistles, the Gospels, and the regimental colors of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Seventh Battalion," he read."
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, p 4
July 2, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word parclose
"The bishop's bird stump had stood on a wrought-iron stand in front of the parclose screen of the Smiths' Chapel."
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, p 2
July 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word oakum
"He did what he was told to do as long as he was able, picking oakum until exhaustion stopped him, or helping to push the heavy handle of the bone grinder round and round until his body failed and he had to be half carried, half dragged back to his pallet."
The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff, p 155
June 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word flitch
"Before the hard days of winter set in, he slaughtered the pig, and for a week stayed at home with the job of butchering. The dogs feasted on bones and scraps, and Pell roasted the head. Dogman salted the flitches and sold the rest."
The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff, p 144
June 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hobby
I didn't know a hobby was a bird 'til I read this: "If the walking hadn't been so strenuous, she might have enjoyed the view more, the great rolling swards of chalk grassland stretching out golden in all directions, skies dotted with hobby and merlin, circling, anxious to be off south."
- The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff, p 95
June 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word frumenty
"They passed within twenty yards of each other on either side of the frumenty seller's striped tent, Pell and Bean heading toward the grounds of the cathedral, Joe Ridley to the nearest tavern."
The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff, p 38
June 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word clamp
This was a new-to-me sense of this word: "To cover, as vegetables, with earth." See a potato clamp here: http://www.self-sufficient.co.uk/Potato-Clamp-Storing-Potatoes.htm. I read about it in The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff: "With what Pell and the boys earned out of doors, and all that Lou, Bean, Ellen, and Sally accomplished at home, the pantry would be filled for winter with fruit in jars, apples set on racks, potatoes in the clamp, hanging bacon, and maize flour ground arduously by hand to save paying the miller" (p 33).
June 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word diabase
"Downriver, the great bridge brackets the receding city—Morningside and midtown and the Village valley and Wall Street. What they see in the ground glass is a fifty-fifty ratio of concentrated city and tree-covered diabase-palisade cliffs, with a fjord running through."
"Under the Cloth" in Silk Parachute by John McPhee, p 133
June 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word neurocity
In the Princeton huddle before play resumed, Bill Tierney studied Damien Davis, looking beyond his eyes and into his neurocity to see if maybe Damien —once burned, twice vulnerable—would prefer that Ryan Mollett cover Powell.
- Spin Right, Shoot Left -- in The Silk Parachute by John McPhee, p 95
June 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bourn
“When he was nineteen, in Massachusetts, he was Lord Mountararat in “Iolanthe”. Now he is Hal Doyne-Lear on the chalky bourn—Gloucester with eyes.”
“Season on the Chalk” by John McPhee, in Silk Parachute, p 35
June 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the user feedback
Just wanted to chime in that the comment weirdness seems not just to be with nested quotes - double quotation marks seem not to be working at all for me, including when used in a href links, meaning I can't currently post a comment containing a link to anything outside of Wordnik. For now I can post things-that-look-like-double-quotes using code, e.g. & # 147 to make this: “ - but just using the double-quotation-mark key on the keyboard doesn't work.
June 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bail
“In a group, you follow a guide with two electric lanterns, suspended from bails like railroad lanterns.”
Season on the Chalk by John McPhee, in Silk Parachute, p 27
I wasn't familiar with the handle-of-a-kettle-or-a-pail-or-a-lantern sense of this word until now.
June 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word gnoseological
The cloakroom attendant would then have to chase after them and would not have time to write her essay about gnoseological dunes.
The Other City by Michal Ajvaz, translated by Gerald Turner, pp 42-43
June 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word gnoseological
See gnoseology.
June 17, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word casuarina
"As for my mother, no inoculation could have saved her. So I left her there, under the casuarinas."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 94
June 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word lazaret
"Biscuits again! In a few days, just you watch, there will be more worms than flour."
"I wouldn't mind taking a peek at the food stores in the lazaret."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 83
June 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word knucklebones
"I preferred playing knucklebones on the abandoned graves of the old cemetery, which I had turned into my private garden."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 18
June 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word harebell
"With the other children, I would run off and play among the harebells along the old sentry path. A mass of rubble, really, but the pillar of my enchanted world."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 17
June 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word guipure
"I see my mother at her spinning wheel, surrounded by pewter and tapestries, engravings and leather-work. Muslin, lace, and guipure."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 16
June 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word martlet
"I'm not one of those side-whiskered dandies, high-waisted and well favord, who warble their love like martlets and chirp about the future."
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet, translated by Willard Wood, p 11
June 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word haimish
"On the other hand, some of them were mysteriously, sinisterly rich, and built showy McMansions that had no place in haimish Forest Hills."
Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker, May 3, 2010, p 43
June 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word murrain
"Mrs. Gaddson was there, searching eagerly through her Bible for murrains and agues and emerods."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 397
May 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word samite
"There had apparently been vestments as well as wine in the envoy's luggage. The bishop's envoy wore a black velvet chasuble over his dazzlingly white vestments, and the monk was resplendent in yards of samite and gilt embroidery."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 283
May 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word wadmal
"Lady Eliwys brought me a brown wadmal kirtle and mustard-colored surcote to wear, and a sort of kerchief to cover my chopped-off hair (not a wimple and coif, so Eliwys must still think I'm a maiden, in spite of all Imeyne's talk about "daltrisses")."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 157
May 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word solar
I hadn't known the "private living quarters of the lord" sense of this word.
As in: "I remember a church, and I think this is a manor house. I'm in a bedroom or a solar, and it's not just a loft because there are stairs, so that means the house of a minor baron at least."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 116
May 26, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hemoptysis
"The doctor took a stethoscope down from the wall, untangling the chestpiece from the connecting cord. "Any hemoptysis?"
She shook her head."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 90
May 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cyanosis
"She didn't look at Badri either. She read the monitors one by one, and then asked, "Indications of pleural involvement?"
"Cyanosis and chills," the nurse said."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 90
May 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word thermistor
"We don't have one," he said, plugging the feed into the shunt. "Just a thermistor and temps."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 41
May 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cannula
"Mary swabbed at the arm again and slid a cannula under the skin. Badri's eyes fluttered open."
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 40
May 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word manchet
""I need to know the language and the customs," she said, leaning over Dunworthy's desk, "and the money and table manners and things. Did you know they didn't use plates? They used flat loaves of bread called manchets, and when they finished eating their meat, they broke them into pieces and ate them. I need someone to teach me things like that, so I won't make mistakes.""
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 7
May 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word scrofula
""Somewhere in Scotland," he said bitterly. "And meanwhile, Gilchrist is sending Kivrin into a century which is clearly a ten, a century which had scrofula and the plague and burned Joan of Arc at the stake.""
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, p 5
May 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kemp
"The mercers sell the well-kempt gents les vêtements de Sèvres: felt berets, kemp fezzes, tweed spencers, crewneck vests, serge breeches, cheverel belts."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 105
May 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word epergne
"Czech pewterers mend pewter kettles; then the street sellers sell these mended vessels: ewers, cressets (even epergnes)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 104
May 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glaive
"Wells of shadow; E, the whitewash of mists and tents,
glaives of icebergs, albino kings, frostbit fennels;"
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 85
May 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word mundungus
"Ubu burns unburnt mundungus."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 78
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word grugru
"Such pumps suck up mush plus muck — dung lumps (plus clumps), turd hunks (plus chunks): grugru grubs plus fungus slugs mulch up humus pulp."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 78
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word sulcus
"Scum plus crud plugs up ducts; thus Ubu must flush such sulcus ruts."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 78
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cruth
"Ubu drums drums, plus Ubu strums cruths (such hubbub, such ruckus): thump, thump; thrum, thrum."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 77
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tondo
"Profs who do schoolwork on Pollock look for photobooks on Orozco or Rothko (two tomfools who throw bold colors, blotch on blotch, onto tondos of dropcloth)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 76
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word thoron
"Orbs of phosphor throw off bolts of hot volts (googols of bosons from photoprotons of thoron)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 75
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bromo
"Folk doctors cook pots of bromo from roots of bloodwort or toothwort — common worts for common colds."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 74
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bromo
According to Merriam-Webster, "a dose of a proprietary effervescent mixture used as a headache remedy, sedative, and antacid ; also : such a proprietary product".
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hoopoo
"Zoos known to stock zoomorphs (crocs or komodos, coons or bonobos) show off odd fowl: condors, hoopoos, flocks of owls or loons (not flocks of rocs or dodos)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 69
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word smolt
"Brown storks flock to brooks to look for schools of smolt or schools of snook."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 69
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word moonwort
aka money plant, honesty, lunaria ...
"Long fronds of moonwort, know to grow from offshoot growths of rootstock, grow on moss bogs of sod."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 68
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bowwood
"Scows from Toronto tow lots of logs thrown onto pontoons: tons of softwood, tons of cordwood — block on block of woof good for woodwork: boxwood, bowwood, dogwood, logwood (most sorts of wood sold to workfolks who work for old woodshops)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 66
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word intimism
"(Is this intimism civilizing if Klimt limns it, if Liszt lilts it?)"
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 58
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word intimism
According to the Tate: "Originally, a French term applied to the quiet domestic scenes of Bonnard and Vuillard. Since applied widely to any painting of such subject matter. An outstanding example is Gwen John."
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word phthisis
"Sick with phthisis in this drizzling mist, I limp, sniffling, spitting bilic spit, itching livid skin (skin which is tingling with stinging pinpricks)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 55
May 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word lich
"Is it this grim lich, which is writhing in its pit, lifting its lid with whitish limbs, rising, vivific, with ill will in its mind, victimizing kids timid with fright?"
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 54
May 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word siskin
"Midspring brings with it singing birds, six kinds (finch, siskin, ibis, tit, pipit, swift), whistling shrill chirps, trilling chirr chirr in high pitch."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 52
May 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word thew
"Greek schemers seek egress en ténèbres, then enter the melee — the welter where berserk tempers seethe whenever men's mettle, then men's fettle, gets tested; there, the Greek berserkers sever men's thews, then shred men's flesh."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 44
May 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kevel
"The December sleet drenches the tethered nets, then threshes the fettered pegs; hence, the deckmen wedge the kevels, then check the kedges; nevertheless, these vessels teeter."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 41
May 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word xebec
"The steersmen steer the xebecs between steep, sheer clefts, where reefs prevent sheltered berth; there, the tempests whelm the decks, then wreck the keels — the helms, left crewless whenever the elements beset these crewmen."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 41
May 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cataplasm
"Hassan asks that a shaman abstract a talc cataplasm that can thwart a blatant rash (raw scars that can scar a man's scalp and gall a man's glans: scratch, scratch)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 30
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word half-track
Tanks clank and clack, as halftracks attack flatcars and tramcars: bang, bang."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 29
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word vaward
"Vaward attacks blast apart hangars and tarmacs: blam, blam."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 29
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word brassard
"A Slav warman as gallant as Galahad (and D'Artagnan) clasps a scabbard and draws a katana that can smash a man's brassards and slash a man's flancards."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 28
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word atlatl
"A Rwandan man-at-arms grasps an atlatl and casts a fatal shaft that can stab a grand marshall."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 28
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tarn
"A black asp crawls past a sawgrass marsh that has algal tarns."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 27
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word addax
"A jackal stalks an addax. A Manx cat nabs a pack rat."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 27
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word jacamar
"A bantam jacamar can stand athwart a jacaranda branch and catch all scarabs that gnaw at sassafras bark."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 27
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word caracara
"Hawks and larks dart past tamaracks, as jackdaws and mallards flap past catalpas and land athwart a larch (sparhawks and caracaras scrawk at blackcaps and avadavats)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 27
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word caracal
"Hassan can watch as a marksman tracks a stag, a hart and a fawn, and at last bags a ram (a bwana as smart as Tarzan can trap all mammals: alpacas and llamas, caracals and pandas, aardvarks that can catch larval ants).
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 27
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word padparadschah
an orange-pink sapphire - see http://www.minerals.net/gemstone/gemstone/sapphire/sapphire.htm
"Hassan can fast-talk a chap at a watchstand and pawn a small watch that has, as a watchglass, a star padparadschah (half a grand, a carat."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 23
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chapman
"A chapman at a standard hatstand can hawk panama hats, canvas caps and tartan tams."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 20
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word dammar
"A haggard almsman can drag a handcart and hawk glass jars (racks and racks): agar-agar — dammar lac and balsam sap (half a franc, a flask)."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 20
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cadastral
"A ranch-man at a ranch warns campagnards that a shah has spat at hard-and-fast laws that ban cadastral graft."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 19
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cataclasm
"A hag as mad as Cassandra warns a shah that bad karma attracts phantasmal cataclasms."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 17
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word khat
"Hassan wants a catnap and grabs, as a calmant, hash, grass and smack, khat, ganja and tabac — an amalgam that can spark a pharmacal flashback."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 17
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word marc
"Hassan can ask that a barman at a bar tap a cask and draw a man a draft (half a dram, a glass): marc, grappa and armagnac, malt, arrack and schnapps."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 16
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tantara
"A sax drawls tantaras (all A-flats and an A-sharp): fa-la-la-la-la."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 15
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the list monovocalics
Have you read Eunoia by Christian Bök? http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/eunoia/text.html
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word czardas
"Fans clap as a fat-cat jazzman and a bad-ass bassman blab gangsta rap — a gangland fad that attacks what Brahms and Franck call art: a Balkan czardas, a Tartar tandava (sarabands that can charm a saltant chap at a danza).
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 15
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fasnacht
"Hassan asks that a vassal grant a man jam tarts and bananas, jam flans and casabas, halva, pappadam and challah, babka, fasnacht and baklava."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 14
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cassabanana
"Hassan wants Kalamata shawarma, cassabananas and taramasalata."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 14
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word skald
"A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat."
Eunoia by Christian Bök (upgraded edition), p 12
May 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word pantechnicon
"Several muscular workers, dressed in overalls, had lugged the set from the back of a pantechnicon and into the drawing room."
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 346
May 10, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cosh
""I've said too much," she said, flustered. "It's the sherry, you see. Alf always says as 'ow sherry coshes the guard what's supposed to be keepin' watch on my tongue.""
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 275
May 10, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word prang
"Later, at the police station in the village, the Spitfire pilot paid me a visit. He was with a squadron based at Catterick, and had taken his machine up to check the controls after the mechanics had made a few adjustments. He had not the slightest intention of getting into a scrap that day, he told me, but there we were, Wolfgang and I, suddenly in his gunsights over Haworth. What else could he do?
'Hell of a prang. Bad luck, old chap.' he said. 'Damned sorry about your friend.'"
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, pp 216-217
May 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word miscible
"Excitedly, I added to the mixture a couple of drops of my homemade chloroform, which, since chloroform is not miscible in water, sank promptly to the bottom."
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 106
May 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tormentor
""Stage right," I said. "Behind the black tormentor curtains."
Rupert blinked once or twice, shot me a barbed look, and clattered back up the narrow steps to the stage. For a few moments we could hear him muttering away to himself up there, punctuated by the metallic sounds of panels being opened and slammed, and switches clicked on and off."
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley, p 34
May 9, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word shawm
"After a little while he no longer heard the drums, the lutes, the flutes (or shawms) as concert, or as any kind of music."
Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke, translated by Krishna Winston, p 56
April 14, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word soutane
"He saw the orthodox priest arriving from the neighboring village after a long hike over hills and through rocky gullies. His floor-length black soutane was spattered up to the knee with yellow clay and pollen from the broom blossoms."
Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke, translated by Krishna Winston, p 43
April 14, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word serinette
"Serenade of serinettes" - from "World without Birds" by Robin Ekiss
April 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word poleax
Whenever I see this word I want to say it in my head like "pole-ee-ax" even though I know it's not. I just came across it in a review in the New Yorker of a production of The Glass Menagerie.
April 10, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word widgie
"Her red hair is cut flat and short, and it occurs to Rose that if the girl waits long enough it'll actually come into fashion, especially if she had a tendency to hang around at the Snakepit and be a widgie. But she can't see it. Red has the look of a hopelessly sporty girl."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 294 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spider
"In Australia and New Zealand, however, an ice cream soda is often called a spider."
April 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spider
"She got friendly with a few decent-looking blokes who took her to the flicks at the Piccadilly or the Capitol and then shouted her a milkshake or a spider before putting her on the bus home."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 280 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word widgie
See Bodgies and Widgies: "Bodgies and Widgies refer to a youth subculture that existed in Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s, similar to the Teddy Boy culture in the UK or Greaser culture in the US. The males were called Bodgies and the females were called Widgies."
April 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word larrikin
"It was the same blokes at the Embassy tonight, the larrikins in suits, the quiet movers with brandy on their breath and Brylcreem in their hair. The ones with vagrant hands, the ones with bad teeth, broken noses, feet like snowshoes, bellies like baskets."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 278 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word drongo
"Lester smiled. Don't ever join the army.
Geez, one army's enough.
She's a good woman, Quick. She's worth two of me.
But she makes a lousy pasty.
Go on, you drongo."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 257 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word shonky
"How many blokes dyou owe?
One fella who owns all the fellas. He's a nasty cove.
What're they gunna do?
Work it out of me, I spose. There's plenty of shonky jobs they'll want done."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 234 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word whacko
"From his gladstone bag the stranger takes a bottle and a loaf of white bread.
Whacko, says Quick.
The black man pulls him off a hunk of bread and Quick takes it. Then the bottle."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 209 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word goanna
Goanna brand history
April 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word goanna
"Quick woke again and there was Wentworth's daughter, Lucy. She was rubbing his blistered skin with goanna oil."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 202 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word damper
"In his duffel bag he finds an old linty piece of damper and hunkers down by the fire, resisting the need to pee."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 196 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word karri
"It's the smell of a karri forest rising into the sky and the bodies of roos and possums returning to the earth as carbon and the cooking smell falling through the dimness like this."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 184 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
April 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word scrubber
Australian slang: "someone who's rough, low quality"
"They showed her where to get the best pie and chips in Murray Street, the very thought of which kept her off lunch in general, and they introduced Rose to the addiction of listening in. They were silly, dizzy scrubbers, and she liked them"
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, pp 181-182 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word brass razoo
"We haven't got a brass razoo.
I wonder why. What you don't drink, the old man gives to the bookies."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 162 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word snag
Australian slang: sausage
"She leaves the spuds boiling on the stove and the snags spitting on low heat to go upstairs to listen to him tinkling on the piano."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 158 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word grouse
"It's ridiculous -- she's too old for him and he's a slow learner and a tenant and a Lamb, for gawdsake, but he's just the grousest looking boy, and his hot blue eyes make you go racy inside."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 159 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bottler
"something terrific" (Australian slang)
"Yer a bottler, Doll, he said the first night, pressing her up against the cool bricks. Bet yer old man's a millionaire, the way you look."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 153 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cove
"Now and then she'd find herself out the back lane against the fence with some sweetmouthed bloke whose name she could almost remember, a cove who didn't mind if she kept talking while he ran his hands about."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 153 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word goog
"It was all too complicated. Everything was. Unless you were full as a good. Then it was simple, then all of it was straight in a girl's mind."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, pp 152-153 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word goog
Australian slang - drunk
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bonzer
"He's a right card, the other women would say, a real bonzer.
A real dag, love. Oh, to have him round the house."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 144 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word shickered
"Ted was the old girl's favourite. Rose often saw her patting and stroking him when she was half shickered. Ted didn't seem to care what she did at all."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 142 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word clinkerbuilt
"The boat is a good sixteen feet, clinkerbuilt and heavy as hell. A big skiff sort of boat, and it takes about a second and a half for it to be obvious that it'll never fit across the tray of the truck."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 109 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word gladstone bag
"Monday. Rose ran home from school and waited for Sam to show. Even the old girl seemed nervous, up there cooking his tea.
He came swinging his gladstone bag into the yard."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 85 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word lair
Australian slang: a flashily-dressed young man
"At the Tivoli, said Lester, and then The Blue Room. Ooh, I was a lair then. All the best people'd sing me songs. I wrote for the best of em."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 72 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word nong
"I didn't know you were married before, said Elaine, lips aquiver.
Eee-laine, you nong, said Hat. 1914 to 1918. She'd hafta start havin em at age twelve to get six out, not to mention one off to war. She was born the year of Federation, 1901.
Well, said Lester. Margaret River School obviously taught Hat more than groomin and deportation."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 71 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word clobber
"Oriel doesn't realize it, but she begins to dress Fish like an idiot, the way people clothe big sadfaced mongoloids. She hoiks his trousers up under his arms with a belt so long it flaps. She combs his hair straight down on this brow and shines his shoes till they mock him. The reason Oriel doesn't notice is that Quick gets to him early after breakfast and drags the clobber round on him, messes him up like a boy, normal and slouchy."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 70 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 31, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word pommy
"He was a waistcoat and watch chain type and he spoke like the pommy officers Lester remembered from his days in the Light Horse."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 65 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 30, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chook
"By May, when a chill had come into the nights and the street was subdued and indoorsy after dark with the Lambs' chooks racked along their perch like mumbling hats, and the air so still you could hear the sea miles off and the river tide eating at the land, Lester and Oriel went to bed bonesore but grateful."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 63 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 30, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word ratbag
"Red was just a tomboy, she didn't think about smiling or not smiling. There was a gap, now that Fish wasn't being the ratbag of the family, and Red was out to fill it. She beat boys at cricket and she terrorized the bike sheds at school with the way she could throw a punch."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 63 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 30, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word troppo
To go troppo = to go crazy because of the heat (Australian slang)
"They were boys with the voices of men, and it sent the Lamb girls absolutely troppo."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 63 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 30, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fair dinkum
"It was where you could smell that daft beanpole husband of hers baking his cakes, though, fair dinkum, you had to hand it to the coot, he could bake his way to Parliament if he set his mind to it."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 50 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 30, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bullroarer
"The huge livingroom window was gone and a shutter stood propped open in its place opening up on a view of that grand old room full of pineboard shelves bowing with jars and jugs, the fireplace bristling with humbugs and bullroarers and toothbusters."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 57 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 30, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spare
to go spare = to get angry, to go berserk
"They'd worn a track across the weeds since dawn, and the cratchety tinkle of that little bell had driven her spare, but she wasn't going to go down there early and give her tenants the satisfaction of gloating."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 57 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word flame tree
"In the park at the end of the street the flame trees and the Moreton Bay figs covered the grass with their broad, brittle leaves that Dolly Pickles kicked up in drifts as she walked alone when the children were at school and she was waiting for the copper to boil in the laundry or she just couldn't stand to be in that big old place anymore, avoiding the plain gaze of that little Lamb woman as she went stiffbooted about her neverending business."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 52 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word boondie
"That autumn the street seemed full. There were always Pickles kids and Lamb kids up one end of the street throwing boondies or chasing someone's dog."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 51 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word boondie
From The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English:
1 in Western Australia, a rock. Probably from an Australian Aboriginal languagge
2 in Western Australia, a piece of conglomerated sand used by children to throw at one another in play
March 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word reffo
"Rose Pickles and her brothers saw them unloading the dust-white truck. They made a crowd standing about down there, and they looked so skinny and tired. They carried a big jarrah table in but no chairs. There were teachests, a clock, shovels and hoes, a couple of bashed old trunks. They all struggled and heaved up the stairs with that little woman barking instructions.
Cripes, Ted said. And I thought we looked like reffoes."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 50 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 29, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word digger
"And he'd lost his postcard from Egypt, the one he got from his dad's cousin, Earl. Back in '43 he wrote a letter to cheer up a digger. He addressed it: Earl Blunt, EGYPT, and it found him, just as he assumed it would. And a card came back, an exotic picture from another world. He'd stuck it somewhere secret and had bamboozled himself with his own cunning."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 46 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word jarrah
"Down the middle of the yard, from the house to the back pickets, was a tin fence which cut the yard in half. The wooden frame was jarrah; it smelt of gum and was the colour of sunburn."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 44 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word paperbark
melaleuca.
"She looks up and sees Lester and the boys hauling the net up onto the beach. The water is flat behind them. She can almost see the trees etched out on the other bank, the paperbarks where the dunes begin."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 28 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cobbler
South Australian cobbler: a fish with poisonous dorsal fins
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word grizzle
"I'll take the boys.
They're not tall enough, Oriel Lamb says.
Ah, the girls grizzle too much. Drives me mad.
Put on yer shoes or yull be stung. Don't want any cobbler stings. Can't stand your grizzlin."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 26 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word dag
"This time the truck goes up the hill in reverse and the kids elbow each other and feel a right bunch of dags heading up like that, but they're the first to see the rivermouth, the oilstill river and roiling sea; it looks so like a picture they're suddenly quiet."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 26 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word carn
"Carn, Dad! someone calls from behind the cab.
The man spits out the window, lets the brake off, and they roll back."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 25 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word mulie
Urban Dictionary says it's "Western Australian slang term for the "Southern Blue Pilchard", a small fish roughly 5-6 inches in length and commonly sold in large frozen blocks and used as bait by anglers, especially those fishing for tailor."
"When he baited up, the gang of hooks always slipped sideways in the mulie and ended up buried in his palm."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 21 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hayburner
"Some people are lucky, she heard him say. Joel, he's lucky. Got a good business. His hayburners win. See, I got me ole man's blood. Dead unlucky."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 20 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 27, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chiack
bilby, thanks - in my head I'd been (mis)pronouncing it with a ch- like change rather than an sh- like shy.
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word compo
"No money came in. No compo. Sam didn't go on the dole."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 18 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word dill
Australian slang: an idiot.
"Oh, he'd made her laugh so many times, making a dill of himself to make her happy."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 16 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word dreckly
"We'll be back dreckly. Dad might be awake, eh."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 16 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cactus
Australian slang for dead.
"Dolly saw it was his right hand. His bloody working hand. A man could hardly pick his nose with a thumb and half a pointer. They were done for; stuffed, cactus."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 15 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word patterson's curse
"Sam Pickles grew up on that racetrack, hanging around the stables or by the final turn where the Patterson's Curse grew knee high and the ground vibrated with all that passing flesh."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 11 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word thunderbox
"He headed for the thunderbox with gulls, terns, shags and cockroaches watching him come."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 9 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word staggerjuice
"There's ginger beer, staggerjuice and hot flasks of tea."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 1 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word staggerjuice
Also "stagger-juice,": A dictionary of slang and unconventional English says it's "Strong liquor: Cockney and Aus.: earlier C. 20. in the RN it = Navy rum (Granville)."
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chiack
to tease or banter - Australian
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chiack
"Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge."
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, p 1 of the Graywolf Press hardcover edition
March 25, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word silverside
"Be it salmon, skate, gammon or a silverside of beef, the ancient art of bringing something to tenderness by letting it blip and blop in not-quite-boiling water appeals not because of its robustness, but for its gentle tone."
Eating for England by Nigel Slater, p 209
March 24, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word rissole
"'Makes a nice luncheon dish,' say so many old cookery books, especially when talking of rissoles or stuffed marrow, or some other silk purse carefully hewn from a sow's ear."
Eating for England by Nigel Slater, p 194
March 24, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word saveloy
"Those who peddle frozen fish clad in batter as thick as their shop's Formica counter tops, with jars of sad pickled eggs and a lone, armour-plated saveloy waiting patiently for someone drunk enough to order it, are still around."
Eating for England by Nigel Slater, p 179
March 24, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tracklement
Re: Branston Pickle: "Its manufacturers advise that their mud-hued, syrupy tracklement sits well with burgers and hot dogs, yet in truth most of it will find its way into cheese sandwiches."
Eating for England by Nigel Slater, p 150
March 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word tracklement
According to worldwidewords.org it's "any kind of savoury condiment served with meat."
March 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chudleigh
"Cornwall's peel-flecked heavy cake would keep you going until you got to feast on Devon's cream-filled chudleighs, before moving swiftly along through treasures such as Somerset's crumbly catterns, Dorset apple, and the sultana-spiked Norfolk vinegar cake."
Eating for England by Nigel Slater, pp 45-46
March 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cattern
See lacemakers' cattern cakes.
March 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chudleigh
aka Devonshire splits
March 21, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word persillade
"And then, just as we Brits abandon our stew to the hungry hordes gathered at the table, the cooks of other nations will add a vital snap of freshness and vigour to lift it from its sleepy brown torpor: the French their persillade of vivid parsley, anchovy and lemon; the Moroccans a slick of tongue-tingling harissa the color of a rusty bucket; and the Italians a pool of hot, salty salsa verde pungent with basil, mustard, and mint."
-Eating for England by Nigel Slater, p 2
March 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cotechino
"The Italians, though less likely to use alcohol, will add body to the simplest stew of boneless brisket with the introduction of a whole, cheap tongue and a gelatinous, collagen-rich cotechino sausage."
- Eating for England by Nigel Slater, p 2
March 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word beard
I don't think I'd ever heard "beard" used as a verb meaning "to confront boldly" until now:
"Already she was beginning to be carried away by the idea of bearding Gert Bigger in her den. She imagined herself armed with a great book from which she read strange grim-sounding incantations, magic words that would bring Gert Bigger to her knees and make her bring Mrs. Zimmermann back from . . . from wherever Gert Bigger had sent her."
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs, p 132 of the Puffin paperback edition.
March 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word klaberjass
A card game. See http://www.bicyclecards.com/game-rules/klaberjass/39.php?page_id=32 -- "Klaberjass" means "clover jack" (that is, the jack of clubs)."
"The party that night turned out to be so much fun that Rose Rita forgot all about her troubles. She even forgot that she was supposed to be mad at Lewis. Mrs. Zimmermann taught Lewis and Rose Rita a couple of new card games (klaberjass and six-pack bezique, Winston Churchill's favorite card game), and Jonathan did one of his magic illusions, where he made everyone think that they were stumping across the floor of the Atlantic in diving suits. They visited some sunken galleons and the wreck of the Titanic, and even watched an octopus fight."
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs, p 8 of the Puffin paperback edition
March 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word galley-west
"As Lewis chanted, the room began to get darker. The light faded from the bright orange leaves of the maple tree outside, and now a strong wind was rattling the glass doors. Suddenly the doors flew open, and the wind got into the room. It riffled madly through the dictionary on the library table, scattered papers across the floor, and knocked all the lampshades galley-west."
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs, p 54 of the Puffin paperback edition
March 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word faytour
Lewis had the long curved parcel. When he had ripped the paper off one end, he saw the tarnished brass hilt of a sword. "Oh boy!" he said. "A real sword!" He ripped the rest of the paper off and started swinging the sword around. Fortunately, it was still in its sheath.
"Have at thee for a foul faytour!" he shouted, lunging at Rose Rita with the sword.
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs, p 19 of the Puffin paperback edition
March 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word aroint
"Mrs. Izard turned around. She faced Mrs. Zimmermann calmly. "So it's you," she said. "Well, my power has not reached its height, but I am still strong enough to deal with you. Aroint ye!"
She pointed the ivory cane at Mrs. Zimmermann. Nothing happened. She stopped smiling and dropped her cane."
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, p 152 of the Puffin Books paperback edition
March 3, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spiraea
"When spring came, Lewis was surprised to see that the hedge in front of the Hanchett house was wildly overgrown. It was a spiraea hedge, and had always had bristly little pink-and-white blossoms. This spring there were no blossoms on the hedge; it had turned into a dark, thorny thicket that completely hid the first floor windows and sent long waving tendrils up to scrape at the zinc gutter troughs. Burdocks and ailanthus trees had grown up overnight near the house; their branches screened the second-story windows."
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, p 122 of the Puffin Books paperback edition
March 2, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word spiraea
also, meadowsweet
March 2, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word izzard
"Old Isaac Izard—his name is odd, isn't it? Mrs. Zimmermann thinks that it comes from izzard, which in some parts of England is the word for zed, which is the word the English use to identify the letter Z. I go along with Mrs. Zimmermann's theory because I can't think of a better one. And besides, she is a Z-lady, so she should know."
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, p 33 of the Puffin Books paperback edition
March 1, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"It was the belief that Robert had been loved, and loved for so long, by Rachel that had made her desire him, had made her reject more glittering matches; it seemed that he was making a sort of concession to her in marrying her."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 930 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"He spoke to no one but his wife; the rest of the hotel appeared not to exist for him; but whenever a waiter came to take an order, and stood close beside him, he swiftly raised his blue eyes and darted a glance at him which did not last for more than two seconds, but in its limpid penetration seemed to indicate a kind of investigative curiosity entirely different from that which might have inspired any ordinary diner scrutinising, even at greater length, a page or waiter with a view to making humorous or other observations about him which he would communicate to his friends."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 926 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"What is more, people whose own hearts are not directly involved always regard unfortunate entanglements, disastrous marriages, as though one were free to choose whom one loves, and do not take into account the exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelops so entirely and so uniquely the person with whom one is in love that the "folly" a man commits by marrying his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a rule the only poetical action that he performs in the course of his existence."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 923 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word prie-dieu
"It is the wisdom inspired by the Muse whom it is best to ignore for as long as possible if we wish to retain some freshness of impressions, some creative power, but whom even those who have ignored her meet in the evening of their lives in the nave of an old country church, at a point when suddenly they feel less susceptible to the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than to the thought of the vicissitudes of fortune which those carvings have undergone, passing into a famous private collection or a chapel, from there to a museum, then returning at length to the church, or to the feeling that as they walk around it they may be treading upon a flagstone almost endowed with thought, which is made of the ashes of Arnauld or Pascal, or simply to deciphering (forming perhaps a mental picture of a fresh-faced country girl) on the brass plate of a wooden prie-dieu the names of the daughters of the squire or the notable—the Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well: the Muse of History."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 919 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hawthorn
"And then, you've talked so often to Saint-Loup about the hawthorns and lilacs and irises at Tansonville, he'll see what you meant now."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 918 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word whist
"But even in the case of a man of real merit, it is a quality not to be despised by the person who admits him into his private life, and one that makes him particularly useful if he can also play whist."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 915 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"People still remembered that the most grandiose and glittering receptions in Paris, as brilliant as those given by the Princesse de Guermantes, had been those of Mme de Marsantes, Saint-Loup's mother."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 912 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"After walking across the garden of the Arena in the glare of the sun, I entered the Giotto chapel, the entire ceiling of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant daylight has crossed the threshold with the human visitor in order to give its pure sky a momentary breather in the coolness and shade, a sky merely of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the glitter of the sunlight, as in those brief moments when, though no cloud is to be seen, the sun has turned its gaze elsewhere and the azure, softer still, grows deeper."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 878 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word cerise
"Finally, before leaving the picture, my eyes came back to the shore, swarming with the everyday Venetian life of the period. I looked at the barber wiping his razor, at the negro humping his barrel, at the Muslims conversing, at the noblemen in wide-sleeved brocade and damask robes and hats of cerise velvet, and suddenly I felt a slight gnawing at my heart."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 877 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"And during the few minutes that the Prince was standing beside their table, M. de Norpois never ceased for an instant to keep his azure pupils trained on Mme de Villeparisis, with the mixture of indulgence and severity of an old lover, but principally from fear of her committing one of those verbal solecisms which he had relished but which he dreaded."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 858 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"But at the same time (because of the always urban character of the impressions which Venice gives almost in the open sea, on those waters whose ebb and flow makes itself felt twice daily, and which alternately cover at high tide and uncover and low tide the splendid outside stairs of the palaces), as we should have done in Paris on the boulevards, in the Champs-Elysées, in the Bois, in any wide and fashionable avenue, we passed the most elegant women in the hazy evening light, almost all foreigners, who, languidly reclining against the cushions of their floating carriages, followed one another in procession, stopped in front of a palace where they had a friend to call on, sent to inquire whether she was at home, and while, as they waited for the answer, they prepared to leave a card just in case, as they would have done at the door of the Hôtel de Guermantes, turned to their guidebooks to find out the period and the style of the palace, being shaken the while, as upon the crest of a blue wave, by the wash of the glittering, swirling water, which took alarm at finding itself pent between the dancing gondola and the resounding marble."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 852-853 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"When, at ten o'clock in the morning, my shutters were thrown open, I saw blazing there, instead of the gleaming black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, the golden angel on the campanile of St Mark's. Glittering in a sunlight which made it almost impossible to keep one's eyes upon it, this angel promised me, with its outstretched arms, for the moment when I appeared on the Piazzetta half an hour later, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 844 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 22, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word syringa
"The spray of syringa made me profoundly sad, as did also the thought that Albertine could have believed, and said, that I was treacherous and hostile; and most of all, perhaps, certain lies so unexpected that I had difficulty in grasping them."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 828 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word syringa
"Then I thought again of the evening of the syringa, and remembered that about a fortnight later, as my jealousy kept changing its object, I had asked Albertine whether she had ever had relations with Andrée, and she had replied: "Oh! never! Of course, I adore Andrée; I have a deep affection for her, but as I might have for a sister, and even if I had the tastes which you seem to suppose, she's the last person I should have thought of in that connexion. I can swear to you by anything you like, the honour of my aunt, the grave of my poor mother." I had believed her."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 827 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word syringa
"At all events, nobody could ever mention syringa again in her hearing without her turning crimson and putting her hand over her face in the hope of hiding her blushes."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 813 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word syringa
"But we lost our heads all the same, so that to conceal our embarrassment we both of us, without having a chance to consult each other, had the same idea: to pretend to dread the scent of syringa which as a matter of fact we adored."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 812 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"The memory of Albertine had become so fragmentary that it no longer caused me any sadness and was no more now than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announces a change of key."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 809 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"The persistence within me of an old impulse to work, to make up for lost time, to change my way of life, or rather to begin to live, gave me the illusion that I was still as young as in the past; and yet the memory of all the events that had succeeded one another in my life (and also of those that had succeeded one another in my heart, for when one has greatly changed, one is misled into supposing that one has lived longer) in the course of those last months of Albertine's existence, had made them seem to me much longer than a year, and now this forgetfulness of so many things, separating me by gulfs of space from quite recent events which they made me think remote, because I had had what is called "the time" to forget them, by its fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all the landmarks—distorted, dislocated my sense of distance in time, contracted in one place, distended in another, and made me suppose myself now further away from things, now much closer to them, than I really was."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 802-803 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word efflorescence
""Oh! not in the least," exclaimed Mme de Guermantes, who had a keen sense of these provincial differences and drew portraits that were sober and restrained but coloured by her husky, golden voice, beneath the gentle efflorescence of her violet-blue eyes."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 794 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"As for Gilberte, she was all the more glad to find the subject being dropped, in that she herself was only too anxious to drop it, having inherited from Swann his exquisite tact combined with a delightful intelligence that was recognised and appreciated by the Duke and Duchess, who begged her to come again soon."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 786 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"However, when Swann was dead, it happened that her determination not to know his daughter had ceased to provide Mme de Guermantes with all the satisfactions of pride, independence, "self-government" and cruelty which she was capable of deriving from it and which had come to an end with the passing of the man who had given her the exquisite sensation that she was resisting him, that he could not compel her to revoke her decrees."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 780 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 775 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word transparent
"Those passages which, when I wrote them, were so colourless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that the reading of them was a torture to me, had only accentuated in me the sense of my own impotence and of my incurable lack of talent."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 770 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"Which of us has not experienced in the course of his life exquisite uncertainties more or less similar to this? A charitable friend, to whom one describes a girl one has seen at a ball, concludes from the description that she must be one of his friends and invites one to meet her. But among so many others, and on the basis of a mere verbal portrait, is there not a possibility of error? The girl you are about to see may well turn out to be a different girl from the one you desire."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 761 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word agate
"It is the tragedy of other people that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one's own mind. For this very reason one bases upon them projects which have all the fervour of thought; but thought languishes and memory decays: the day would come when I would readily admit the first comer to Albertine's room, as I had without the slightest regret given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts that I had received from Gilberte."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 751-752 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hawthorn
"Gradually, as the love that Albertine may have felt for certain women ceased to cause me pain, it attached those women to my past, made them somehow more real, as the memory of Combray gave to buttercups and hawthorn blossom a greater reality than to unfamiliar flowers."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 746 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"Hearing it from a neighbouring room without being able to see, one may mistake for uncontrollable laughter the noise which is forced by pain from a patient being operated on without an anaesthetic; and as for the noise emitted by a mother who has just been told that her child has died, it can seem to us, if we are unaware of its origin, as difficult to translate into human terms as the noise emitted by an animal or by a harp. It takes us a little time to realise that those two noises express what, by analogy with the (very different) sensations we ourselves may have felt, we call pain; and it took me some time, too, to understand that this noise expressed what, by analogy with the (very different) sensations I myself had felt, I called pleasure; and the pleasure must have been very great to overwhelm to this extent the person who was expressing it and to extract from her this strange utterance which seemed to describe and comment on all the phases of the exquisite drama which the young woman was living through and which was concealed from my eyes by the curtain that is for ever lowered for other people over what happens in the mysterious intimacy of every human creature."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 741-742 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word voluptuous
"Alas, remembering my own agitation whenever I had caught sight of a girl who attracted me, sometimes when I had merely heard her spoken of without having seen her, my anxiety to look my best, to show myself to advantage, my cold sweats, I had only, to torture myself, to imagine the same voluptuous excitement in Albertine, as though by means of the apparatus which, after the visit of a certain practitioner who had shown some scepticism about her malady, my aunt Léonie had wished to see invented, and which would enable the doctor to undergo all the sufferings of his patient in order to understand better."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 734 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hydrotherapeutic
"If the strength of my feelings made me regard as untruthful and colourless the expressions of men who had no true happiness or sorrow in their lives, on the other hand the most insignificant lines which could, however remotely, be related either to Normandy, or to Touraine, or to hydrotherapeutic establishments, or to Léa, or to the Princesse de Guermantes, or to love, or to absence, or to infidelity, at once brought back before my yes the image of Albertine, without my having the time to turn away from it, and my tears started afresh."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 704 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"Then my tenderness could revive anew, but, simultaneously with it, a sorrow at being parted from Albertine which made me perhaps even more wretched than I had been during the recent hours when it had been jealousy that tormented me. But the latter suddenly revived at the thought of Balbec, because of the vision which all at once reappeared (and which until then had never made me suffer and indeed appeared one of the most innocuous in my memory) of the dining-room at Balbec in the evening, with all that populace crowded together in the dark on the other side of the window, as in front of the luminous wall of an aquarium, watching the strange creatures moving around in the light but (and this I had never thought of) in its conglomeration causing the fisher-girls and other daughters of the people to brush against girls of the bourgeoisie envious of that luxury, new to Balbec, from which, if not their means, at any rate parsimony and tradition excluded their parents, girls among whom there had certainly been almost every evening Albertine whom I did not know and who doubtless used to pick up some little girl whom she would meet a few minutes later in the dark, upon the sands, or else in a deserted bathing hut at the foot of the cliff."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 702-703 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"It is indeed probable that for Albertine, even if they had been true, even if she had admitted them, her own misdeeds (whether her conscience had thought them innocent or reprehensible, whether her sensuality had found them exquisite or somewhat insipid) would not have been accompanied by that inexpressible sense of horror from which I was unable to detach them."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 697 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 16, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"The truth is that this woman has only raised to life by a sort of magic countless elements of tenderness existing in us already in a fragmentary state, which she has assembled, joined together, effacing every gap between them, and it is we ourselves who by giving her her features have supplied all the solid matter of the beloved object."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 679 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word hawthorn
"When we speak of the "niceness" of a woman, we are doing no more perhaps than project outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel in seeing her, like children when they say: "My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorns." Which explains, incidentally, why men never say of a woman who is not unfaithful to them: "She is so nice," and say it so often of a woman by whom they are betrayed."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 670 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word diaphanous
"Either swift-moving and bent over the mythological wheel of her bicycle, strapped on rainy days inside the warrior tunic of her waterproof which moulded her breasts, her head turbaned and dressed with snakes, when she spread terror through the streets of Balbec; or else on the evenings when we had taken champagne into the woods of Chantepie, her voice provocative and altered, her face suffused with warm pallor, reddened only on the cheekbones, and when, unable to make it out in the darkness of the carriage, I drew her into the moonlight in order to see it more clearly, the face I was now trying in vain to recapture, to see again in a darkness that would never end. A little statuette on the drive to the island in the Bois, a still and plump face with coarse-grained skin at the pianola, she was thus by turns rain-soaked and swift, provoking and diaphanous, motionless and smiling, an angel of music."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 659 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"But much later, when I went back gradually, in reverse order, over the times through which I had passed before I had come to love Albertine so much, when my healed heart could detach itself without suffering from Albertine dead, then I was able to recall at length without suffering that day on which Albertine had gone shopping with Françoise instead of remaining at the Trocadéro; I recalled it with pleasure as belonging to an emotional season which I had not known until then; I recalled it at last exactly, no longer injecting it with suffering, but rather, on the contrary, as we recall certain days in summer which we found too hot while they lasted, and from which only after they have passed do we extract their unalloyed essence of pure gold and indestructible azure."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 656 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word translucent
"At last it was dark in the apartment; I stumbled against the furniture in the hall, but in the door that opened on to the staircase, in the midst of the darkness I had thought to be complete, the glazed panel was translucent and blue, with the blueness of a flower, the blueness of an insect's wing, a blueness that would have seemed to me beautiful had I not felt it to be a last glint, sharp as a steel blade, a final blow that was being dealt me, in its indefatigable cruelty, by the day."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 649 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"How often had I crossed, on the way to fetch Albertine, how often had I retrodden, on the way back with her, the great plain of Cricqueville, sometimes in foggy weather when the swirling mists gave us the illusion of being surrounded by a vast lake, sometimes on limpid evenings when the moonlight, dematerialising the earth, making it appear from a few feet away as celestial as it is, in the daytime, in the distance only, enclosed the fields and the woods with the firmament to which it had assimilated them in the moss-agate of a universal blue!"
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 648 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word prismatic
"She left the room, then returned, but I turned sharply away under the impact of the painful discharge of one of the thousand invisible memories which incessantly exploded around me in the darkness: I had noticed that she had brought me cider and cherries, things which a farm-lad had brought out to us in the carriage, at Balbec, "kinds" in which I should have made the most perfect communion, in those days, with the prismatic gleam in shuttered dining-rooms on days of scorching heat."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 646 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fugitive
"Now this love, born first and foremost of a need to prevent Albertine from doing wrong, this love had thereafter preserved the traces of its origin. Being with her mattered little to me so long as I could prevent the fugitive creature from going to this place or to that."
abrupt reaction of pain."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 585 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fugitive
"Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen."
abrupt reaction of pain."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 571-572 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 564 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 15, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word ineffable
"I rang for Françoise to ask her to buy me a guidebook and a timetable, as I had done as a boy when already I wanted to prepare in advance a journey to Venice, the fulfilment of a desire as violent as that which I felt at this moment. I forgot that in the meantime, there was a desire which I had attained without any satisfaction—the desire for Balbec—and that Venice, being also a visible phenomenon, was probably no more able than Balbec to fulfil an ineffable dream, that of the Gothic age made actual by a springtime sea, that now teased my mind from moment to moment with an enchanted, caressing, elusive, mysterious, confused image."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 558 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word calico
"Now that Albertine no longer appeared to be angry with me, the possession of her no longer seemed to me a treasure in exchange for which one is prepared to sacrifice every other. For perhaps one would have done so only to rid oneself of a grief, an anxiety, which are now appeased. One has succeeded in jumping through the calico hoop through which one thought for a moment that one would never be able to pass."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 556 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, an urbane and refined civilisation, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a sombre azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 556 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word vetiver
"But to me (just as an aroma, unpleasing perhaps in itself, of naphthalene and vetiver would have thrilled me by bringing back to me the blue purity of the sea on the day of my arrival at Balbec), the smell of petrol which, together with the smoke from the exhaust of the car, had so often melted into the pale azure on those scorching days when I used to drive from Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise to Gourville, since it had accompanied me on my excursions during those summer afternoons when I left Albertine painting, called into blossom now on either side of me, for all that I was lying in my darkened bedroom, corn-flowers, poppies and red clover, intoxicated me like a country scent, not circumscribed and fixed like that of the hawthorns which, held in by its dense, oleaginous elements, hangs with a certain stability about the hedge, but like a scent before which the roads sped away, the landscape changed, stately houses came hurrying to meet me, the sky turned pale, forces were increased tenfold, a scent which was like a symbol of elastic motion and power and which revived the desire that I had felt at Balbec to climb into the cage of steel and crystal, but this time no longer to pay visits to familiar houses with a woman I knew too well, but to make love in new places with a woman unknown."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 554-555 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"In my bedroom, where on the contrary it was cooler, when the unctuous air had succeeded in glazing and isolating the smell of the wash-stand, the smell of the wardrobe, the smell of the sofa, simply by the sharpness with which they stood out, vertical and erect, in adjacent but distinct slices, in a pearly chiaroscuro which added a softer glaze to the shimmer of the curtains and the blue stain armchairs, I saw myself, not by a mere caprice of my imagination but because it was physically possible, following, in some new suburban quarter like that in which Bloch's house at Balbec was situated, the streets blinded by the sun, and finding in them not the dull butchers' shops and the white freestone facings, but the country dining-room which I could reach in no time, and the smells that I would find there on my arrival, the smell of the bowl of cherries and apricots, the smell of cider, the smell of gruyère cheese, held in suspense in the luminous coagulation of shadow which they delicately vein like the heart of an agate, while the knife-rests of prismatic glass scatter rainbows athwart the room or paint the oilcloth here and there with peacock-eyes."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 553-554 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fugitive
"But even allowing for her lies, it was incredible how spasmodic her life was, how fugitive her strongest desires. She would be mad about a person whom, three days later, she would refuse to see. She could not wait for an hour while I sent out for canvas and colours, for she wished to start painting again. For two whole days she would be impatient, almost shed the tears, quickly dried, of an infant that has just been weaned from its nurse. And this instability of her feelings with regard to people, things, occupations, arts, places, was in fact so universal that, if she did love money, which I do not believe, she cannot have loved it for longer than anything else."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 552 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fugitive
"Looking back, I find it difficult to describe how densely her life was covered in a network of alternating, fugitive, often contradictory desires. No doubt falsehood complicated this still further, for, as she retained no accurate memory of our conversations, if, for example, she had said to me: "Ah! that was a pretty girl, if you like, and a good golfer," and, when I had asked the girl's name, had answered with that detached, universal, superior air of which no doubt there is always enough and to spare, for all liars of this category borrow it for a moment when they do not wish to answer a question, and it never fails them: "Ah, I'm afraid I don't know" (with regret at her inability to enlighten me), "I never knew her name, I used to see her on the golf course, but I didn't know what she was called"—if, a month later, I said to her: "Albertine, you remember that pretty girl you mentioned to me, who used to play golf so well," "Ah, yes," she would answer without thinking, "Emilie Daltier, I don't know what's become of her." And the lie, like a line of earthworks, was carried back from the defence of the name, now captured, to the possibilities of meeting her again."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 551 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminosity
"But I hesitated for an instant, for the sky-blue border of her dress added to her face a beauty, a luminosity, without which she would have seemed to me harder."
birds, symbols of death and resurrection."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 538 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"I kissed her then a second time, pressing to my heart the shimmering golden azure of the Grand Canal and the mating birds, symbols of death and resurrection."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 538 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan's wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternatively life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same transmutations which, before an advancing gondola, change into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 531 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word mauve
"Her throat, the curve of which, seen from my bed, was strong and full, at that distance and in the lamplight appeared pinker, less pink however than her face, bent forward in profile, which my gaze, issuing from the innermost depths of myself, charged with memories and burning with desire, invested with such a brilliancy, such an intensity of life that its relief seemed to stand out and turn with the same almost magic power as on the day, in the hotel at Balbec, when my vision was clouded by my overpowering desire to kiss her; and I prolonged each of its surfaces beyond what I was able to see and beneath what concealed it from me and made me feel all the more strongly—eyelids which half hid her eyes, hair that covered the upper part of her cheeks—the relief of those superimposed planes; her eyes (like two facets that alone have yet been polished in the matrix in which an opal is still embedded), become more resistant than metal while remaining more brilliant than light, disclosed, in the midst of the blind matter overhanging them, as it were the mauve, silken wings of a butterfly placed under glass; and her dark, curling hair, presenting different conformations whenever she turned to ask me what she was to play next, now a splendid wing, sharp at the tip, broad at the base, black, feathered and triangular, now massing the contours of its curls in a powerful and varied chain, full of crests, of watersheds, of precipices, with its soft, creamy texture, so rich and so multiple, seeming to exceed the variety that nature habitually achieves and to correspond rather to the desire of a sculpture who accumulates difficulties in order to emphasise the suppleness, the vibrancy, the fullness, the vitality of his creation, brought out more strongly, but interrupting in order to cover it, the animated curve and, as it were, the rotation of the smooth, roseate face, with its glazed matt texture as of painted wood."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 515-516 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 505 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 10, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"She chose pieces which were either quite new or which she had played to me only once or twice, for, beginning to know me better, she was aware that I liked to fix my thoughts only upon what was still obscure to me, and to be able, in the course of these successive renderings, thanks to the increasing but, alas, distorting and alien light of my intellect, to link to one another the fragmentary and interrupted lines of the structure which at first had been almost hidden in mist."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 501 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 10, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fugitive
"It was no longer the same Albertine, because she was not, as at Balbec, incessantly in flight upon her bicycle, impossible to find owing to the number of little watering-places where she would go to spend the night with friends and where moreover her lies made it more difficult to lay hands on her; because, shut up in my house, docile and alone, she was no longer what at Balbec, even when I had succeeded in finding her, she used to be upon the beach, that fugitive, cautious, deceitful creature, whose presence was expanded by the thought of all those assignations which she was skilled in concealing, which made one love her because they made one suffer and because, beneath her coldness to other people and her casual answers, I could sense yesterday's assignation and tomorrow's, and for myself a sly, disdainful thought; because the sea breeze no longer puffed out her skirts; because, above all, I had clipped her wings, and she had ceased to be a winged Victory and become a burdensome slave of whom I would have liked to rid myself."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 500-501 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 10, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"So that, as I raised my eyes for one last look from the outside at the window of the room in which I should presently find myself, I seemed to behold the luminous gates which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the inflexible bars of gold."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 445 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"The carriage drove off. I remained for a moment alone on the pavement. It was true that I endowed those luminous streaks which I could see from below, and which to anyone else would have seemed quite superficial, with the utmost plenitude, solidity, and volume, because of all the significance that I placed behind them, in a treasure unsuspected by the world which I had hidden there and from which those horizontal rays emanated, but a treasure in exchange for which I had forfeited my freedom, my solitude, my thought."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 444-445 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word khedive
"The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon's troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt's Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good."
-- Claudia Roth Pierpont, in "Found in Translation" in The New Yorker's January 18, 2010 issue.
January 23, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word translucent
"From his smile, a tribute to the defunct salon which he saw with his mind's eye, I understood that what Brichot, perhaps without realising it, preferred in the old drawing-room, more than the large windows, more than the gay youth of his hosts and their faithful, was that unreal aspect (which I myself could discern from certain similarities between La Raspelière and the Quai Conti) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else, the actual, external aspect, verifiable by everyone, is but the prolongation, the aspect which has detached itself from the outer world to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives as it were a surplus-value, in which it is absorbed into its habitual substance, transforming itself—houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at suppers which we recall—into that translucent alabaster of our memories of which we are incapable of conveying the colour which we alone can see, so that we can truthfully say to other people, when speaking of the past, that they can have no conception of them, that they are unlike anything they have seen, and that we ourselves cannot inwardly contemplate without a certain emotion, reflecting that it is on the existence of our thoughts that their survival for a little longer depends, the gleam of lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of arbours that will never bloom again."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 379 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word orangeade
"The electric lights would have fused, the pastries would not have arrived in time, the orangeade would have given everybody a stomach-ache. She was the one person not to have here. At the mere sound of her name, as in a fairy-tale, not a note would have issued from the brass; the flute and the oboe would have suddenly lost their voices."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 367 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word voluptuous
"And no doubt they ought to have forgone the voluptuous pleasure of that sacrilege, but it did not express the whole of their natures."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 348 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"But very soon, the triumphant motif of the bells having been banished, dispersed by others, I succumbed once again to the music; and I began to realise that if, in the body of this septet, different elements presented themselves one after another to combine at the close, so also Vinteuil's sonata and, as I later discovered, his other works as well, had been no more than timid essays, exquisite but very slight, beside the triumphal and consummate masterpiece now being revealed to me."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 335 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"The cellist was hunched over the instrument which he clutched between his knees, his head bowed forward, his coarse features assuming an involuntary expression of disgust at the more mannerist moments; another leaned over his double bass, fingering it with the same domestic patience with which he might have peeled a cabbage, while by his side the harpist, a mere child in a short skirt, framed behind the diagonal rays of her golden quadrilateral, recalling those which, in the magic chamber of a sibyl, arbitrarily denote the ether according to the traditional forms, seemed to be picking out exquisite sounds here and there at designated points, just as though, a tiny allegorical goddess poised before the golden trellis of the heavenly vault, she were gathering, one by one, its stars."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 334 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word shimmering
"My joy at having rediscovered it was enhanced by the tone, so friendly and familiar, which it adopted in addressing me, so persuasive, so simple, and yet without subduing the shimmering beauty with which it glowed."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 332 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"As when, in a stretch of country which one thinks one does not know and which in fact one has approached from a new direction, after turning a corner one finds oneself suddenly emerging on to a road every inch of which is familiar, but one had simply not been in the habit of approaching it that way, one suddenly says to oneself: "Why, this is the lane that leads to the garden gate of my friends the X----s; I'm only two minutes from their house," and there, indeed, is their daughter who has come out to greet one as one goes by; so, all of a sudden, I found myself, in the midst of this music that was new to me, right in the heart of Vinteuil's sonata; and, more marvellous than any girl, the little phrase, sheathed, harnessed in silver, glittering with brilliant sonorities, as light and soft as silken scarves, came to me, recognisable in this new guise."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 331-332 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word roseate
"Mme Verdurin sat alone, the twin hemispheres of her pale, slightly roseate brow magnificently bulging, her hair drawn back, partly in imitation of an eighteenth-century portrait, partly from the need for coolness of a feverish person reluctant to reveal her condition, aloof, a deity presiding over the musical rites, goddess of Wagnerism and sick-headaches, a sort of almost tragic Norn, conjured up by the spell of genius in the midst of all these "bores," in whose presence she would scorn even more than usual to express her feelings upon hearing a piece of music which she knew better than they."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 331 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word kakochnyk
"Does a toque really suit that enormous head of hair which a kakochnyk would set off to full advantage?"
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 294 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 20, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 227 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"Before that hour drew near, we had a spell of chiaroscuro, because after we had driven as far as the Seine, where Albertine admired, and by her presence prevented me from admiring, the reflexions of red sails upon the wintry blue of the water, and a tiled house nestling in the distance like a single red poppy against the clear horizon of which Saint-Cloud seemed, further off still, to be the fragmentary, friable, ribbed petrifaction, we left our motor-car and walked a long way."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 227 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"It was definitive, for the lady had returned perhaps to Balbec, had registered perhaps, on the luminous and echoing beach, the absence of Albertine; but she was unaware that the girl was living with me, was wholly mine."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 226 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word bhadralok
"The cooking and eating of food thus became deeply implicated in the cultural politics of bhadralok nationalism."
-- from the abstract of "Nation on a Platter: the Culture and Politics of Food and Cuisine in Colonial Bengal" by Jayanta Sengupta, in Modern Asian Studies volume 44, issue 1: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X09990072
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word prismatic
"'All the poetry that the old quarters contain has been squeezed out to the last drop, but if you look at some of the houses that have been built lately for well-to-do tradesmen in the new districts, where the stone is all freshly cut and still to white, don't they seem to rend the torrid midday air of July, at the hour when the shopkeepers go home to lunch in the suburbs, with a cry as sharp and acidulous as the smell of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the darkened dining-room, where the prismatic glass knife-rests throw off a multicoloured light as beautiful as the windows of Chartres?'"
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 218 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"I had barely time to make out, being separated from them by the glass of the car as effectively as I should have been by that of my bedroom window, a young fruit-seller, or a dairymaid, standing in the doorway of her shop, illuminated by the sunshine like a heroine whom my desire was sufficient to launch upon exquisite adventures, on the threshold of a romance which I should never know."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 216 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word chrysanthemum
"Our motor-car sped along the boulevards and the avenues, whose rows of houses, a pink congelation of sunshine and cold, reminded me of my visits to Mme Swann in the soft light of her chrysanthemums, before it was time to ring for the lamps."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 216 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 11, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"The other musician, he who was delighting me at the moment, Wagner, retrieving some exquisite fragment from a drawer of his writing-table to introduce it, as a retrospectively necessary theme, into a work he had not even thought of at the time he composed it, then having composed a first mythological opera, and a second, and afterwards others still, and perceiving all of a sudden that he had written a tetralogy, must have felt something of the same exhilaration as Balzac when the latter, casting over his books the eye at once of a stranger and of a father, finding in one the purity of Raphael, in another the simplicity of the Gospel, suddenly decided, shedding a retrospective illumination upon them, that they would be better brought together in a cycle in which the same characters would reappear, and touched up his work with a swift brush-stroke, the last and the most sublime."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 205 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word voluptuous
"However much she tried to conceal her awareness of it, it bathed her, enveloped her, vaporous, voluptuous, made her whole face glow."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 193 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word voluptuous
"I remembered the distress that I felt when I saw her face subjected to an active scrutiny, like that of a painter preparing to make a sketch, entirely enveloped in it, and, doubtless on account of my presence, submitting to this contact without appearing to notice it, with a passivity that was perhaps clandestinely voluptuous."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 192 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word translucent
"Surrounding both myself and Albertine there had been this morning (far more than the sunny day) that environment which itself is invisible but through the translucent and changing medium of which we saw, I her actions, she the importance of her own life—that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure, the season, for our days have their own singularity, physical and moral."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 191 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word flavescent
"I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 185 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"In doing so I was like Elstir, who, obliged to remain closeted in his studio, on certain days in spring when the knowledge that the woods were full of violets gave him a hunger to see some, used to send his concierge out to buy him a bunch; and then it was not the table upon which he had posed the little floral model, but the whole carpet of undergrowth where in other years he had seen, in their thousands, the serpentine stems bowed beneath the weight of their tiny blue heads, that Elstir would fancy that he had before his eyes, like an imaginary zone defined in his studio by the limpid odour of the evocative flower."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 178 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 8, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"Besides, in the state of limpid unreason that precedes these heavy slumbers, if fragments of wisdom float there luminously, if the names of Taine and George Eliot are not unknown, the waking state remains none the less superior to the extent that it is possible to continue it every morning, but not to continue the dream life every night."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 155-156 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word transparent
"The iron shutters of the baker's shop and of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over every possibility of feminine bliss, were now being raised, like the canvas of a ship that is getting under way and about to set sail across the transparent sea, on to a vision of young shopgirls."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 144 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word translucent
"Then her sleep would seem to me a marvellous and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 144 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 7, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word etiolated
"When Albertine came back to my room, she was wearing a black satin dress which had the effect of making her seem paler, of turning her into the pallid, intense Parisian woman, etiolated by lack of fresh air, by the atmosphere of crowds and perhaps by the practice of vice, whose eyes seemed the more uneasy because they were not brightened by any colour in her cheeks."
-- The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 127-128 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 5, 2010
knitandpurl commented on the word diaphanous
"Between the two Balbec settings, so different one from the other, there was an interval of several years in Paris, the long expanse of which was dotted with all the visits that Albertine had paid me. I saw her in the different years of my life occupying, in relation to myself, different positions which made me feel the beauty of the intervening spaces, that long lapse of time during which I had remained without seeing her and in the diaphanous depths of which the roseate figure that I saw before me was carved with mysterious shadows and in bold relief. This was due also to the superimposition not merely of the successive images which Albertine had been for me, but also of the great qualities of intelligence and heart, and of the defects of character, all alike unsuspected by me, which Albertine, in a germination, a multiplication of herself, a fleshy efflorescence in sombre colours, had added to a nature that formerly could scarcely have been said to exist, but was now difficult to plumb."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 83 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 29, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"The fugitive and fragmentary pleasure, compounded of mystery and sensuality, which I had felt at Balbec, on the night when she had come to sleep at the hotel, had been completed and stabilised, filling my hitherto empty dwelling with a permanent store of domestic, almost conjugal, ease that radiated even into the passages and upon which all my senses, either actively or, when I was alone, in imagination as I awaited her return, peacefully fed."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 69 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 29, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"I do not say that a day will not come when, even to these luminous girls, we shall assign sharply defined characters, but that will be because they will have ceased to interest us, because their entry upon the scene will no longer be, for our heart, the apparition which it expected to be different and which, each time, leaves it overwhelmed by fresh incarnations."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 79 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 29, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word roseate
"We have been told that some pretty girl is tender, loving, full of the most delicate feelings. Our imagination accepts this assurance, and when we behold for the first time, beneath the woven girdle of her golden hair, the rosy disc of her face, we are almost afraid that this too virtuous sister, cooling our ardour by her very virtue, can never be to us the lover for whom we have been longing. What secrets, however, we confide to her from the first moment, on the strength of that nobility of heart, what plans we make together! But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury. As for the successive facets which after pulsating for some days the roseate light, now eclipsed, presents to us, it is not even certain that a momentum external to these girls has not modified their aspect, and this might well have happened with my band of girls at Balbec."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 77-78 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 29, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word syringa
"On this particular evening, Mme de Guermantes had given me, knowing that I was fond of them, some branches of syringa which had been sent to her from the South. When I left her and went upstairs to our flat, Albertine had already returned, and on the staircase I ran into Andrée, who seemed to be distressed by the powerful smell of the flowers that I was bringing home."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 63-64 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 29, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word vermilion
"I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis who signs himself—as he was christened, as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis, with the same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in vermilion or ultramarine, in a Book of Hours or in a stained-glass window."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 39 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 25, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word batten
I had no recollection of having looked this word up before, but apparently I did! Yet again I encountered it in the sense of "fatten" and was surprised. In The Captive by Proust: "Then, like a famished convalescent already battening upon all the dishes that are still forbidden him ..."
December 25, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word transparent
"The sun's rays fell upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me glow like crystal."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 25 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 25, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word hoar-frost
yarb, excellent! I started The Captive in September but didn't get very far, then kept getting distracted by library books. Now I'm on vacation, which means lots of reading time.
December 25, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word hoar-frost
"The windows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might not be visible from without, were not smooth and transparent but crinkled with an artificial and transparent hoar-frost. All of a sudden, the sun would colour this muslin glass, gild it, and, gently disclosing in my person an earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicate me with memories, as though I were in the heart of the country amidst golden foliage in which even a bird was not lacking."
--The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 3 of the Modern Library paperback edition
December 23, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word spagyrical
"Fifty years before, the glassmaking priest and alchemist Antonio Neri had been enticed into the Antwerp house of the Portuguese nobleman Emanuel Zimines and persuaded to write out his spagyrical secrets in a book published in Florence in 1612 called The Art of Glass."
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott, p 68
December 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word pyracanthas
"Virginia Woolf had once described the riverbanks as being on fire on either side of the Cam, but there was no such fire here now. Or at least not yet. There was red—rowan berries, rose hips, pyracanthas—but the red sat against the astonishing palette of autumn green like the sparks of a newly lit fire, like drops of crimson blood in the hedgerows."
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott, p 109
December 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word brasill
"OK. How did he make red?" Was she laughing at me?
"Can't quite remember. Yes, I can." Blurred words came into focus. "Sheep's blood drained into a bladder, hung out to dry in the sun to make a powder, then mixed with alum water when needed. There was another one in which you boil brasill, whatever that is, and then he writes that if you would have it a 'sad red,' mingle it with potash water; if a light red, temper it with white lead. Christ, I've only read the transcription of that notebook once and I remember it all. What do you think a 'sad red' is?"
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott, p 110
December 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word savin
"There are words for trees that shelter these birds—
low laurels, others that are called liquid-
ambars, cedars, savins, and evergreen oaks—"
from "Stranging" by David Baker, in Never-Ending Birds
November 28, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word trillium
See also: trillium flexipes: "nodding wakerobin" is such a good name!
November 27, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word epiphenomenal
"My epiphenomenal faces retract, and no longer a metal dancer at the hub of a wheel, I take a step, diminish in size, stumble, stoop, fumble on the floor for my robe, laugh a silly laugh, thoroughly un-tranced."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 130 of the Vintage International paperback edition
November 21, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word pastille
"Two, three, four paces down the hall, past a pastille burner, and Billy steers me to the left into a blue-tiled bathroom."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 122 of the Vintage International paperback edition
November 21, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word phthisic
"His hand pumps mine, his a meaty, insensitive hand, the exact opposite of the Hand's phthisic arm which only now releases me."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 105 of the Vintage International paperback edition
November 21, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word chinaberry
"A final flight, short and narrow, as though it were the last resistance to gravity the structure could come up with, passes through glass doors to an open balcony overlooking a charming old garden of chinaberries and variegated mosses and birches peeling in papery white tatters around a pool that undoubtedly spells out a word like heart or mind but has been allowed to revert so thoroughly to nature that its letters, like the snow-weathered features of a marble bust, have lapsed into incoherence."
Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, p 69 of the Vintage International paperback edition
November 20, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word fantod
"Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods."
The Magicians by Lev Grossman, p 397
October 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word aeruginous
"From the uptown end he could just barely see the tiny, hazy, aeruginous spike of the Statue of Liberty out in the bay."
The Magicians by Lev Grossman, pp 394-395
October 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word poniard
"Too many things were happening at once. Quentin's stomach clenched when he realized an elf had singled Alice out and was advancing across the dry basin toward her, twirling a long straight knife—were they called poniards?—in each hand."
The Magicians by Lev Grossman, p 328
October 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word viognier
"Magic," Richard announced slowly, flushed, "is the tools. Of the Maker." He almost never drank, and two glasses of viognier had put him well over his limit. He looked first left and then right to make sure the whole table was listening. What a fatuous ass."
The Magicians by Lev Grossman, p 233
October 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word spinney
"In the middle distance beyond the wide lawn a large house stood, all honey- colored stone and gray slate, adorned with chimneys and gables and towers and roofs and sub- roofs. In the center, over the main house, was a tall, stately clock tower that struck even Quentin as an odd addition to what otherwise looked like a private residence. The clock was in the Venetian style: a single barbed hand circling a face with twenty- four hours marked on it in Roman numerals. Over one wing rose what looked like the green oxidized- copper dome of an observatory. Between house and lawn was a series of inviting landscaped terraces and spinneys and hedges and fountains. Between house and lawn was a series of inviting landscaped terraces and spinneys and hedges and fountains."
- The Magicians by Lev Grossman, p 16
October 5, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word chechem
Black poisonwood, metopium brownei
September 28, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word shura
"To keep the rest of the government informed, and to avoid turf battles, in June Holbrooke and Lieutenant General Doug Lute, the President's adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, started a weekly Monday-evening meeting at the State Department for all the relevant agencies. Lute called it the 'shura.'"
- "The Last Mission" by George Packer, The New Yorker, September 28, 2009, p 47
September 28, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word ipocras
Of Canvey Island: "A place, in William Harrison's words, 'which some call marshes onlie, and liken them to an ipocras bag, some to a vice, scrue, or wide sleeve, because the are verie small at the east end and large at the west'."
-Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, p 441
"A spiced wine taken at the end of a meal as a digestive. The spices were filtered through a jelly bag known to apothecaries as a manicum hippocraticum - the sleeve of Hippocrates. This piece of apparatus gave the drink its name." -- from historicfood.com, which also has recipes.
also spelled ypocras or hippocras
August 23, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word thegn
"The first reference to a stone bridge across the Thames occurs in a document of AD 958 when Eadwig granted to his thegn, Eadrig, the lands "first to the stone bridge and from the stone bridge eastwards along the Thames until it comes to the boundary of the people of King's Hone." King's Hone is now known as Kingston Bagpuize, and the site of the stone bridge is that of the present Radcot Bridge."
- in Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, p 132
August 16, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word thalweg
"The main thrust of the river flow is known to hydrologists as the "thalweg"; it does not move in a straight and forward line but, mingling with the inner flow and the variegated flow of the surface and bottom waters, takes the form of a spiral or helix."
Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, p 4
August 11, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word panatella
"The low cholesterol salt didn't save him, naturally. And neither did the disappearance of the plump Montecristo No. 2s and H. Upmanns, replaced by slim panatellas and Hamlets. Less smoke, same addiction, same awful outcome give or take a few months."
- The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon Garfield, p 29
August 3, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word soffit
"Interior spaces bleed freely into the gardens beyond through projections of wall, soffit and floor, while the forces of nature are freely admitted into the building through expansive apertures, in such a way as neither to render the building fully as an instrument, nor dissolve it into the landscape." (p 279)
John Sadar (2008). The healthful ambience of Vitaglass: light, glass and the curative environment. Architectural Research Quarterly, 12 , pp 269-281
doi:10.1017/S1359135508001206
July 26, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word grig
"'I am obliged to no one, Mrs Newton, and I am only too well aware that you are trying to grig me.'"
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 106
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word draff
"Worked to the bone, clad in rags, fed on husks and draff, infected by tropical fever, he sank into dumb beastliness. For two years his only consolation was a book, a tattered Geometry, and — picture this — when night fell he would repair to the beach and trace out on the sand Euclid's ideal forms by the pure light of the African moon."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 99
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word swive
"'You're drunk, sir," Newton said quite loudly. He was on his feet and was just about to speak even more loudly when he realised that people were looking at him and that the occasion was solemn, so he managed to restrain himself and merely bore down on the astonished Mr Teale and hissed in his ear, 'You're drunk, you swiving bastard, you poxed-up fucking son of a whore.'"
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 93
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word cleg
"Plodding along between high banks of lacy cow parsley, the mare shook her head just once as a hungry cleg found its way into the velvety coolness of her ear."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 87
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word girn
"Really, it was no concern of hers that Mr Cowper's relatives were girning yet again over the cost of his upkeep; it was one thing for a man to have a lackey — and Sam Roberts was an excellent servant — but it was piling Ossa on Pelion for them to learn that he also had a half-orphan boy attending on him."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 85
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word hirple
"As briskly as his bird-like legs allowed, the Reverend Unwin hirpled back to his study."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 84
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word quinsy
"When she was ill in December, quite seriously so, with a quinsy, I wrote the following little hymn. I began to compose it one morning, before daybreak, but fell asleep at the end of the first two lines. When I waked again the third and fourth were whispered to my heart in a way which I have often experienced."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 80
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word snecket
"A piece of verse on the bottom of a page in the newspaper was ringed with red crayon. In the margin, written in black ink, were the words, 'A cricket is a stool but a fool wrote this. And the nobility, where is that?' The verse was headed, 'A Receipt to Cure a Love Fit'.
Tie one end of a rope fast over a beam,
And make a slip-noose at the other extreme;
Then just underneath let a cricket be set,
On which the lover must manfully get;
Then over his head let the snecket be got,
And under one ear be well settled the knot.
The cricket kicked down, let him take a fair swing,
And leave all the rest of the work to the string."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, pp 43-44
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word gamahuche
"'You're not selfish, Mister C; you're bothered, that's all. Think about money, think about happiness, think even about me. They're prizes worth having, ain't they?' She kissed him on the cheek, then broke away to continue her inspection, opening the door to the bedroom. 'Hey, lookee here! The monk's cell. Is this where you gamahuche the boys?'
He didn't know what the word meant, nor did he want to. He waited for a moment, then went in after her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, head bent, hands in her lap, and when she spoke her voice was different."
-- The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, pp 40-41
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word mulligrubs
"The barber chuckled. 'You're a philosopher, sir, a philosopher.'
'I am, but I'm a blue one. I have the blue mulligrubs.'
'The blue mulligrubs?' Cowper said. I think I know them.'"
-- The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 34
July 12, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word caserne
"What a funereal sight the camp at Norman Cross had been! A monumental collection of five or six tall wooden casernes, and in each one a thousand Frenchmen, starving, fed on rotten carrion flesh and bread the hounds would not eat; and the guards, battalions of them, were constantly searching their quarters at bayonet point in case the prisoners had somehow procured for themselves any of the comforts of existence, the which being found they burned in great bonfires in the barrack square beneath the glaring eyeballs and the cursing mouths of the captives."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 4
July 9, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word lorimer
"We might be forgiven for envisaging Birmingham already as mainly a town of metal trades. The smiths, lorimers, and nailers probably made more noise and show, but wills and tax-assessments tell us that the wealthiest townsmen were still tanners and butchers, as in many other Midland towns."
W. G. Hoskins (1956). English Provincial Towns in the Early Sixteenth Century. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series), 6 , pp 1-19
doi:10.2307/3678838
The OED online (definition from the second edition, 1989) says it is "A maker of bits and metal mountings for horses' bridles; also, a spurrier, and (generally) a maker of small iron ware and a worker in wrought-iron. "
June 29, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word carlock
Chambers 20th Century Dictionary says: "a Russian isinglass"
June 26, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word keck
cow parsley
May 11, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word heteronormative
I can see how the academic righteousness can be annoying -- it's like any buzzword, like saying "weltaunschauung" instead of "worldview" just to be pretentious. But the concept of "please don't assume everyone is straight, and please don't assume everyone believes in a binary system of gender, and please don't ignore my identity/relationships just 'cause they're not like yours" seems a useful one.
May 3, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word sheepweed
aka soapwort
April 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word serviceberry
"Also called shadblow, shadbush, juneberry and saskatoon in different areas of the country" (says Horticulture Information).
April 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word serviceberry
"I will make something of you both pigment
and insecticide. Something natural,
even red, like serviceberries."
- from "Still Life, with Gloxinia" in Interior with Sudden Joy by Brenda Shaughnessy
April 7, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word anfractuosity
"Not only did I no longer feel the anxious dread of loneliness which had gripped my heart the first evening; I had no longer any need to fear its reawakening, nor to feel myself a homesick stranger in this land productive not only of chestnut-trees and tamarisks, but of friendships which from beginning to end of the route formed a long chain, interrupted like that of the blue hills, hidden here and there in the anfractuosity of the rock or behind the lime-trees of the avenue, but delegating at each stopping-place an amiable gentleman who came to punctuate my journey with a cordial handclasp, to prevent me from feeling its length, to offer if need be to continue it with me."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 696 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 27, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word penate
"I was so pleased to hear that you have definitely chosen this neighbourhood to set up your taber . . ."
She was going to say "tabernacle" but it occurred to her that the word was Hebraic and discourteous to a Jew who might see some innuendo in it. And so she pulled herself up in order to choose another of the expressions that were familiar to her, that is to say a ceremonious expression: "to set up, I should say, your penates." (It is true that these deities do not appertain to the Christian religion either, but to one which has been dead for so long that it no longer claims any devotees whose feelings one need be afraid of hurting.
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 595-596 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 25, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"I should have preferred not to set out so early; the luminous and burning air provoked thoughts of indolence and cool retreats. It filled my mother's room and mine, according to their exposure, at varying temperatures, like rooms in a Turkish bath."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 534 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 24, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word deliquescent
"But Brichot was determined that I should have my share in the entertainment, and having learned, from those oral examinations which he conducted like nobody else, that the best way to flatter the young is to lecture them, to make them feel important, to make them regard you as a reactionary: 'I have no wish to blaspheme against the Gods of Youth,' he said, with that furtive glance at myself which an orator turns upon a member of his audience when he mentions him by name, 'I have no wish to be damned as a heretic and renegade in the Mallarméan chapel in which our new friend, like all the young men of his age, must have served the esoteric mass, at least as an acolyte, and have shown himself deliquescent or Rosicrucian.'"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 482-483 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 14, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word etheromaniac
"Some have been known to inhale it, but true etheromaniacs drank it."
March 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"From the height we had now reached, the sea no longer appeared, as it did from Balbec, like an undulating range of hills, but on the contrary like the view, from a mountain-peak or from a road winding round its flank, of a blue-green glacier or a glittering plain situated at a lower level."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 401 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 8, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word assart
"Land cleared from a forest to make space for buildings or farmland." -- definition from the Domesday Book Online Glossary
March 8, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"Often, in the hall of the Casino, when two girls were smitten with mutual desire, a sort of luminous phenomenon occurred, as it were a phosphorescent trail flashing from one to the other."
"I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 339 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 8, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 338 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 8, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"But I could not bear to have before my eyes those sea vistas on which my grandmother used to gaze for hours on end; the fresh image of their heedless beauty was at once supplemented by the thought that she could not see them; I should have liked to stop my ears against their sound, for now the luminous plenitude of the beach carved out an emptiness in my heart; everything seemed to me to be saying, like those paths and lawns of a public garden in which I had once lost her, long ago, when I was still a little child: 'We haven't seen her,' and beneath the roundness of the pale vault of heaven I felt crushed as though beneath a huge bluish bell enclosing an horizon from which my grandmother was excluded."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 219 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 21, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word crenellated
"I ceased for some time to see Albertine, but continued, failing Mme de Guermantes who no longer spoke to my imagination, to visit other fairies and their dwellings, as inseparable from themselves as is the pearly or enamelled valve or the crenellated turret of its shell from the mollusc that made it and shelters inside it."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 190 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word annunciation
"Thus, from that nocturnal Paris out of whose depths the invisible message had already wafted into my very room, delimiting the field of action of a faraway person, what was now about to materialise, after this preliminary annunciation, was the Albertine whom I had known long ago beneath the sky of Balbec, when the waiters of the Grand Hotel, as they laid the tables, were blinded by the glow of the setting sun, when, the glass panels having been drawn wide open, the faintest evening breeze passed freely from the beach, where the last strolling couples still lingered, into the vast dining-room in which the first diners had not yet taken their places, and when, in the mirror placed behind the cashier's desk, there passed the red reflexion of the hull and, lingering long, the grey reflexion of the smoke of the last steamer for Rivebelle."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 181-182 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 18, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word voluptuous
"This effort on the part of the old feeling to combine and form a single element with the other, more recent, which had for its voluptuous object only the coloured surface, the flesh-pink bloom of a flower of the sea-shore, was one that often results simply in creating (in the chemical sense) a new body, which may last only a few moments."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 179-180 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word mauve
"As I listened to these words of excuse, uttered as though she did not intend to come, I felt that, with the longing to see again the velvet-soft face which in the past, at Balbec, used to direct all my days towards the moment when, by the mauve September sea, I should be beside that roseate flower, a very different element was painfully endeavouring to combine."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 179 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word delight
"And I sat there, unable to take my eyes from the strip which persisted in remaining dark; I bent my whole body forward to make certain of noticing any change; but, gaze as I might, the the vertical black band, despite my impassioned longing, did not give me the intoxicating delight that I should have felt had I seen it changed by a stroke of sudden and significant magic to a luminous bar of gold."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 174 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 13, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word agelast
"Such (meta)satire not only labels Osborne a carnival agelast or unlaughing lenten hypocrite (Bakhtin 212-13) like Carroll's Queen of Hearts, but also suggests the dystopian undercurrents of carnival that post-Bakhtinians like Michael André Bernstein stress: 'when the tropes of Saturnalian reversal of all values spill over into daily life, they usually do so with a savagery that is the grim underside of their exuberant affirmations' (6)."
Mark M. Hennelly (2009). ALICE'S ADVENTURES AT THE CARNIVAL. Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 , pp 103-128 (p 106)
doi:10.1017/S106015030909007X
February 11, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word cicisbeo
"'You won't come with us to the ball?' he asked me. 'I can lend you a Venetian cloak and I know someone who will be deucedly glad to see you there—Oriane for one, that goes without saying—but the Princesse de Parme. She never tires of singing your praises, and swears by you. It's lucky for you—since she's a trifle mature— that she is a model of virtue. Otherwise she would certainly have taken you on as a cicisbeo, as they used to say in my young days, a sort of cavaliere servente.'"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 168 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 6, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word fugitive
"But what peace of mind, after having been perpetually troubled by my restless desires for so many fugitive creatures whose very names I often did not know and who were in any case so hard to find, harder still to get to know, impossible perhaps to conquer, to have drawn from all that scattered, fugitive, anonymous beauty two choice specimens duly labelled, whom I was at least certain of being able to procure when I wished!"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 166-167 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 6, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word azure
"Tossing her head like a royal palfrey embarrassed by its halter of pearls, of an incalculable value but an inconvenient weight, she let fall here and there a soft and charming gaze, of an azure which, as it gradually began to fade, became more caressing still, and greeted most of the departing guests with a friendly nod."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 163 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 6, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word glittering
"And, indeed, on a chair drawn up to the glittering inaugural table, M. de Charlus in person, never touching a card, oblivious of what was going on around him, incapable of observing that I had entered the room, seemed precisely a magician applying all the force of his will and reason to drawing a horoscope."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 119 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 4, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word evanescent
"The similarity between the evanescent greetings of the Duchesse de Lambresac and those of my grandmother's friends had begun to arouse my interest by showing me how in all narrow and closed societies, be they those of the minor gentry or of the great nobility, the old manners persist, enabling us to recapture, like an archaeologist, something of the upbringing, and the ethos it reflects, that prevailed in the days of the Vicomte d'Arlincourt and Loiisa Puget."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 110 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 3, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word languid
"At Combray and in Paris, all my grandmother's friends were in the habit of greeting one another at a social gathering with as seraphic an air as if they had caught sight of someone of their acquaintance in church, at the moment of the Elevation or during a funeral, and were offering him a languid greeting which ended in prayer."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 110 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 3, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word ephemeral
"Her lists were made up and closed, so that while she wandered slowly through the Princess's rooms dropping into one ear after another: 'You won't forget tomorrow,' she had the ephemeral glory of averting her eyes, while continuing to smile, if she caught sight of some ugly duckling who was to be avoided or some country squire for whom the bond of a schoolboy friendship had secured admission to 'Gilbert's,' and whose presence at her garden-party would be no gain."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 96 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 2, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word whist
"I had plenty of time (as he was pretending to be absorbed in a fictitious game of whist which enabled him to appear not to notice people) to admire the deliberate, artful simplicity of his evening coat which, by the merest trifles which only a tailor's eye could have picked out, had the air of a 'Harmony in Black and White' by Whistler; black, white and red, rather, for M. de Charlus was wearing, suspended from a broad ribbon over his shirt-front, the cross, in white, black and red enamel, of a Knight of the religious Order of Malta."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, pp 70-71 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 2, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word orangeade
"I was yielding to a purely sensual desire, although we were at that torrid period of the year when sensuality, released, is more readily inclined to visit the organs of taste, and seeks coolness above all. More than for the kiss of a girl, it thirsts for orangeade, for a bath, or even to gaze at that peeled and juicy moon that was quenching the thirst of heaven."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 61 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 2, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word whirl
"In offering me this greeting, she executed around me, holding me by the hand, a graceful pirouette, by the whirl of which I felt myself swept away."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 51 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 2, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word incandescence
"But now the guests for the reception were beginning to arrive and the lady of the house was seated not far from the door—erect and proud in her quasi-regal majesty, her eyes ablaze with their own incandescence—between two unattractive highnesses and the Spanish Ambassadress."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 48 of the Modern Library paperback edition
February 2, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word transparent
"When I followed my instinct only, the jellyfish used to revolt me at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard them, like Michelet, from the standpoint of natural history and aesthetics, I saw an exquisite blue girandole. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea?"
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 36 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 24, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"But the latter has obtained promotion, has been transferred to the other end of the country; the solitary will no longer be able to go and ask him the times of the trains or the price of a first-class ticket, and, before retiring to dream, Griselda-like, in his tower, loiters upon the beach, a strange Andromeda whom no Argonaut will come to free, a sterile jellyfish that must perish on the sand, or else he stands idly on the platform until his train leaves, casting over the crowd of passengers a look that will seem indifferent, disdainful or abstracted to those of another race, but, like the luminous glow with which certain insects bedeck themselves in order to attract others of their species, or like the nectar which certain flowers offer to attract the insects that will fertilise them, would not deceive the connoisseur (barely possible to find) of a pleasure too singular, too hard to place, which is offered him, the confrère with whom our specialist could converse in the strange tongue—in which at best some ragamuffin on the platform will put up a show of interest, but for material gain alone, like those people who, at the Collège de France, in a room in which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures without an audience, attend his course only for the sake of keeping warm."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 36 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 24, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word cit
Wiktionary says "1. (archaic) townsman, citydweller (term of contempt)" (here)
As in: "'To return to young men not of the lower orders,' the Baron went on, 'at the present moment my head has been turned by a strange little fellow, an intelligent little cit who shows with regard to myself a prodigious want of civility'."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 16 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 22, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word clandestine
"Certainly, the affairs of this sort of which I have been a spectator have always been, as far as their setting is concerned, of the most imprudent and least probable character, as if such revelations were to be the reward of an action full of risk, though in part clandestine."
--Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, p 10 of the Modern Library paperback edition
January 22, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word ingenio
sugar mill -- I came across the word in Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit
January 8, 2009
knitandpurl commented on the word chautauqua
"The Sophists, however, functioned something like the chautauquas and public lecturers in nineteenth-century America, who went from place to place delivering talks to audiences hungry for information and ideas."
- Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, p 15 of the Verso paperback edition (2006)
December 24, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word milkmaids
Cardamine californica, or California Toothwort. In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes: "I wasn't sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine that can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers." (p 5)
December 24, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word tain
"The sidewalks were gray and uneven, and the sky looked like a mirror without a tain, the place where everything should have been reflected but where, in the end, nothing was."
-"Meeting with Enrique Lihn" by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, in the New Yorker, Dec 22 and 29, 2008, pp 80-81
December 22, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word annoy
"Today, the meaning of annoy is mild – 'vex, irritate'. But when the word first came into English from French in the fourteenth century, it had a much stronger sense – 'to be hateful or odious' to someone. By the time of the Civil War it had developed meanings of 'injure, harm', especially in a military context."
David Crystal, By Hook Or By Crook, p 214
December 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word hobbity-hoy
Talking about possible sources for the word "hobbit," David Crystal writes that "it might be a shortened form of hobbity-hoy, a variant form of hobbledehoy."
(By Hook or By Crook p 203)
December 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word courbaril
"–ril is not an expected word-ending. There are probably fewer than a dozen words in English ending in –ril. Most are unusual words, such as umbril and courbaril. Only four – April, Avril, peril, and nostril – are at all common."
David Crystal, By Hook or By Crook p 200
December 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word sallow
I hadn't known a sallow was a willow until reading a book by David Crystal in which he talks about a "leah overgrown with sallows."
December 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word isogram
David Crystal says that an isogram isn't necessarily a word in which no letter is repeated, but a letter in which the letters have the same frequency. "But to the ludic linguist, Wilmcote is a first-order isogram, or heterogram. Not a very interesting one, admittedly, but a first-order isogram nonetheless.
An isogram is a word in which the letters turn up an equal number of times. In a first-order isogram, each letter appears just once: dialogue is an example. In a second-order isogram, each letter appears twice: deed is an example. Longer examples are hard to find: they include Vivienne, Caucasus, intestines, and (important for a phonetician to know this) bilabial. In a third-order isogram, each letter appears three times. These are very rare, unusual words such as deeded ('conveyed by deed'), sestettes (a variant spelling of sextets), and geggee ('victim of a hoax)."
By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 192
December 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word isogram
David Crystal says that an isogram isn't necessarily a word in which no letter is repeated, but a letter in which the letters have the same frequency. "But to the ludic linguist, Wilmcote is a first-order isogram, or heterogram. Not a very interesting one, admittedly, but a first-order isogram nonetheless.
An isogram is a word in which the letters turn up an equal number of times. In a first-order isogram, each letter appears just once: dialogue is an example. In a second-order isogram, each letter appears twice: deed is an example. Longer examples are hard to find: they include Vivienne, Caucasus, intestines, and (important for a phonetician to know this) bilabial. In a third-order isogram, each letter appears three times. These are very rare, unusual words such as deeded ('conveyed by deed'), sestettes (a variant spelling of sextets, and geggee ('victim of a hoax)."
By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 192
December 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word shog
"Shog is Elizabethan English: it means 'go away, move along'. Historically, it relates to such 'movement' words as shock and shake."
By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 182
December 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word vexillographic
"I relaxed. The Shakespeare vexillographic canon would be complete.
Interesting coinage, vexillology, 'the study of flags'. It dates only from the 1950s. The vexillum was a type of banner used by the Roman legions. It wasn't flown from the top of a pole, as modern flags are. Rather, its top side was fastened to a crossbar fixed across the top of a spear."
By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 168
December 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cornel
"Dogberry is an old name for a kind of shrub (the wild cornel) and Verges is probably a dialect form of verjuice, meaning 'sour-faced'. Costard is a large apple, thus a word often applied to heads – in effect, 'bighead'."
-David Crystal By Hook or by Crook, p 160
December 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word adder
"With adder, the 'n-swapping' went the other way round. Old English a nadder became an adder."
-By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 93
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word nickname
"Nickname comes from an Old English expression, an eke name. Eke meant 'also'. It was your 'other' name. Over time, the n of an got transferred to the beginning of eke. An eke became a neke. The pronunciation changed, and the spelling, and eventually we get the modern word."
-By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 92
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word upping
"There is an annual census of the swan population on parts of the River Thames called 'Swan Upping' – 'upping' because the birds are picked 'up' out of the water. It dates from the twelfth century and takes place during the third week of July."
-By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, p 92
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word grathely
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal -- in an account of an old man who'd been a coal miner in Durham, and remembered the dialect they used in the pits: "In his account he used several general words from the local dialect, such as grathely ('tidy') and ettle ('arrange'), both Old Norse words that came into English in the Middle Ages" (p 86).
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word starling
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal: "It is from Old English, steor + ling, 'spotted'. In the eighteenth century, two men who slept with the same woman were said to be brother-starlings. In the nineteenth century, the police used to refer to someone under surveillance as a starling – a person who had been 'spotted', a 'marked man'." (p 81)
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cheppy
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal: "For instance, there was a survey of bird-names done in Yorkshire in the 1950s. It turned out that the local word for 'starling' was cheppy in the extreme north-west of the county, but jibby in the coastal areas of the North and East Ridings. If you went into the Wolds, the Vale of Pickering, or the North Riding moors, it was called jibby. In the upper valleys of the Wharfe, Aire, and Calder it was shebby. And in the Vale of York, Hambleton, Ampleforth, and the Cleveland Hills it was shippy." (p 81)
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word bracteate
"In 1981 a farmer found a gold bracteate – a kind of medallion, fashioned with eyelets so that it could be worn around the neck – at Undley Common, near Lakenheath in Suffolk."
- David Crystal, By Hook or By Crook p 44
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word calash
David Crystal writes of a toll-board sign in Porthmadog in Wales from the early nineteenth century, which begins thus: "For every Horse or other Beast of Draught drawing any Coach, Sociable, Berlin, Landau, Chariot, Vis-a-Vis, Chaise, Calash, Chais-marine, Curricle, Chair, Gig, Whisky, Caravan, Hearse, Litter, Waggon, Wain, Cart, Dray, or other Carriage, any Sum not exceeding One Shilling:"
(By Hook or By Crook, p 38)
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cob
From By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal: "Cob – or cobb, as it is sometimes spelled – is a curious word. It has a remarkable range of senses, some dating back to the fifteenth century. At one time or another it has referred to a well-built man, a type of gull, a herring, a male swan, a stout horse, and a spider (think of cobweb). Small haystacks, loaves of bread, certain types of nut, the tops of maize shoots, and even testicles have also been called cobs, as have Spanish dollars (the famous 'pieces of eight'), lumps of building material for walls, and small rounded stones for roadways, more commonly called cobble stones." (p 36)
And: "To give someone a cob can mean to hit them. To have a cob on is to be in a bad mood. To get a cob on is to become sulky." (p 37)
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word blurb
David Crystal writes about the origin of blurb in By Hook or By Crook. Crystal tells the Gelett Burgess story and writes: "In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, he defined his own term:
1 A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.
2 Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher."
(Crystal, p 25)
I like the second one!
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word daylights
As in "to scare the living daylights out of" someone. David Crystal writes about this in By Hook or By Crook as follows: "The plural of daylight is known from the eighteenth century. Henry Fielding is the first recorded user, in Chapter 10 of his novel Amelia. During a lively piece of prison table-talk we hear one woman say of another, who has called her a 'good woman': 'Good woman! I don't use to be so treated. If the lady says such another word to me, d—n me, I will darken her daylights.' 'Black her eyes,' we would say these days. Daylights was slang for 'eyes'." (p 71)
Crystal goes on to talk about how "daylights" then came to mean other vital organs, not just they eyes, and says that "the living daylights" "seems to have arisen in the late nineteenth century. It became popular about fifty years later" (ibid.).
December 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cleek
David Crystal writes: "And I hadn't realized that classic crooks have hooks at both ends, one larger than the other. One is large enough to catch hold of a sheep's neck; the other end is smaller, for catching hold of the hind foot. He called it a 'leg cleek." (pp 8-9)
And then: "It seems to have been a Scottish word originally, in the fifteenth century. A hook for catching hold of something, or pulling something, or hanging something up. Fishermen used it a lot. And then it turned up again in the nineteenth century, in gold, referring to a type of club." (p 9)
And: "In parts of Scotland, to this day, if someone calls you cleeky, they mean you're grasping, captious." (p 9)
And: "And in the jazz era it turned up again, meaning a wet blanket at a party, a party-pooper. Beatniks in the US used it in the 1960s for any sad or melancholy person." (p 9)
If you can't tell, I just started reading By Hook or By Crook by David Crystal, and am loving it so far.
December 14, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word spencer
See this page for more on the type of jacket.
December 12, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word gamp
"The gamps and bonnets, the white gym-shoes, the bottles and the mildew king, the singing mortuary man, the Rose of Tralee, swam together in the snuggery ..." - Dylan Thomas in "Old Garbo," in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, p 96 of the New Directions Paperbook edition
December 9, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word sideboards
Dylan Thomas, in "Old Garbo," in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, writes: "Most of the boys were there already. Some wore the outlines of moustaches, others had sideboards and crimped hair, some smoked curved pipes and talked with them gripped between their teeth, there were pin-stripe trousers and hard collars, one daring bowler." (p 89 of the New Directions Paperbook edition)
December 9, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word frail
Dylan Thomas uses this, presumably in the sense of "a container that is usually woven and has handles," in "Old Garbo" in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog:
"I made my way through the crowds: the Valley men, up for the football; the country shoppers; the window-gazers; the silent, shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in isolation in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women in black, brooched dresses carrying frails; smart girls in shining mackintoshes and splashed stockings; little dandy lascars, bewildered by the weather; business men with wet spats; through a mushroom forest of umbrellas; and all the time I thought of the paragraphs I would never write. I'll put you all in a story by and by." (pp 88-89 of the New Directions Paperbook edition)
December 9, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word abyssinia
slang: "I'll be seeing you." See http://www.paperdragon.com/1939/slang.html. Also, it's in "Just Like Little Dogs" by Dylan Thomas:
"We all shook hands.
'See you again,' said Walter.
'I'm always hanging about,' said Tom.
'Abyssinia!'" (p 60 of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog)
December 6, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word moochin
The OED online says: "A difficult or disagreeable person, esp. a child. Sometimes used as a scolding term of reproach. (In quots. only from the writings of Dylan Thomas.)"
December 5, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word bray
There's also the sense of "to crush or grind fine," or "to spread thin" -- see Merriam-Webster
December 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word tonga
also a "light 2-wheeled vehicle for two or four persons drawn by one horse and common in India" (definition from Merriam Webster)
November 29, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word esker
"Love could be an embankment, even an esker, or Customs; or a sailing ship, noisy at the horizon."
C.S. Giscombe, "Palaver," p 8 in Prairie Style
November 25, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word rampe leaf
See Asian herbs: "screw pine leaf = screwpine leaf = bai toey = bai touy = pandanus leaf = daun pandan = pandan leaf = kewra = rampe leaf"
November 24, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word prehend
The Chambers Dictionary (New Ninth Edition) also defines this as "to apprehend without conscious perception."
November 9, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word pendant
"anything attached to another thing of the same kind, an appendix: a companion picture, poem, etc." (from the Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, New Edition, 1983)
As in "In a pendant essay called "The Procession of Flowers," Higginson followed the seasons of New England from the first flowering arbutus among the lingering snows of April to the late-blooming fall blossoms heralding the coming of winter."
-- A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, p 18
October 16, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word evanescent
"Adrift in a new world of often devastating change, they found meaning in the shifting light on a river at dawn, or the evanescent flash of a hummingbird's flight."
- A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, p 4
October 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word honeysuckle
and a picture
October 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word heliotrope
and a picture
October 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word hyacinth
On Emily Dickinson's garden:
"She never left the house except to tend the hyacinths and heliotrope in her garden, or to cut back the cascading honeysuckle, which, as her niece next door observed, 'lured the hummingbirds all day'."
from A Summer of Hummingbirds" by Christopher Benfey, p 3
(and a picture)
October 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word adrift
"This book is about a cluster of American artists and writers adrift during the seismic upheaval of the Civil War and its wrenching aftermath."
and
"Who could have less in common than Mark Twain, adrift on the Mississippi, and Emily Dickinson, secluded in her father's house on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts?"
-- from A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey, pp 2-3
October 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word nautch
"The world moves so much—shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you're in it rather than looking at it."
--Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, p 255
September 29, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word hawthorn
"When all was said, the stories I had heard at Mme de Guermantes's, very different in this respect from what I had felt in the case of the hawthorns, or when I tasted a madeleine, remained alien to me."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 756 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 29, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word keiretsu
"All apartments in Paris that you would long to live in belong to the domaine privé. This is to say not that they all belong to the city government but that they can be obtained only through membership in one or another of the political or literary or fashionable keiretsus that dominate Paris."
-- Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, p 23
September 23, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word iridescence
"But as these faces, different in this respect from those of the party around me, were not overlaid for me by any residue of physical experience or social mediocrity, they remained, in their handsome outlines and rainbow iridescence, homogeneous with those names which at regular intervals, each of a different hue, detached themselves from the genealogical tree of Guermantes, and disturbed with no foreign or opaque matter the translucent, alternating, multicoloured buds which like the ancestors of Jesus in the old Jesse windows, blossomed on either side of the tree of glass."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 744 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word margravine
wife of a margrave
September 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word lime-blossom
"Old friends of M. and Mme Guermantes came in to see them after dinner, 'with the tooth-picks' as Mme Swann would have said, without being expected, and took in winter a cup of lime-blossom tea in the lighted warmth of the great drawing-room, in summer a glass of orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden outside."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 703of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 11, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word deliquescent
"'Don't listen to him, Ma'am, he's having you on; she's as stupid as a (h'm) goose,' came in a loud and husky voice from Mme de Guermantes, who, a great deal more 'old world' even than the Duke when she wasn't trying, often deliberately sought to be, but in a manner entirely different from the deliquescent, lace jabot style of her husband and in reality far more subtle, with a sort of almost peasant pronunciation which had a harsh and delicious flavour of the soil."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 664-665 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"A certainty of taste in the domain not of aesthetics but of behaviour, which when he was faced by a novel combination of circumstances enabled the man of breeding to grasp at once—like a musician who has been asked to play a piece he has never seen—the attitude and the action required and to apply the appropriate mechanism and technique, and then allowed this taste to be exercised without the constraint of any other consideration by which so many young men of the middle class would have been paralysed from fear both of making themselves ridiculous in the eyes of strangers by a breach of propriety and of appearing over-zealous in those of their friends, and which in Robert's case was replaced by a lofty disdain that certainly he had never felt in his heart but had received by inheritance in his body, and that had fashioned the attitudes of his ancestors into a familiarity which, they imagined, could only flatter and enchant those to whom it was addressed; together with a noble liberality which, far from taking undue heed of his boundless material advantages (lavish expenditure in this restaurant had succeeded in making him, here as elsewhere, the most fashionable customer and the general favourite, a position underlined by the deference shown him not only by the waiters but by all its most exclusive young patrons), led him to trample them underfoot, just as he had actually and symbolically trodden upon those crimson benches, suggestive of some ceremonial way which pleased my friend only because it enabled him more gracefully and swiftly to arrive at my side: such were the quintessentially aristocratic qualities that shone through the husk of his body—not opaque and dim as mine would have been, but limpid and revealing—as, through a work of art, the industrious, energetic force which has created it, and rendered the movements of that light-footed course which Robert had pursued along the wall as intelligible and charming as those of horsemen on a marble frieze."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 566-567 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word translucent
"If I had sought to reproduce in a piece of writing the material in which my most insignificant memories of Rivebelle appeared to me to be carved, I should have had to vein with pink, to render at once translucent, compact, cool and resonant, a substance hitherto analogous to the sombre, rugged sandstone of Combray."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 545 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word shimmering
"Weary, resigned, occupied for several hours still with its immemorial task, the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade, and it saddened me to think that I was to be left alone with a thing that knew me no more than would a seamstress who, installed by the window so as to see better while she finishes her work, pays no attention to the person present with her in the room."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 479 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word transparent
"The grey light, falling like a fine rain, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared in a silvery sheen."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 474 of the Modern Library paperback edition
September 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word brelan
French card game
September 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word amaranthine
"But in order that I should not be disappointed by the words that I should hear uttered by a person who called herself Mme de Guermantes, even if I had not been in love with her, it would not have sufficed that those words be shrewd, beautiful, and profound, they would have had to reflect that amaranthine colour of the closing syllable of her name, that colour which on first seeing her I had been disappointed not to find in her person and had fancied as having taken refuge in her mind."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 280 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word counter-jumper
"A draper’s assistant, who jumps over the counter to go from one part of the shop to another."
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word roseate
"But I responded to her complaints only with a languid smile; all the more indifferent to these predictions in that whatever happened in would be fine for me; already, I could see the morning sun shining on the slope of Fiesole, and I warmed myself smilingly in its rays; their strength obliged me to half-open and half-shut my eyelids, which, like alabaster lamps, were filled with a roseate glow."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 195 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word shimmering
"One morning, after several weeks of showers and storms, I heard in my chimney—instead of the formless, elastic, sombre wind which stirred in me a longing to go to the sea—the cooing of the pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 186-187 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word luminous
"When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky but held back by the chill of those last autumn mornings, so luminous and so cold, which herald winter, in order to look at the trees on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few strokes of gold or pink which seemed to have been left in the air, on an invisible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like a chrysalis in the process of metamorphosis, I was a dual creature whose different parts were not adapted to the same environment; for my eyes, colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on the other hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 111 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cineraria
"I walked down a long gallery which displayed to me successively all that it had to offer me if I could not sleep, an armchair placed in a corner, a spinet, a blue porcelain vase filled with cinerarias on a console table, and, in an old frame, the phantom of a lady of long ago with powdered hair mingled with blue flowers, holding in her hand a bunch of carnations."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 105 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word orris-root
"And the room was prolonged in depth by two closets as wide as itself, one of which had hanging from its wall, to scent the occasion on which one had recourse to it, a voluptuous rosary of orris-roots; the doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this innermost retreat, were not content with tripling its dimensions without spoiling its harmonious proportions, and not only allowed my eyes to enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but added further to the pleasure of my solitude—which, while still inviolable, was no longer shut in—the sense of liberty."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 104 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word magnolia
"The man who has become completely deaf cannot even heat a pan of milk by his bedside without having to keep an eye open to watch, on the tilted lid, fr the white hyperborean reflexion, like that of a coming snowstorm, which is the premonitory sign it is wise to obey by cutting off (as the Lord stilled the waves) the electric current; for already the fitfully swelling egg of the boiling milk is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong undulations, puffs out and fills a few drooping sails that had been puckered by the cream, sending a nacreous spinnaker bellying out in the hurricane, until the cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is exorcised in time, will make them all twirl round on themselves and scatter like magnolia petals."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 94-95 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word madrepore
"I gazed on this momentary apotheosis with a perturbation which was partly soothed by feeling that I myself was unknown to the Immortals; the Duchess had indeed seen me once with her husband, but could surely have kept no memory of that, and I was not distressed that she should find herself, owing to the position that she occupied in the box, gazing down upon the nameless, collective madrepores of the audience in the stalls, for I was happily aware that my being was dissolved in their midst, when, at the moment in which, by virtue of the laws of refraction, the blurred shaped of the protozoon devoid of any individual existence which was myself must have come to be reflected in the impassive current of those two blue eyes, I saw a ray illumine them: the Duchess, goddess turned woman, and appearing in that moment a thousand times more lovely, raised towards me the white-gloved hand which had been resting on the balustrade of the box and waved it in token of friendship; my gaze was caught in the spontaneous incandescence of the flashing eyes of the Princess, who had unwittingly set them ablaze merely by turning her head to see who it might be that her cousin was thus greeting: and the latter, who had recognized me, poured upon me the sparkling and celestial shower of her smile."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 68-69 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word refinement
"Perhaps Mme de Guermantes would smile next day when she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, which the Princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that the latter had been none the less quite lovely and marvellously got up; and the Princess, whose own tastes found something a little cold, a little austere, a little "tailor-made" in her cousin's way of dressing, would discover in this strict sobriety an exquisite refinement."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 63 of the Modern Library paperback edition
August 4, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word anfractuosity
"Within the boundaries of their domain, however, the radiant daughters of the sea were constantly turning round to smile up at the bearded tritons who clung to the anfractuosities of the cliff, or towards some aquatic demi-god whose skull was a polished stone on to which the tide had washed a smooth covering of seaweed, and his gaze a disc of rock crystal."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 44-45 of the Modern Library paperback edition
July 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word hyacinthine
"Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night which they embroidered, and, raising themselves toward the light, allowed their half-naked bodies to emerge into the chiaroscuro of the surface where their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 44 of the Modern Library paperback edition
July 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"Then in the depths of this name the castle mirrored in its lake had faded, and what now became apparent to me, surrounding Mme de Guermantes as her dwelling, had been her house in Paris, the Hôtel de Guermantes, limpid like its name, for no material and opaque element intervened to interrupt and occlude its transparency."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 9 of the Modern Library paperback edition
July 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word crenellated
"A two-dimensional castle, no more indeed than a strip of orange light, from the summit of which the lord and his lady disposed of the lives and deaths of their vassals, had given place—right at the end of the "Guermantes Way" along which, on so many summer afternoons, I followed with my parents the course of the Vivonne—to that land of bubbling streams where the Duchess taught me to fish for trout and to know the names of the flowers whose red and purple clusters adorned the arches of the neighbouring gardens; then it had been the ancient heritage, the poetic domain from which the proud race of Guermantes, like a mellow crenellated tower that traverses the ages, had risen already over France, at a time when the sky was still empty at those points where later were to rise Notre-Dame of Paris and Notre-Dame of Chartres; a time when on the summit of the hill of Laon the nave of its cathedral had not yet been poised like the Ark of the Deluge on the summit of Mount Ararat, crowded with Patriarchs and Judges anxiously leaning from its windows to see whether the wrath of God has yet subsided, carrying with it specimens of the plants that will multiply on the earth, brimming over with animals which have even climbed out through the towers, between which oxen grazing calmly on the roof look down over the plains of Champagne; when the traveller who left Beauvais at the close of day did not yet see, following him and turning with his road, the black, ribbed wings of the cathedral spread out against the golden screen of the western sky."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 6-7 of the Modern Library paperback edition
July 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word prismatic
"But even apart from rare moments such as these, in which suddenly we feel the original entity quiver and resume its form, carve itself out of syllables now dead, if in the dizzy whirl of daily life, in which they serve only the most practical purpose, names have lost all their colour, like a prismatic top that spins too quickly and seems only grey, when, on the other hand, we reflect upon the past in our day-dreams and seek, in order to recapture it, to slacken, to suspend the perpetual motion by which we are borne along, gradually we see once more appear, side by side but entirely distinct from one another, the tints which in the course of our existence have been successively presented to us by a single name."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 5-6 of the Modern Library paperback edition
July 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word hawthorn
"And the name Guermantes of those days is also like one of those little balloons which have been filled with oxygen or some other gas; when I come to prick it, to extract its contents from it, I breathe the air of the Combray of that year, of that day, mingled with a fragrance of hawthorn blossom blown by the wind from the corner of the square, harbinger of rain, which now sent the sun packing, now let it spread itself over the red woolen carpet of the sacristy, clothing it in a bright geranium pink and in that, so to speak, Wagnerian sweetness and solemnity in joy that give such nobility to a festive occasion."
--The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 5 of the Modern Library paperback edition
July 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word maguey
"The shy mimosa opened at his glance; the spiky maguey drooped at his touch, its barbs turned soft and pliant."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, p 237
July 11, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word balata
"By and by, after a few years, Mack and Raiss let me share in the profits in my district, a tiny share, but enough to give me some surplus income, which I invested in a little island smack in the Amazon, where I planted rubber trees and tobacco, coffee and cocoa, and drew a high yield of balata gum and oil from the juicy kernels of the babassu palm, which I rafted down to Pará."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, p 170
July 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word macumba
"The Americas were my district, a territory where you made a pile of money in a month of sweat and lost it in a night of gambling and women, where the Southern Cross blinked out its torrid message in the hot sky—WELCOME TO SOUTH AMERICA, CONTINENT OF CONTRASTS AND ROMANCE—not my kind of territory at first, hard and gritty and tough on the liver for a pure white man, yet once it got in your blood, you couldn't get over it even if you lived five lives more, because that macumba magic gets under the skin, those nights on the sand of the copacabana with the jet black mountains at your back and that purple ocean before your eyes, savage and sexy like a jaguar prowling for porterhouse steaks in a summer rain, or out there on the grassy flatness they call the pampas, under the stars so close down to a man he can touch 'em with his fingertips, so close he'd have to crawl on his belly just to get to his blanket spaced between sky and earth ... Well, sirs, a man gets to love it so much it near spoils 'im for any other life."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, p 168
July 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word algid
"Perhaps this new Viennese science would explain my shirking of a higher education as a revenge against my hypereducated parents, whom by this stage in my life I presumably would have or should have detested, and the proponents of this science would be in some part correct, for detest them I did, but not for their negligence of me when a child or for their benign and distinctly algid treatment of me during my adolescence, but for reasons I shall not enter into here, and as for education and learning, why, I revered these, in spite of their being the trademarks, so to speak of my parents' whole being, so I would not likely have denied myself the education open to me merely to do these parents spiritual injury."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, p 151
July 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word estivate
"I suppose I passed my youth in the amateur fashion common to certain youths born to a gracious life, to the luxury, calm, and voluptuousness of my generation—never mind which precisely—of European bourgeoisie who estivated on the North Sea or Atlantic coast rather than the Mediterranean or by placid Alpine lakes rather than along the lagoons and grand hotels of Venice."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, p 135
July 10, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word larboard
"Once, in the middle of dessert, he attacked Pimento with a carving knife he had tucked away in his belt. 'Avast! Pirates larboard. Repel boarders,' he shouted, lunging at the surprised man's throat, just as some lemon sherbet was coolly passing down it."
-Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, pp 75-76
July 9, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word latifundia
"Things for us here are elemental. We require the elimination of the latifundia and the ownership of huge estates by absentee landlords; we must return to the communal system of our ancestors."
- Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, p 37
July 8, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word koulibiaca
"... she put on a pink meal — ham au Vertus in aspic, koulibiaca of salmon in aurora sauce, wild duck with vineyard peach, pink champagne, etc. ..."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 343
June 19, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word quetsch
"The lower level of the rack holds five bottles of fruit brandies: kirsch, apricot, quetsch, plum, raspberry."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 325
Though quetsch is apparently a variety of plum brandy, according to http://www.foodsubs.com/Brandy.html
June 17, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word chaud-froid
According to Peter Hertzmann, "In its classic preparation, a chaud-froid dish consists of cooked poultry that is cooled and then coated with a jellied white or brown sauce."
June 16, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cos lettuce
Romaine
June 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word petits-suisses
cheese
June 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word pretty-by-night
a flower, also known as four o'clock flower, marvel of Peru
June 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word pretty-by-night
a flower, also known as four o'clock flower, marvel of Peru
June 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word pretty-by-night
a flower, also known as four o'clock flower, marvel of Peru
June 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word chemin de fer
"He wanted, so he said, to sort the labels into order, but it was very difficult: of course, there was chronological order, but he found it poor, even poorer than alphabetical order. He had tried by continents, then by country, but that didn't satisfy him. What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else: for example, the could have some detail in common, a mountain or volcano, an illuminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of a groom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface, or similar slogans ("Pearl of the Ocean", "Diamond of the Coast"), or a relationship based not on similarity but on opposition or association: a minute village by an Italian lake followed by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, skiers followed by swimmers, fireworks by candlelit dinner, railway by aeroplane, baccarat by chemin de fer, etc."
June 3, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word rhine pebble
of rhinestone, the Online Etymology Dictionary says this: 1888, a loan-translation of Fr. caillou du Rhin "Rhine pebble," so called because they were made near Strasburg, on the River Rhine (q.v.).
I came across it in Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos: p 28: "It was not until later that he started to make rings: he took small stones — agate, cornelian, Ptyxes, Rhine pebbles, sunstones — and mounted them on delicate rings made of minutely plaited silver threads."
June 3, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word etiolated
"And so it was not with the pleasure which otherwise I should doubtless have felt that I suddenly discerned at my feet, crouching among the rocks for protection against the heat, the marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and whom he had surprised there, beneath a dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted, the marvellous shadows, sheltering furtively, nimble and silent, ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to the rock or the seaweed over whose torpid slumbers they seemed to be keeping vigil, beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean, motionless lightfoot guardians darkening the water's surface with their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 689 of the Modern Library paperback edition
June 3, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word etiolated
I always want to mis-type or mis-say this word as "etoliated," as reesetee spotted! I s'pose if I spoke French I wouldn't have this problem.
June 3, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word bumph
"Now in the little lounge what is left is what remains when there's nothing left: flies, for instance, or advertising bumph slipped under the door by students, proclaiming the benefits of a new toothpaste or offering twenty-five centimes' reduction to every buyer of three packets of washing powder, or old issues of Le Jouet Français, the review he took all his life and to which his subscription didn't run out until a few months after his death, or those things without meaning that lie around on floors and in cupboard corners, you never know how they got there nor why they stayed: three faded flowers of the field; bendy sticks with probably calcinated threads etiolating at each end, an empty Coke bottle, a cake box, opened, still keeping its false raffia string and its legend "Aux Délices de Louis XV, Pastrycooks and Candymakers since 1742" forming a fine oval shape surrounded by a garland and flanked by four puffy-cheeked putti, or behind the door to the landing a kind of cast-iron coatstand, with a mirror cracked roughly Y-shaped into three unequal surface portions, and in the edge of which there is still stuck a postcard showing an incontrovertibly Japanese woman athlete holding a flaming torch at arm's length."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 27
June 3, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word hessian
"The walls are covered in hessian, once blue, now returned to an almost colourless condition except in the places where the furniture and the pictures have protected it from the light."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 25
June 3, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word martingale
"In all the local cafés he gave out his visiting card, which described him as "Head of Practical Services at the Ecole Pyrotechnique," and he offered his services generously; he obtained innumerable orders for superactive hair and carpet shampoos, stain-removers, energy-saving devices, cigarette filters, martingales for 421, cough potions, and other miracle products."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 23
June 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word weasand
I came across "weasand" on this list of meat industry job titles, which I in turn came across while looking for the phrase "ham stripper."
Edited in 2011: that old link doesn't work but I think this was the whole list I was looking at:
Abalone Processor, Animal Eviscerator, Animal Skinner, Bacon Skinner, Bacon Slicer, Bacon de-Rinder, Beef Boner, Beef Breaker, Beef Skinner, Bladder Blower, Bladder Cleaner, Bladder Tier, Blowing Weasand, Boner, Boner, Meat, Boston Cutter, Breast Puller, Breast Splitter, Breast Trimmer, Brisket Puller, Bruise Trimmer, Bung Dropper, Butcher, Butcher, Fish, Calf Skinner, Carcass Splitter, Casing Splitter, Cattle Knocker, Caul Dresser, Caul Puller, Chicken Boner, Chicken Dresser, Chuck Splitter, Clean Up Crew Worker, Clod Puller, Crab Backer, Crab Butcher, Crab Meat Processor, Crop Puller, Crotch Breaker, Cutlet Maker, Pork, Cutter, Cutter Off, Deboner, Draw Off Worker, Eviscerator, Fatter, Fell Cutter, Filleter, Final Dressing Cutter, Fish Butcher, Fish Chopper, Gang Knife, Fish Cleaner, Fish Cutting Machine Operator, Fish Filleter, Fish Flipper, Fish Header, Fish Roe Processor, Frozen Meat Cutter, Gamb Cutter, Gambreler, General Production Laborer, Gizzard Peeler, Gizzard Puller, Gullet Slitter, Gut Cleaner, Gut Dropper, Gut Puller, Gut Snatcher, Gutter, Ham Boner, Ham Facer, Ham Sawyer, Ham Stripper, Ham Trimmer, Head Holder, Head Trimmer, Header, Hide Dropper, Hide Trimmer, Hog Cutter, Hog Dropper, Hog Scalder, Jaw Skinner, Jawbone Puller, Kidney Puller, Kidney Trimmer, Knifeman, Leg Breaker, Loin Puller, Lung Gun Operator, Lung Puller, Meat Boner, Meat Cutter, Meat Department Manager, Meat Market Manager, Meat Trimmer, Meatcutter, Offal Separator, Offal Worker, Oyster Opener, Oyster Shucker, Paunch Trimmer, Pluck Separator, Pluck Trimmer, Poultry Boner, Poultry Cutter, Poultry Dresser, Poultry Eviscerator, Poultry Killer, Poultry Processor, Poultry Trimmer, Poultryman, Retrimmer, Rib Chopper, Rib Puller, Rib Sawyer, Rip Sawyer, Round Boner, Rumper, Sausage Cutter, Sausage Meat Trimmer, Seafood Processor, Shank Skinner, Shrimp Cleaner, Shrimp Header, Shrimp Peeler, Shrimp Picker, Sider, Skewer Up, Skin Lifter, Bacon, Skinner, Skirt Trimmer, Skull Chopper, Skull Splitter, Slitter, Hand, Snout Puller, Soup Person, Squilgeer, Sticker, Animal, Sweetbread Trimmer, Tail Puller, Tail Ripper, Tail Sawyer, Toe Puller, Tongue Trimmer, Tonguer, Trimmer, Tripe Finisher, Tripe Scraper, Turkey Boner, Turkey Roll Maker, Weasand Trimmer, Wing Scorer
- now viewable here: http://www.dws.state.nm.us/careersolutions/occs/51302200.html
June 2, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word oppidum
"Some believed it was a monastery built by two monks to escape from the Moors; other saw it as a Visigoth citadel; still others held it to be a Hispano-Roman oppidum sometimes called Lucus Asturum, sometimes Ovetum; and finally there were those who said that it was Pelage himself (called Don Pelayo by the Spaniards, who believed him to have been King Rodriguez's old lance-bearer at Jerez, and Belaï al-Roumi by the Arabs since he was supposed to be of Roman extraction) who had founded the city."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, pp 9-10
June 1, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word sigillary
"Beaumont belonged to that school of medievalists which described itself as "materialist" and which prompted a professor of the history of religion, for example, to go through the accounts of the Vatican chancery with the sole aim of proving that in the first half of the twelfth century the consumption of parchment, lead, and sigillary ribbon so far exceeded the amount justified by the number of officially declared and registered bulls that even allowing for possible meltings and probable muddles one had to conclude that a relatively large number of bulls (and we are talking about bulls, not briefs, since only bulls were sealed with lead, briefs being sealed with wax) had been kept confidential if not clandestine."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, pp 8-9
June 1, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word ashlar
"From the property angle, the deal is a good one, the area is decent, the façade is of ashlar, the staircase is OK despite the agedness of the lift, and the woman is now coming to inspect in greater detail the condition of the flat itself, to draw up a more detailed plan of the accommodation with, for instance, thicker lines to distinguish structural walls from partitions and arrowheaded semicircles to show which way the doors open, and to decide on the work needed, to make a preliminary costing for the complete refurbishment: the partition wall between the toilet and the boxroom to be knocked down, allowing the installation of a bathroom with a slipper-bath and WC; the kitchen tiles to be renewed; a wall-mounted gas-fired boiler (giving both central heating and hot water) to replace the old coal-fired boiler; the woodblock floor with its zigzag moulding to be lifted and replaced by a layer of cement, a felt underlay, and a fitted carpet."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 5
June 1, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cyclostyle
"The woman is looking at a plan held in her left hand. It's just a sheet of paper, whose still visible creases attest to its having been folded in four, fixed by a paperclip to a thick cyclostyled volume — the terms of co-ownership relating to the flat this woman is about to visit."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 4
June 1, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word sugar-loaf
"A woman of about forty is climbing the stairs; she is wearing a long imitation-leather raincoat and on her head a kind of felt hat shaped like a sugar-loaf, something like what one imagines a goblin's hat to be, divided into red and grey squares."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 4
May 29, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word judas
"Carefully he slid open the small judas in his chest and withdrew a heart-shaped disk."
-- "Theme Park Days," John Ashbery, in Chinese Whispers
May 21, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word euphuistic
"... We smile at these,
Thinking them matter for a child's euphuistic
Tale of what goes on in the morning,
After everyone but the cat has left ..."
John Ashbery, "Becalmed on Strange Waters"
May 14, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word etoliated
"And so it was not with the pleasure which otherwise I should doubtless have felt that I suddenly discerned at my feet, crouching among the rocks for protection against the heat, the marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and whom he had surprised there, beneath a dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted, the marvellous shadows, sheltering furtively, nimble and silent, ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to the rock or the seaweed over whose torpid slumbers they seemed to be keeping vigil, beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the etiolated ocean, motionless lightfoot guardians darkening the water's surface with their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 689 of the Modern Library paperback edition
May 7, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word nankeen
"And it's the same with women's clothes on board a yacht; what's really charming are those light garments, uniformly white, cotton or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against the blue of the sea show up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread sail."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 654 of the Modern Library paperback edition
May 7, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cerise
"The ships were massive, built like pieces of architecture, and seemed almost amphibious, like lesser Venices set in the heart of the greater, when, moored to the banks by gangways decked with crimson satin and Persian carpets, they bore their freight of ladies in cerise brocade and green damask close under the balconies incrusted with multicoloured marble from which other ladies leaned to gaze at them, in gowns with black sleeves slashed with white pearls or bordered with lace."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 653 of the Modern Library paperback edition
May 7, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word diabolo
"One morning, not long after Andreé had told me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach tossing up and catching again at the end of a string a weird object which gave her a look of Giotto's 'Idolatry'; it was called, as it happened, a 'diabolo,' and has so fallen into disuse now that, when they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the commentators of future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be in front of the allegorical figures in the Arena Chapel, what it is that she is holding."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 637 of the Modern Library paperback edition
May 7, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word iridescent
"The blinds were closed almost everywhere round the studio, which was fairly cool and, except in one place where daylight laid against the wall its brilliant but fleeting decoration, dark; one small rectangular window alone was open, embowered in honeysuckle and giving onto an avenue beyond a strip of garden; so that the atmosphere of the greater part of the studio was dusky, transparent and compact in its mass, but liquid and sparkling at the edges where the sunlight encased it, like a lump of rock crystal of which one surface, already cut and polished, gleams here and there like a mirror with iridescent rays."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 565 of the Modern Library paperback edition
May 7, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word nightingale
"But her words remained so indistinct and the sound which was all that I caught was prolonged so sweetly and seemed to me so musical that it was as if, among the dim branches of the trees, a nightingale had begun to sing."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 537-538 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word pleached
"Often, since even after dinner there might still be a little light left outside, this long corridor was left unlighted, and, skirted by the trees that overhung it on the other side of the glass, it suggested a pleached alley in a wooded and shady garden."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 537 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word twilight
"A few hours later, during dinner, which, naturally, was served in the dining-room, the lights would be turned on, even when it was still quite light out of doors, so that one saw before one's eyes, in the garden, among summerhouses glimmering in the twilight like pale spectres of evening, arbours whose glaucous verdure was pierced by the last rays of the setting sun and which, from the lamp-lit room in which one was dining, appeared through the glass no longer—as one would have said of the ladies drinking tea in the afternoon along the blue and gold corridor—caught in a glittering and dripping net, but like the vegetation of a pale and green aquarium of gigantic size lit by a supernatural light."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 536 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word coruscate
"The result of which, apart from ubiquitous draughts, was sudden and intermittent bursts of sunshine, a dazzling and changeable light that made it almost impossible to see the tea-drinkers, so that when they were installed there, at tables crowded pair after pair the whole way along the narrow gully, shimmering and sparkling with every movement they made in drinking their tea or in greeting one another, it resembled a giant fish-tank or bow-net in which a fisherman has collected all his glittering catch, which, half out of water and bathed in sunlight, coruscate before one's eyes in an ever-changing iridescence."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 536 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word filigree
"I had more pleasure on the evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by the horizon, appeared so much the same colour as its background, as in an Impressionist picture, that it seemed also to be of the same substance, as though its hull and the rigging in which it tapered into a slender filigree had simply been cut out from the vaporous blue of the sky."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 525 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word burnish
"Close to the shore, patches of vapour, soot-black but with the burnish and consistency of agate, visibly solid and palpable, were trying to rise one above another over the sea in ever wider tiers, so that the highest of them, poised on the top of the twisted column and overreaching the centre of gravity of those which had hitherto supported them, seemed on the point of bringing down in ruin this lofty structure already half-way up the sky, and precipitating it into the sea."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 523 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word effulgent
"Presently the days grew shorter and at the moment when I entered the room the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff, geometrical, fleeting, effulgent figure of the sun (like the representation of some miraculous sign, of some mystical apparition) lowering over the sea on the edge of the horizon like a sacred picture over a high altar, and while the different parts of the western sky exposed in the glass fronts of the low mahogany bookcases that ran along the walls, which I carried back in my mind to the marvellous painting from which they had been detached, seemed like those different scenes executed long ago for a confraternity by some old master on a reliquary, whose separate panels are now exhibited side by side in a gallery, so that the visitor's imagination alone can restore them to their place on the predella of the reredos."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 522-523 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word glaucous
"For what princely traveller, sojourning here incognito, could they be intended, those plums, glaucous, luminous and spherical as was at that moment the circumfluent sea, those transparent grapes clustering on the shrivelled wood, like a fine day in autumn, those pears of a heavenly ultramarine?"
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 377-378 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word opalescent
"It brightened; the sky turned to a glowing pink which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent sheen of night, beneath a firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 317 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word exquisite
"And I realised that it was for herself that she obeyed these canons in accordance with which she dressed, as though yielding to a superior wisdom of which she herself was the high priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep buttoned up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unobserved, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer has devoted infinite labour although they may never reach the ears of the public: or, in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, and would lengthily gaze at, for my own pleasure or from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strap, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like those Gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as the bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, overlooking the whole town, between the soaring towers."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 293-294 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 26, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word unhurrying
"Suddenly, on the gravelled path, unhurrying, cool, luxuriant, Mme Swann would appear, blossoming out in a costume which was never twice the same but which I remember as being typically mauve; then she would hoist and unfurl at the end of its long stalk, just at the moment when her radiance was at its zenith, the silken banner of a wide parasol of a shade that matched the showering petals of her dress."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 290 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word verdure
"It was enough to fill me with longing for country scenes that, overhanging the loose snowdrifts of the muff in which Mme Swann kept her hands, the guelder-rose snow-balls (which served very possibly in the mind of my hostess no other purpose than to compose, on the advice of Bergotte, a "Symphony in White with her furniture and her garments) should remind me that the Good Friday music in Parsifal symbolises a natural miracle which one could see performed every year if one had the sense to look for it, and assisted by the acid and heady perfume of other kinds of blossom which, although their names were unknown to me, had brought me so often to a standstill on my walks round Combray, should make Mme Swann's drawing room as virginal, as candidly in blossom without the least trace of verdure, as overladen with genuine scents of flowers, as was the little lane by Tansonville."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 289 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word guelder-rose
"When spring arrived, and with it the cold weather, during an icy Lent and the hailstorms of Holy Week, as Mme Swann declared that it was freezing in her house, I used often to see her entertaining her guests in her furs, her shivering hands and shoulders buried beneath the gleaming white carpets of an immense rectangular muff and a cape, both of ermine, which she had not taken off on coming in from her drive, and which suggested the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest, which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had succeeded in melting. And the all-embracing truth about these glacial but already flowering weeks was suggested to me in this drawing room, which soon I should be entering no more, by other more intoxicating forms of whiteness, that for example of the guelder-roses clustering, at the summits of their tall bare stalks, like the rectilinear trees in pre-Raphaelite paintings, their balls of blossom, divided yet composite, white as annunciating angels and exhaling a fragrance as of lemons."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 288 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word philopena
"Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf covers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains and topaz chestnuts there would be on the dress itself some design carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin buttons which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the jewels, gave the impression—having otherwise no possible justification—of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition, commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or a philopena."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 268-269 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word arborescence
"And finally, beyond the winter-garden, through the various kinds of arborescence which from the street made the lighted window appear like the glass front of one of those children's playthings, pictured or real, the passer-by, drawing himself up on tiptoe, would generally observe a man in a frock-coat, a gardenia or a carnation in his buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely outlined like two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the drawing-room atmosphere clouded by the samovar—then a recent importation—with steam which may escape from it still today, but to which, if it does, we have grown so accustomed now that no one notices it."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, pp 229-230 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word luminosity
"And yet one did not find in Bergotte's speech a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written sentence the appearance of its words."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 173 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word chimerical
"For years I had believed that the notion of going to Mme Swann's was a vague, chimerical dream to which I should never attain; after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing-room, it was the time when I did not yet know her that had become chimerical and vague like a possibility which the realisation of an alternative possibility has destroyed."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 151 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word fragmentary
"And not only does one not grasp at once and remember works that are truly rare, but even within those works (as happened to me in the case of Vinteuil's sonata) it is the least precious parts that one at first perceives. So much so that I was mistaken not only in thinking that this work held nothing further in store for me (so that for a long time I made no effort to hear it again) from the moment Mme Swann had played me its most famous passage (I was in this respect as stupid as people are who expect to feel no astonishment when they stand in Venice bfore the façade of Saint Mark's, because photography has already acquainted them with the outline of its domes); far more than that, even when I had heard the sonata from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 141 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word ensconced
"I encountered no one at first but a footman who, after leading me through several large drawing-rooms, showed me into one that was quite small, empty, its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of afternoon. I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire, preciously ensconced behind a crystal screen, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled from time to time its dangerous rubies."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 136 of the Modern Library paperback edition
April 20, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word deliquescent
"Even in Bergotte's books, all those Chinese puzzles of form, all those subtleties of a deliquescent mandarin seem to me to be quite futile."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 62 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 5, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word lapidary
"To add his own contribution to the pleasures of the repast, M. de Norpois entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his diplomatic colleagues, quoting now some ludicrous period uttered by a politician notorious for long sentences packed with incoherent images, now some lapidary epigram of a diplomat sparkling with Attic salt."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 40 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 5, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word transparent
"The cold spiced beef with carrots made its appearance, couched by the Michelangelo of our kitchen upon enormous crystals of aspic, like transparent blocks of quartz."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 39 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 5, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word ephemeral
"I felt it in the little square that lay in front of the theatre, in which, in two-hours' time, the bare boughs of the chestnut-trees would gleam with a metallic lustre as the lighted gas-lamps showed up every detail of their structure; and before the ticket attendants, whose selection, advancement and ultimate fate depended upon the great artist—for she alone held power in this administration at the head of which ephemeral and purely nominal managers followed one after the other in an obscure succession—who took our tickets without even glancing at us, so preoccupied were they in seeing that all Mme Berma's instructions had been duly transmitted to the new members of the staff, that it was clearly understood that the hired applause must never sound for her, that the windows must all be kept open so long as she was not on stage and every door closed tight the moment she appeared, that a bowl of hot water must be concealed somewhere close to her to make the dust settle."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 22 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 5, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word otiose
"But what I demanded from this performance—as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from pleasure: verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me by any trivial incident—even though it were to cause me bodily suffering—of my otiose existence."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 17 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 5, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word breeze-block
"As I later discovered, St. Oswald's specialized in architectural sadism—even the new science lab (pride of the establishment) featured brown glass and breeze-block walls dating from 1958, height of the ugly unfriendly architecture movement."
What I Was by Meg Rosoff, p 3
February 14, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word captious
"They made a great pet of the creature—naturally, it was called Fiddle. Though it remained bad-tempered, captious, and unfriendly, it never went short of food."
-- Diana Wynne Jones, Charmed Life, in The Chronicles of Chrestomanci (p 16)
January 29, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word chrysanthemum
"In place of the abstract expressions 'the time when I was happy,' 'the time when I was loved,' which he had often used before then without suffering too much since his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips—the address 'Maison Dorée; embossed on the note-paper on which he had read 'My hand trembles so as I write to you'—the contraction of her eyebrows when she said pleadingly: 'You won't leave it too long before getting in touch with me?'; he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he used to have singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little seamstress; could feel the showers which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all the network of mental habits, of seasonal impressions, of sensory reactions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes in which his body found itself inextricably caught."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, pp 375-376 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 23, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word anfractuosity
"Whereas upon that pestilential but longed-for staircase to the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the building, one saw in the evening outside every door-mat in readiness for the morning round, on the splendid but despised staircase which Swann was now climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled and doing homage for them to the guests, a concierge, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the bourgeois service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in observing to the letter all the instructions they had been given before being allowed to don the brilliant livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway with a pompous splendour tempered by democratic good-fellowship, like saints in their niches, while a gigantic usher, dressed in Swiss Guard fashion like the beadle in a church, struck the floor with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 354 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 23, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word cattleya
"But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of offending her, or from reluctance to appear retrospectively to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If she had cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: 'It's most unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've not been disturbed as they were the other night. i think, though, that this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than the others?' Or else, if she had none: 'Oh! no cattleyas this evening; then there's no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements.'"
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 255 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 15, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word roseate
"But when her footman came into the room bringing, one after another, the innumerable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this winter afternoon the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate, more human—filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight—she had kept a sharp eye on the servant, to see that he set them down in their appointed places."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 241 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word ineffable
"And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable—did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 228 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word plashing
"And it had been a source of keen pleasure to him when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge upward in plashing waves of sound, multiform but invisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 227 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 13, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word burnished
"Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely care while, a little farther again, others, pressed close together in a veritable floating flower-bed, suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this watery garden—this celestial garden, too, for it gave the flowers a soil of a color more precious, more moving than their own, and, whether sparkling beneath the water-lilies in the afternoon in a kaleidoscope of silent, watchful, and mobile contentment, or glowing, towards evening, like some distant haven, with the roseate dreaminess of the setting sun, ceaselessly changing yet remaining always in harmony, around the less mutable colours of the flowers themselves, with all that is most profound, most evanescent, most mysterious—all that is infinite—in the passing hour, it seemed to have made them blossom in the sky itself."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 185 of the Vintage International paperback edition
January 1, 2008
knitandpurl commented on the word sainfoin
"I knew that Mlle Swann used often to go and spend a few days at Laon; for all that it was many miles away, the distance was counterbalanced by the absence of any intervening obstacle, and when, on hot afternoons, I saw a breath of wind emerge from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally come to rest, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to unite us; I would imagine that the same breath of wind had passed close to her, that it was some message from her that it was whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would kiss it as it passed."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 159 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 31, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word stock
Also a flower; see also Virginia stock
December 31, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word lacustrine
"And so it was that, at the foot of the path which led down to the artificial lake, there might be seen, in its two tiers woven of forget-me-nots and periwinkle flowers, a natural, delicate, blue garland encircling the water's luminous and shadowy brow, while the iris, flourishing its sword-blades in regal profusion, stretched out over agrimony and water-growing crowfoot the tattered fleurs-de-lis, violet and yellow, of its lacustrine sceptre."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 149 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 31, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word cineraria
"'There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend' he said to my father, 'a blue, especially, more floral than aerial, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky.' "
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 142 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 31, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word guelder-rose
aka viburnum opulus
December 31, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word antiphonal
"From gates far apart the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up an antiphonal barking such as I still hear at times of an evening, and among which the Boulevard de la Gare (when the public gardens of Combray were constructed on its site) must have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their alternate challenge and response, I can see it again with its lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 124 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 28, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word hawthorn
"It was in the "Month of Mary" that I remember first having fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 121 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 28, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word runagate
"They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of these two runagates, in an article by my revered master, old Lecomte, beloved of the immortal gods."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 97 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word liquorice-water
"So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out as though from a beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and after having risked her life a hundred times over, would reappear bringing us, together with a jug of liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least a thousand of them, pouring along without a break from the direction of Thiberzy and Méséglise."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 96 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word limpid
"Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in the garden at Combray, carefully purged by me of every commonplace incident of my personal existence, which I had replaced with a life of strange aspirations and adventures in a land watered with living streams, you still recall that life to me when I think of you, and you embody it in effect by virtue of having gradually encircled and enclosed it—while I went on with my reading and the heat of the day declined—in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and dappled with foliage, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, pp 94-95 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word circumjacent
"It was hardly light enough for me to read, and my sense of the day's brightness and splendour was derived solely from the blows struck down below, in the Rue de la Cure, by Camus (whom Françoise had assured that my aunt was not "resting" and that he might therefore make a noise) upon some dusty packing-cases which, reverberating in the sonorous atmosphere that accompanies hot weather, seemed to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and also from the flies who performed for my benefit, in their tiny chorus, as it were the chamber music of summer, evoking it quite differently from a snatch of human music which, heard by chance in high summer, will remind you of it later, whereas the music of the flies is bound to the season by a more compelling tie—born of the sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them, containing something of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our memory, but guarantees their return, their actual, circumjacent, immediately accessible presence."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 89 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word morris column
"Every morning I would hasten to the Morris column to see what new plays it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the day-dreams with which these announcements filled my imagination, day-dreams which were conditioned by the associations of the words forming the titles of the plays, and also by the colour of the bills, still damp and wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 79 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word annulated
"I shall never forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons, between which, when one looks up at it from the fine garden which descends in terraces to the river, the gothic spire of a church (itself hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the effect of crowning and completing their façades, but in a style so different, so precious, so annulated, so pink, so polished, that one sees at once that it no more belongs to them than would the purple, crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with glossy colour to a pair of handsome, smooth pebbles between which it had been washed up on the beach."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, pp 70-71 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word lemon-wood
"At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vichy-Célestins, might be found her prayer-books and her medical prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed, of her duties to soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and for vespers."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 56 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 25, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word lime-blossom
"And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (and though I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden ..."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 51 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 24, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word bengal light
"And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which the glow of a Bengal light or a searchlight beam will cut out and illuminate in a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness ..."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 46 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 24, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word rep
"Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 30 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 24, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word transvertebration
"The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance of his steed's, overcame every material obstacle—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking it as an ossature and embodying it in himself: even the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float irresistibly his red cloak or his pale face, which never lost its nobility or its melancholy, never betrayed the least concern at this transvertebration."
-- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, p 10 of the Vintage International paperback edition
December 23, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word teratological
"Marine creatures—sea cucumbers, shreds of squid, faded coral—or perhaps the morbid figments of some artist's teratological imagination. Yves Tanguy?
From The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco, translated by Geoffrey Brock, p 168
December 17, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word tittlebat
three-spined stickleback, according to Websters.
From The Old Curiosity Shop:
"What rebellious thoughts of the cool river, and some shady bathing-place beneath willow trees with branches dipping in the water, kept tempting and urging that sturdy boy, who, with his shirt-collar unbuttoned and flung back as far as it could go, sat fanning his flushed face with a spelling-book, wishing himself a whale, or a tittlebat, or a fly, or anything but a boy at school on that hot, broiling day!"
(p 255 of the Penguin English Library edition)
December 1, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word roystering
It seems like this is more often spelled as roister and therefore "roistering" but there's this, from The Old Curiosity Shop:
"This candid declaration tended rather to increase than restrain Mr Quilp's eccentricities, and Richard Swiveller, astonished to see him in such a roystering vein, and drinking not a little himself, for company, — began imperceptibly to become more companionable and confiding, so that, being judiciously led on by Mr Quilp, he grew at last very confiding indeed." (p 227 in the Penguin English Library edition)
December 1, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word coadjutor
"This important step secured, with the assistance of a man of law whom he brought with him for the purpose, the dwarf proceeded to establish himself and his coadjutor in the house, as an assertion of his claim against all comers; and then set about making his quarters comfortable after his own fashion." (p 137 of the Penguin English Library edition)
November 14, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word condign
"The dwarf muttering a terrible oath looked round as if for some weapon with which to inflict condign punishment upon his disobedient wife." (p 96 in the Penguin English Library edition)
November 14, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word eleemosynary
'An author,' says Fielding, in his introduction to 'Tom Jones,' 'ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. Men who pay for what they eat, will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn their dinner without control.'
-- from the Preface to the Original Edition of 'The Old Curiosity Shop,' 1841
November 12, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word spondulics
"When Sterling appears later, lugging an aluminum case bursting with spondulics ..." -- "Pay and Play" by John Lahr, in The New Yorker, October 15, 2007 (p 102)
October 15, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word junket
also, a dessert
September 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word pi-jaw
"The house was even darker then, with the shutters locked and shades made of cambric pulled down over the shelves of bottles and jars. I thought such pi-jaw hardly necessary. For most of my first week, the shop might just as well have been closed." (p 68)
September 26, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word fresser
yiddish: glutton
September 7, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word monarda
beebalm, bergamot
September 3, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word monarda
beebalm, bergamot
September 3, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word batten
I knew batten in the sense of "batten down the hatches" but not in the sense of, as m-w.com puts it, "to grow prosperous especially at the expense of another."
August 10, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word crowdy
porridge, gruel
July 31, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word lonnen
See the "Northumbrian language" section of this Northumberland cultural heritage page. (I came across this word while reading Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow.)
July 28, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word lilo
inflatable mattresses for the beach/pool (U.K.)
May 9, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word cuddie
a young coalfish
May 8, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word mordant
I'd been familiar with this word in the "biting" or "caustic" sense, but not as a substance used to fix dyes. (From Sea Room by Adam Nicolson: "In order to reduce the liquidity of the animal end, the householders 'attended on their cows with large vessels to throw out the wash' - or to keep it as mordant for dyes - 'but still it must be wet and unwholesome" (pp 241-242)
May 8, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word coley
variant spelling of coaley
May 7, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word fank
(Scot) n an enclosure for sheep.
April 30, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word corncraik
more commonly spelled corncrake
April 30, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word thrift
thrift, sea thrift, sea pink: more on wikipedia
April 30, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word coaley
another name for the pollock, also known as the coalfish
April 29, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word goosecap
goose-cap n (obs): a silly person
April 7, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word parvise
"The great Casino in the midst is as big as the Vatican, which it strikingly resembles, and it stands perched on a terrace as vast as the parvise of St. Peter's, looking straight away over black cypress-tops into the shining vastness of the Campagna." (p. 167)
March 19, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word anfractuosity
(though I came across it in a footnote to James's Italian Hours)
"There are chance anfractuosities of ruin in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the rugged face of an Alpine cliff."
March 17, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the list new-englander
cabinet, as a synonym for frappe? or is that only a rhode-islandism rather than a new-englandism?
March 15, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word ulster
"The modern tenant may take in all the magazines, but he bends not the bow of Achilles. He occupies the place, but he does n't fill it, and he has guests from the neighbouring inns with ulsters and Baedekers." (p 46)
March 15, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word transmanche
"of, for, or relating to the tunnel under the English Channel"
March 10, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word maja
"After a timeless minute or two my sprawling maja drew in her leg and turned on her side again and fell asleep with a shocking suddenness—her gentle snores were the sound of a small, soft engine trying and failing repeatedly to start—and I sat up, carefully, as if something delicately poised inside me might shatter at the slightest violent movement." (p 86)
February 20, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word mappemond
Found this while flipping through the Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, New Edition. "a map of the world (hist.): the world itself (obs.)"
February 6, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word damozel
"The juxtaposition of textures, of the silky, flowing hair with the heavy, sweaty bodies, says something. We think of the blessed damozel leaning down from Heaven. But we don't stop thinking that the scene is also pretty bizarre, and that double meaning is echt Bausch."
From "City Lights" by Joan Acocella
The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006 and Jan. 1, 2007, p 142
December 26, 2006
knitandpurl commented on the word buccal
"This was a normal rite of passage then: from being rickety-gnashered to fully porcelained in one leap, to all that buccal sliding and clacking, to social embarrassment and the foaming glass on the bedside table."
From "The Past Conditional" by Julian Barnes
The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006 and Jan. 1, 2007, p 56
December 25, 2006
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