Only one book on the agenda this time around for the simple reason that it was phenomenal. I read through Wicked in just a few days and I loved it. Addressing the political agenda of human rights, and commenting on the pros and cons of activism and inactivism… it was so good. Naturally then, I requested Volume Two in “The Wicked Years” from my mother for Christmas.
Son of a Witch arrived on my door with the storm and was devoured over the holiday. For the first time in a long time, I had to start marking pages in order to further contemplate specific passages at a later date. My plan is to list the quotes here and then if I have time, which I doubt, unravel some of them in posts of their own.
Without further introduction:
“It hardly matters on one’s deathbed from whom one has been born, does it? The world is the womb now, and the Afterlife waits for one to be born into it.” Pg 17
“From the distance of a skeptical adolescent, unionism seemed like a thicket of contradictions. Charity to all, but intolerance toward the heathen. Poverty ennobles, but the Bishops had to be richer than everyone else. The Unnamed God made the good world, imprisoning the rebellious human being within it, and taunt[ed] humankind with tinderbox sexuality that must be guarded against at all cost.” Pg 31
“”Perhaps he just didn’t have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible.” Pg 31
“We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept if we’re lucky, but frequently tedious or regettable as we flesh ourselves out.” Pg 128
“Up the side of the waterfall, tracing the banks of the rightmost branch of the higher Vinkus, and still higher up the middle ridge of Knobblehead Pike, and he’d be back. Not home. There was no place like home. Just back. Back at Kiamo Ko.” Pg 180O
“… – what magic a body is – all that you couldn’t know about the world packed up tightly in the flesh lying on your breast.” Pg 270
” He guessed, in the hours or years remaining to him, he would remember the effect of Trism clearly, without corruption, as a secret pulse held in a pocket somewhere behind the heart. The exact look of Trism, though, the scent and heft of him, the feel of him, would probably decay into imprecision, a shodowy form, unseen but imagined.” Pg 292
More information @ http://www.powells.com/biblio/0060548932