where you can say anything...

Some lines from passages I liked while reading Patricia Hampl's "A Romantic Education" this week:

p. 11 "For the first time the lilacs came to me nostalgically because I noticed them... the knowledge that objects carry their dense bundles of significance out of unconsciousness all the way to - I could almost sense it ahead - the end of the line. To death."
p. 15 "Finding one's 'voice' is, essentially, getting to the point where you can say anything."
p. 63 "... I wanted a city. Not a town, not even the capital of Minnesota, but a city. It was the Midwestern desire that, in part, creates or sustains the empire quality of New York, of Gotham. New York, left to its own devices, without Podunk dreams and ambitions flying to it generation after generation, would hardly be a city, but a collection of steamy, squabbly neighborhoods where everybody is selling sandwiches to each other, the ethnic diversity forever unmelted."
p. 90 "My aunt and uncle were aesthetes. The art of living was their form."
p. 97 "But trying is exactly what beauty is not. Beauty is the absence of effort. It is the casualness that announces: this person is special, was born special."
p. 112 "[Referring to feminism]: We Aren't Beautiful, Lovely is Lousy, Female is Ugly. But we didn't mean that either. We meant... but that is the suicidal part: it is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves."
p. 237 "Only a city can sustain the truth of this fact of beauty - the brokenness - because, unlike an old woman who was once beautiful, a city can perfectly balance, in its architecture, the fresh loveliness of form and the ruined, irreplacable qualities of age."

Currently reading : Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons By Frederick Buechner