The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to... read more
During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to fit in with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling due to the school's obsession with literary figures and their work.
“Memory is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test”
Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.Highlighted by 34 Kindle customers
The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.Highlighted by 33 Kindle customers
Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege—the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it.Highlighted by 29 Kindle customers
The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.Highlighted by 28 Kindle customers
If, as Talleyrand said, loyalty is a matter of dates, virtue itself is often a matter of seconds.Highlighted by 26 Kindle customers
Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I’m being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It’s true—rhyme’s a completely bankrupt device. It’s just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.Highlighted by 25 Kindle customers
Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers
And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers
Shelley liked to say that we poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers
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