EoE Favorite Quotes

At the beginning of Part 2, Steinbeck’s narrator goes on about how horrible the 19th century was, glad it is over, time to wash our hands of it and start fresh. But he repeats this lovely bit before moving on to the thirteenth chapter:

Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

I can’t wait to use that.

This entry was written by glenl, posted on 18 November 2009 at 5:28 pm, filed under Books, East of Eden, Notes. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Comment

  1. Randy Fromm
    Posted 18 November 2009 at 6:52 pm | Permalink

    Two spots that caught my eye/ear/mind, from opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum: first the more mundane, late in Chapter 5:

    When Liza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and her doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath.

    And then, a meditation on time from the opening of Chapter 7—always something that interests me:

    Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

Post a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.