Jack French Clutched The Sides Of His Chair And Leaned Back Into It. This Was Not The Way Things Went

Jack French clutched the sides of his chair and leaned back into it. This was not the way things went in his office. In a semicircle on the wall behind him portraits of great men hung, men who were careful with their words, who weighed them cautiously and considered their consequences, men whom Jack French admired and had learned from: Joseph Addison, Bertrand Russell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Carlyle and Henry Watson Fowler, the author of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, on whom French had written a colossal, almost painfully detailed biography. But nothing in French’s armoury of baroque sentences seemed sufficient for dealing with a girl who used language like an automatic weapon.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)

‘You see, Tom, I am the bridge,’ he wrote in a hand that was irritatingly sluggish. ‘I am what you must walk over to get from Rick to life.’

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)

I spent days trying to fashion a thin flute from fresh greenwood, whittling the soft bark away from the sinew and gouging out the fleshy innards. I worked precisely to make the outside as smooth as I could, curved like a finger. But the flute did not sound and after that I moved towards making things that were useful, objects that required less skill, or rather, things that were able to exist even if they were not precisely so. As long as a bowl holds its charge it is easy to define even if it is ugly and rough. But if a flute does not make a musical note it cannot be called a flute.

Elmet, Fiona Mozley (via wholesomeobsessive)

You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)

‘Art is the Western myth,’ announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)

He’s one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is ‘noble’. Howard didn’t much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)