tomato sandwiches.

[from levine intro: “potter’s first change of clothes initiates a succession of clothes changes that underscores just how easily identity can be altered and performed...clothes are central to melville’s presentation of the fungibility of personal and national identity” (xix).” 

“a hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed. the ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into that watery immensity of terror, man’s private grief is lost like a drop” (11). 

“beg pardon, lads, but i thought ye were something else.” (20). 

“suddenly metamorphosed from youth to old age...he felt comparatively safe in diguise” (22). 

“when israel now preceived him again, he seemed, while momentarily hidden, to have undergone a complete transformation” (62). 

“for you can’t improve so well on ideas, as you can on bodies” (66). 

“mind your own box” (72). 

“he might pass for a ghost at night, and among the relations and immediate friends of the gentleman deceased; but by day, and among indifferent persons, he ran no small risk of being apprehended for an entry-thief” (86). 

“well, too, he knew, and had experienced it, that for a man desirous of avoiding notice, the more wretched the clothes the better” (87). 

“...intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, america is, or may yet be...” (136). 

“the spirit of baneful intermixture pervaded this craft throughout” (138). 

“in view of this battle one may well ask--what separates the enlightened man from the savage? is civilization a thing distinct, or is it just an advanced stage of barbarism?” (148). 

“i keep leading him about because he has no final destination” (159). 

“it was good to have a few secrets here and there. it kept one interested in herself” (83). 

“one makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants” (125). 

“it was too much effort to disrobe, wait for the water to heat, address my body for what it was now, so little, just a little thing i had to keep clean, like washing a single dish one uses constantly” (143). 

“life in this caravan is not altogether bad” (51). 

“a woman for whom, when i meet her, i feel a sense of hazard and constraint so that i flee from her as quickly as i can” (75). 

“what should one expect from the irish but the very worst?” (198). 

“bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit” (251). 

“an irishman don’t look like an englishman” (271). 

“all weather research is really just war research by other means” (13). 

“contrary to my nature as it was was, happiness grew in me” (25). 

“it was very bad, the acoustics inside of me” (33). 

“habits of thought are death to truth” (71). 

“but i saw rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon, and actually i’m glad love does that, i shouldn’t complain about love, or love’s perspective--distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing” (127). 

“when is talking about literature not an evasion of the real question at hand?” (149). 

“the tears had arrived so slowly” (153). 

“...but even though i’ve sometimes had the feeling that my life was insignificant, and even that my love was nothing more than an accumulation of contingencies--still, all that ran contrary to the enduring phenomenon of my own sense of great importance” (213). 

“where thin soil became soup, each day waterlogged by the suck-tide of living” (62). 

“a small, clotted part of her” (68)

“her beauty now hardly covers her bones” (74).

“lucy floats easily; she is hollow” (156).

“i never saw the tiger’s face, but does that make my story any less true?” (187)

“...the words made a lacquer over the truth” (201).

“the right butter. the wrong butter. the tea of allegiance. the tea of betrayal” (25). 

“all this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality here was this constant unacknowledged struggle to see. i knew even as a child--maybe because i was a child--that this wasn’t really physical; knew the impression of a pall, of some distorted quality of the light had to do with the political problems, with the hurts that had come, the troubles that had built, with the loss of hope and absence of trust with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed willing or able to prevail” (89-90). 

“...but the truth will cut across your life, wee girl...” (123)

“here were females who did love the sound of breaking glass” (127). 

“life here, said real milkman, simply had to be lived and died in extremes” (146). 

“...using terminology such as ‘terminology’...” (161)

“‘you can’t kill them. they’re simpletons. intellectual simpletons. academe! that’s all they’re fit for’“ (163).

“i pushed him out of my mind, not because he didn’t matter but because he did matter” (247).

“from then on, their letters concerned only chemical gases and armenian grammar” (107). 

“i’m not going to write about love. i’m going to write only about the weather” (16). 

“all this is simple--like postage stamps” (19).

“it’s just that everything has changed” (29).

“he had begun to weep in prague not out of sentimentality, but the way the windows weep in a room heated for the first time in many weeks” (43).

“he received us without joy and without consternation, as if we were passengers and his room a railroad car” (56).

“you said that on such a ship, one has a constant sense of being pulled. not really movement, but, more precisely, propulsion--motion forward and its potential” (61). 

“what happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it’s more like one late afternoon, and its not just unsaid, it’s gone” (9). 

“a mistake, a series of errors, first of love, then of officiousness, finally of language” (20). 

“libel actions, i knew, had always been one of the real slums of anglo-saxon law” (27). 

“as much as this is the age of crime, after all, this is the century of dislocation” (46). 

“...like so many things that were said to me in ireland, this seemed to make no sense” (48). 

“the incredibly long eyelashes of the cows” (60)

“i chose one of the irish whiskeys, bushmills” (61).

“writing is always, in part, bending somebody’s ear. as reading is. in the matter of the commas. in the matter of the question marks. in the matter of the tenses” (62).

“you remember everything, he said, you remember everything, out of context, and then you brook” (64). 

“the tense, the perfected future, is the clue” (67). 

“it is just that i’ve been too long alone” (70). 

“a reasonable expectation of life, i have found, is hardly ever quite borne out” (72). 

“she went on and on, too, of course, but only in a state of tension: drawn to the sentimental rhythm and the sentimental substance, but mocking and concealing it, reining it back” (115). 

“those for whom there was, first dimly, then more bright, then dimly again, a possibility. which, though dimly, perhaps still exists, but which they know, have somehow always known, would never come to anything. they were never, how can i put this, going to be a part of life. it is as though, going through a landscape, through the seasons, in the same general direction as everybody else, they never quite made it to the road. through the years, humanity, like a tide of refugees or pilgrims, shoeless and in rags, or in Mercedes, station wagons, running shoes, were traveling on, joined by others, falling by the way. and we, joined though we may be, briefly, by other strays, or by road travelers on their little detours, nonetheless never quite joined the continuing procession, of life and birth, never quite found or made it to the road. whose voice is this? not here. not mine” (125). 

“it was true what she had said about connell. he didn’t do anything that bad. he never tried to delude her into thinking she was socially acceptable; she’d deluded herself. he had just been using her as a kind of private experiment, and her willingness to be used probably shocked him. he pitied her in the end, but she also repulsed him. in a way she feels sorry for him now, because he has to live with the fact that he had sex with her, of his own free choice, and he liked it. that says more about him, the supposedly ordinary and healthy person, that it does about her” (63).

“people are always telling him he’s going to miss her, but until now he’s been looking forward to how long and intense their email correspondence will be while she’s away. now he looks into her cold interpretive eyes and thinks: okay, i will miss her. he feels ambivalent about this, as if it’s disloyal of him, because maybe he’s enjoying how she looks or some physical aspect of her closeness. he’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other” (162).

“...marianne is laughing in a generous way, not because the stories are so funny but to make elaine feel welcome” (163).

“with helen he doesn’t feel shameful things, he doesn’t find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn’t have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he will never belong anywhere. marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual energy, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. but he was never damaged like she was. she just made him feel that way” (169).

“in the city there is no simple love or simple fidelity, the poem long after concludes” (23).

“her notebook is sleepless” (27).

“i have the drama of skies, no question; an affinity for blue...” (40).

“the idea of an inventory, of overwhelming, came to me since an inventory would be capacious enough to carry what the poet knew or could know. an inventory is agape” (61).

“to be plain requires so much work, you have to sandpaper all the viscera, and every branchial cleft” (81).

“so you are dying in their etymology” (82).

“however if you were to stop for a minute and observe yourself, you are merely the container for a set of cultural practices which go on without you, but which you are never without. they are like a bag of...a heavy bag on you” (92).

“and i admire that kind of devotion, as hopeless as i find it” (103).

“let us be honest, women never talk directly to god” (122).

“seas and days go on in tranquility whatever you are doing, whatever is going on, they have their own sovereignty” (161). 

“i am just a lover with lover’s weaknesses, with her manifest heartaches” (168).

“i was thrown into the word nuclear and nautical” (207).

“i’ve thought so often, phoebe said, of the idea that longing should be allowed the change to find its object” (185). 

“in existing in the life, i’ve survived nothing” (22). 

“everyone here in my hole is a home into which i toss aesthetics” (38).