here a foie-gras roll, there a chocolate éclair

Everyone at the moment is making end-of-year lists, so this morning I sat down and made an end-of-year list. Here are fifteen extracts from books I've read this year. They're not ranked, but they're some of my favourites. I've left out Proust because there's too much of him that's quotable, and I haven't repeated anything I've already posted on this blog (this wasn't done on purpose, my mind skipped past those quotes with the hazy idea that they'd "Already been dealt with" - I see this in retrospect), so there's no sign of ER Eddison's monstrous sentence, and nothing from Christina Stead, although if I'd thought of it I might have included the pity speech from The Puzzleheaded Girl, or the storm-sentence from The People With the Dogs.

The last one gives away the ending of Gustav Flaubert's juvenile novel November. Consider yourself warned there.

So:

*


I have seen the end of all this, clearly, in my imagination: the earth transfigured and the gods walking upon it in their bodies' light … It is the earth as we have made it, clearing, grafting, transplanting, carrying from one place to another, following no plan that we could enunciate, but allowing our bellies to lead us, and some other, deeper hunger, till the landscape we have made reveals to us the creature we long for and must become.


*


History was like that - a negative of which one was the print, the positive.


*


Expect a little, confer future and times past with the present, see the event and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. Italy was once lord of the world, Rome the queen of cities, vaunted herself of two myriads of inhabitants; now that all-commanding country is possessed by petty princes, Rome a small village in respect. Greece of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarians, a den of thieves. Germany then, saith Tacitus, was incult and horrid, now full of magnificent cities: Athens, Corinth, Carthage, how flourishing cities! now buried in their own ruins: corrorum ferarum, aprorum et bestiarum lustra, like so many wildernesses, a receptacle of wild beasts. Venice, a poor fisher-town, Paris, London, small cottages in Ceasar's time, now most notable emporiums.


*


… at this period in his life he had been writing a a particularly prolific amount about the Slavonic Question, emphasizing the God-given role of the Russian people whose vocation it was to free the rest of Europe, the basis of this chosen destiny being, in his opinion, the special, unique nature of the Russian national mentality and character which, amongst other things, was demonstrated in the use of unprintable words pronounced in various ways and with various shades of meaning, which were employed by the common people not, of course, to insult others or abuse them, but to express the subtle, profound and even saintly feelings buried in the soul of every genuine Russian.


*


It was the old dilemma: how was one to be known?


*


It is the ultimate in being homeless when you understand you have no way of cooking a potato.


*


They must cook very gently indeed, the liquid not even simmering but merely shuddering.


*


"Any cup?" asked Reggie, questing like a prawn over the groaning board, seizing here a foie-gras roll, there a chocolate éclair.


*


The Master said, "What the gentleman seeks in himself, the small man seeks in others."


*


BOSWELL: "But I wonder, sir, you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing." JOHNSON: "Sir you may wonder."

He talked of making verses, and observed, "The great difficulty is, to know when you have made good ones."


*


Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.


*


Those who strive to account for a man's deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop. Young Marius now acts like a son of Mars, now as a son of Venus.


*


Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about her or his life. Now I think, "That is what they thought at that time." An interim report - that is what an autobiography is. Would Cellini, would Casanova, would even Rousseau, later have agreed with what they said about themselves in those books that we assume is the fixed truth about what they thought?


*


Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.


*


At length, last December, he died, but slowly, little by little, solely by the force of thought, without any organic malady, as one who dies of sorrow - which may seem incredible to those who have greatly suffered, but must be tolerated in a novel, for the sake of our love of the marvellous.

David Malouf: An Imaginary Life, Lawrence Durrell: The Avignon Quintet, Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Leonid Tsypkin: Summer in Baden-Baden, translated by Roger Keys, Anita Brookner: Strangers, Elizabeth Jolley: Lovesong, Elizabeth David: French Provincial Cooking, Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz, Confucius: The Analects, translated by Raymond Dawson, James Boswell: Life of Johnson, Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, translated by Maxwell Stanforth, Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays, translated by M. Screech, Doris Lessing, Time Bites, from the essay Writing Autobiography, George Eliot: Middlemarch, Gustav Flaubert: November, translated by Francis Steegmuller.