A golden age = a matter of disregard

Thus, just as his mother begged him [in her letter, which he kept, unread, in his pocket]... Joe had turned his thoughts from Prague, his family, the war.  Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.  It was only when he was settling into the back of a taxicab, or reaching for his wallet, or brushing against a chair, that there came the crinkling of paper; the flutter of a wing; the ghostly foolscap whisper from home; and for a moment he would hang his head in shame.

p. 525, Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon, Dec./Jan. 2010-2011

A transient effect of weather

The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over.  Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce... As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation.  The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it.  It was, in part, a longing...to be someone else, to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved.  Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.

p.112-113, Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon, Dec./Jan. 2010-2011

Plateau of pleasure and pain

And then he would turn me over and begin to massage me, his fingers made of some kind of steel, and like the cracker and digger used to splay open a lobster his hands dug in.  The muscles of my back and neck and legs slid apart, and even my feet seemed to spread like the bones of a fan... Most everything was beyond words, in a plateau of pleasure and pain that lifted out the tongue and stomped it on the floor.

p. 193, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

Accumulated misfortune

I was reduced.  I was barely there.  When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.  Light seemed to shine right through your very hands, your blood no longer red:  your skin in the breeze billowing, like a jellyfish.

p. 260, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

Sitting gloriously in the ruins

Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth:  Here she is! everyone exclaimed.  And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again.  A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it.  Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.

p. 121, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

He fell on the floor

When I was younger I could get away with not eating something I didn't like by claiming to my parents either that it was too rich or that it had fallen on the floor.  (Later, I would use this with people:  "She was too rich" or "He fell on the floor -- what is there to say?")

p. 107, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

Degrees of hose-edness

Impolite terms, used intramurally, were meant as philosophical rebukes to the misplaced preoccupations of those who believed in "identity politics," in the idea that all members of an oppressed minority were equally oppressed, which all too conveniently obscured the fact that there were real differences in the "shaftedness," also sometimes called the "degrees of hose-edness," that people of the same race or gender suffered.  "All suffering isn't equal" was an article of the PIH (Partners in Health) faith, generated in reaction to the many times when they had tried to raise money and instead had been offered lectures about the universality of suffering, or simply lines like "The rich have problems, too."

p. 216, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder, Dec. 2010