From Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale

People disappear when they die. Their voices, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living mempry of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continut to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

--Diane Setterfield



Sunday, May 29, 2011

The Thirteenth Tale - a wonderful book with some quotes I really like

Like this:

Then the most unexpected thing happened. The doctor's face changed. Yes, changed, before my eyes. It was one of those moments when a face comes suddenly into focus, then the features, all recognizeable as the were befoer, are prone to a dizzing shift and present themselves in an unexpected new light. I would like to know what it is in a human mind that causes the faces of those we know to shift and dance about like that. I have ruled out optical effects, phenomena related to the light and so on, and have arrived at the conclusion that the explination is rooted in the psychology of the onlooker.

an exerpt from a journal passage in the book.

Has anyone's face changed like that for anyone else? I've seen it happen. It's wierd.
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