"to head toward the land that no one had promised them (23)"
Notes to Self are longer journal entries from Seven Yrs Ago. For more One Hundred Years of Solitude, read "The only thing missing is for him to make chairs rock by simply looking at them (150)" (Pt. 2). I was 21 mid-2014.
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
“Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.” on not shooting a gun, p. 25
“At last I got out of bed and knelt down and did an imitation of somebody receiving divine reassurance and inspiration. I stopped crying.” after shooting a squirrel dead, p. 26
“Answers kept coming to me in the dark, proofs of my blamelessness that I knew to be false, but could not stop myself from devising.” p. 83
100 Years of Solitude
“The spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation and the urge to discover the wonders of the world” (9)
“Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars.” = ice (17)
“abandoned to the appetite of the squids” (18)
“It was simply a way of giving herself some relief, because actually they were joined till death by a bond that was more solid than love: a common prick of conscience.” (20)
“to head toward the land that no one had promised them” (23)
(I have a very grandiose vision of the world and I would like to see it happen.)
“With her waiting she had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, her habit of tenderness, but she kept the madness of her heart intact.” (28)
“maddened by that prodigious plaything” (28)
“all of a sudden she threw the whole world on top of him.” (31)
I think I’m so much of a thinker that if you can’t trick me into feeling, then there is no magic.
“‘My boy,’ she exclaimed, ‘may God preserve you just as you are.’” (33)
“That they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.” (47)
“In all the houses, keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imagined reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.” (47)
For commentary seven years later, go here.