"As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him. The twisting roads of the past weeks became alien, faded from his memory; it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the center.
How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: 'Your life is so simple.' 'Your life seems always to go in a straight line.' Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: 'You have chosen the easiest terrain.' But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way -- and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance -- that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoynace that he would say: 'Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?' as though there were nothing further to be said." (198)
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"She had quite forgotten the August afternoon only a little more than a year ago, when they had sat alone out on the grass beneath the maples, watching the thunderstorm sweep up the river valley toward them, and death had become the topic. And Port had said: 'Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.'" (238)
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"Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw be revealed." (312)
(1949. New York : Harper Collins, 1998)
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I like the middle quote a lot. The idea of these rich memories only ever being recalled a few times in the course of your life reminds me of the possibility (or solution in a way) that Proust opens up of building your entire present reality on the exploration of those remembrances.
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