Stoner

This is the kind of book that takes you by the wrist at first, but by the end of the book it has you by the throat. 

William Stoner, the main dude, is as real to me as any person that I know and I don't know if I will ever really forget him. That's what a great book does, it lives inside of you. 

Here are a few sneak peaks into this treasure of a book:

"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

This is a goodie too:

"He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive."

This is one of my faves (he is describing his daughter):

"She was he knew-and had known very early, he supposed-one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and care for that it might be fulfilled." 

Here a completely unrelated painting by Pierre Soulages. Okay bye.