Quotes
Listed here are favorite quotes from Froth on the Daydream.
Quotes that inspire, or give a strong visual image, or just admiration of the author's words
..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
Everything else can go, because all the rest is ugly - and the few pages which follow as an illustration of this draw their entire strength from the fact that the story is completely true since I made it up from beginning to end. ~ Boris Vian
He took the oil from the shelf and sprayed its pulverized perfume onto his yellow hair. His golden comb separated the silky mop into long honeyed strands like the furrows that a happy farmer ploughs through apricot jam with his fork.
ReplyDeleteThe skaters' trampling had not yet reached the sonic booming of those hectic moments when the noise it makes can be compared to a regiment marching over cobbled roads through squelching mud.
ReplyDeleteThe flat door slammed behind him with a noise like a naked hand slapping a bare bottom ... The street door closed behind him with a sound that was like a kiss on an uncovered shoulder.
ReplyDeleteHis mouth felt as if it were stuffed with the frizzled crumbs of burnt doughnuts.
ReplyDelete'It's awful' said Colin, 'I'm full of despair and yet, at the same time, I'm horribly happy. It's a nice kind of feeling to want something as badly as that.
ReplyDelete'I wish,' he went on, 'I were lying deep in lightly tossed grass, with sunshine and warm earth all around - the grass crisp and yellow as straw, you know what I mean, with hundreds of little buzzing insects, and clumps of soft dried moss too. One lies flat on one's tummy and stares. A hedge, some pebbles, a few gnarled trees and half-a-dozen leaves complete the scene. They're a great help.'
'Procrastination,' said Chick, 'is a prelude in a minor key.'
ReplyDeleteThey were carrying colossal corrugated cardboard cartons crammed with candles, coloured crepe and carnival decorations.
ReplyDeleteGreat rays of light were shining everywhere, trying to pick out anything golden so that they could burst out again in every direction. The wide yellow and purple painted stripes made the nave of the church look like the abdomen of an enormous sleeping wasp -. seen from the inside.
ReplyDeleteVery high up the Minstrels began to hum a distant chorus. The clouds came to listen. They smelt of coriander and mountain grass. It was warm in the church and the audience felt as if it were wrapped in an atmosphere of gracious cotton-wool.
At the spot where a river joins the ocean there is a barrier that is very difficult to navigate. Wrecked ships dance helplessly in the great eddies of foam. Between the night outside and the light of the lamp, memories flowed back from darkness of the past, banging against the light and immersed in its glow, gleaming and transparent, flaunted their white fronts and their silver backs.
ReplyDeleteThe wind blew a path between the leaves, took it, and came out on the other side of the trees loaded with the perfume of buds and flowers. People were walking on air and breathing more deeply because there was plenty of freshness about. The sun slowly unfolded its rays and chanced them in the sky, cautiously prying into places which it could not strike directly, bending them round curved and ornate angles, but banging against very black things and drawing them back immediately as if it were a clockwork ormolu octopus made by Faberge.
ReplyDeleteColin had sat on the floor to listen, with his back against the clavicocktail, and soft paisley-shaped tears slowly came from his eyes, ran down his jacket and trousers and trickled away into the dust. The music passed through him and came out distilled. The result sounded more like "Chloe" than the "Blues of the Vagabond". The junk merchant hummed an accompaniment of pastoral simplicity and swung his head to one side like a rattlesnake. He came to the end of his three choruses and stopped. Colin, filled with contentment to the very bottom of his soul, sat still. It was like the days before Chloe was ill.
ReplyDeleteSitting in his chair he looked out of the window and noticed smoke rising here and there above the roofs in huge blue spirals. There undersides were red as if it were the smoke from paper burning. He watched the red slowly but surely take over from the blue. The stereophonic collision of words in his head coincided with great flashes of light, opening up a field of repose to his deep fatigue that was like lush and new-mown moss in May.
ReplyDelete... as the commissergeant's hand shot up to the rim of his helmet the sentry at the bottom leapt into the saddle of his high horse which was clearly standing on its dignity.
ReplyDelete