Tag: Nobel Prize

“You were right to tell me that in life, it is not the future which counts, but the past.”

ModianoWhat kind of person believes that the past is more important than the future? Wouldn’t the least likely be someone with amnesia? The central character in this novel by Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano is a Parisian who has no memory of his life before the second world war. It appears … Read More

“There was a sunlit absence.”

heaney croppedThis is the first line of my current-favorite poem by the Irish poet who was said to be “permanently homesick.”  I wonder if somehow he enjoyed being homesick. (Absence isn’t dark, it’s “sunlit” and the title of the poem is “Sunlight.”) It describes his aunt baking scones in her … Read More

“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.”

Munro croppedThese are the final sentences in Alice Munro’s collection of short stories, Dear Life, which won the Nobel Prize.  I believe that the character is lying and that she wishes she could forgive herself. I’m sure that other readers have come to different conclusions. These stories are complex, with characters … Read More

“Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.”

PamukcropThis novel is a collection of beautiful sentences about self-discovery.  For example: “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” (52)  When … Read More