Beautiful Ruins by Jess WalterMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
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This is a book I won from the Maricopa Summer Reading Program.
March 27, 2017 - May 3, 2017
“We marched that March for the sake of marching, ... but because a wet army not marching begins to smell like a camp of hobos ... We marched up that boot like a woman rolling up a stocking" (Walter 88 Beautiful Ruins).
“God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is" (Walter 104 Beautiful Ruins).
"Because Eddy knows that this evil lives in all of us, that we are all animals in the end. William Eddy has simply...survived. And as he faces the horizon, we realize that maybe it's all any of us can hope to do. Survive. Caught in the raging crosscurrents of history, of sorrow, and of certain death, a man realizes he is powerless, that all his belief in himself is a vanity...a dream. ... For family, for love, for simple decency, a good man rages against nature, and the brutality of fate, but it is a war he can never win. Every love is the same love, overpowering--the wrenching grace of what it is to be human. We love. We try. We die alone" (Walter 153 Beautiful Ruins).
"The Room is everything. When you are in The Room, nothing exists outside. The people hearing your pitch could no more leave The Room than choose to not orgasm. They MUST hear your story. The Room is all there is. Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth? If your story improves Truth, you will sell it in The Room. Sell it in The Room and you'll get The Deal. Get The Deal and the world awaits like a quivering bride in your bed. - From chapter 14 of The Deane's Way: How I Pitched Modern Hollywood to America and How You Can Pitch Success In Your Life Too, by Michael Deane" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 170-171).
“The whole world is sick...we've all got this pathetic need to be seen. We're a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 195).
"Pasquale just smiled. He concentrated, looking for the words. 'The first night, you say something...that we don't know when our story is start, yes?' Dee nodded. 'My friend Alvis Bender, the man who write the book you read, he tell me something like this one time. He say our life is a story. But all stories go in different direction, yes?' He shot a hand out to the left. 'You.' And the other to the right. 'Me.' The words didn't match what he'd hoped to say, but she nodded as if she understood. 'But sometimes...we are like people in a car or a train, go in same direction. Same story.' He put his hands together. 'And I think...this is nice, yes?' 'Oh, yes,' she said, and put her own hands together to show him. 'Thank you, Pasquale.' ... Pasquale stared at the door. He had wished for this world of the glamorous Americans, and like a dream she had come to his hotel, but now the world was back where it belonged, and he wondered if it would have been better to never have glimpsed what lay behind the door" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 220-222).
"they'd told their stories: first the bland, self-serving surface story one tells a stranger--family, college, career--and then the truth, the pain of Shane's failed marriage and the rejection of his book of short stories; Claire's seemingly misguided decision to come out of the cocoon of the academia and her anguish over whether to go back in; Shane's painful realization that he was milk fed veal; Claire's failed quest to make one great film; and then the loud, laugh-until-you-cry sharing--My boyfriend is a gorgeous zombie who loves strip clubs! and I actually live in my parent's basement!" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 225).
“His motivation still worried her--he talked a lot about hitting it big, about being famous--and so she'd tried to explain the dangers of fame, but she couldn't really be specific, could only make flat, bland speeches about the purity of art and the trappings of success. So she worried that her talk was all a waste of time, like warning a starving person about the dangers of obesity" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 241).
"This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 254).
"Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 259).
“My reward was a vision that would define my career: We want what we want” (Walter 299 Beautiful Ruins).
“She looked up in his calm, whiskey-brown eyes and nodded. ‘All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character--what we believe--none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!'" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 315).
“She looked up at him. ‘You really think the painter made it back to see her?' ‘Oh, yes,' Pasquale said, his voice hoarse with feeling. ‘You're not just saying that to make me feel better?' And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, ‘Yes'" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 324-325).
“It's what isn't that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs--four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon--but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 334).
“In the Drama Club photo she poses at the center of a mugging, expressive group of shaggy-haired students--a tulip in a field of weeds” (Walter Beautiful Ruins 339).
"Pasquale's mother said, 'I hope that is what you would have done even if I wasn't watching you.' Pasquale wasn't sure what she meant. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.' She put a hand on his shoulder. 'Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.' ... And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant--how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 359).
"He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality--the openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries--America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones o empires. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations--Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor" (Walter Beautiful Ruins 360-361).
“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life in that fact” (Milan Kundera Walter Beautiful Ruins 384).
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