Matthew Harffy ~ Author Interview
“Just finish the first draft and go for it!”
Category: Fiction
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway & the Ideal Self
“Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it.”
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Stages on Life’s Way (1845) by Søren Kierkegaard & Connections to Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)
“The esthetic hero must have his opposition outside himself, not in himself.”
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The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers & the Power of Trees
“What do all good stories do… They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
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Hippie (2018) by Paulo Coelho & the Virtue of Intuition
“At that moment, she basked in a world without questions or answers. Without doubts or convictions. She basked in a world that was one with her.”
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Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce & the Great Irish Novel
“We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends.”
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The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann & the Natures of Love & Death
“Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death.”
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Less (2017) by Andrew Sean Greer & the Blue Suit
“I don’t mean the middle America of small minds and malt shops, or midcentury America, but rather the middle, the muddle, the void of America.”
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The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) by John Gardner & the Great American Read
“It was beautiful, sad and unreal, where the sunlight struck. You felt as though life would be different there, the air lighter and cooler, the silence more profound.”
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Selected Poems of Rūmī (2011) by Jalāl’l-Dīn Rūmī & the States of Grace
“The soul says to her base earthly parts, ‘My exile is more bitter than yours: I am celestial.’”
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The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro & On the Nature of Dignity
“And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”
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In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI: Time Regained (1927) by Marcel Proust & the Lost Paradises
“I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.”
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In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V: The Captive (1923) & The Fugitive (1925) by Marcel Proust & the Fraternity of Travel
“So that if happiness, or at least the absence of suffering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek.”
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In Search of Lost Time, Vol. IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921/1922) by Marcel Proust & the Common Oblivion
“A common oblivion obliterates everything… The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.”
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In Search of Lost Time, Vol. III: The Guermantes Way (1920/1921) by Marcel Proust & Oriane’s Enchanted World of Names
“And my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck… I cried out with myself as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: ‘How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes.’”
