Originale
Tom Robbins: Jitterbug Perfume
The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. Zentrales Thema in »Jitterbug Perfume« ist die Fähigkeit des Menschen, sein Schicksal selbst zu bestimmen. Die Frage, inwieweit...
Pete Dexter: Paris Trout
»There are things like that buried in everybody,« he said. »That doesn't mean you want to act on it, just that it's there. We're all flawed people.« Pete Dexters Roman »Paris Trout« hat nichts mit der französischen Stadt oder ihren Forellen zu tun. Paris Trout ist der Eigenname des Mannes, der...
Denis Johnson: Already Dead. A California Gothic
To find the people who've become truly sane, seek among those who've managed to do without sanity. The rest of us, Meadows thought, just brainlessly acquiesce. Noch mehr als der vielversprechende Titel »Already Dead« deutet der Untertitel von Johnsons Roman, »A California Gothic«, darauf hin, dass...
Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down
I don't know why but it was kind of liberating, saying what you really wanted, even if you couldn't have it. ... We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because...
Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses
The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be...
Tom Robbins: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
The only truly magical and poetical exchanges that occur in this life occur between two people. Sometimes it doesn't get that far. Often, the true glory of existence is confined to individual consciousness. That's okay. Let us live for the beauty of our own reality. »Even Cowgirls Get the Blues«...
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim
I tell you my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. Die für das Englische etwas merkwürdige Satzstellung dieses Zitats rührt daher, dass es der deutsche Schmetterlingssammler Stein ist, der...
Abbott/Huntington Smith: We Pointed Them North
My sympathies was with the Indians. ... God, I wish I'd been a Sioux Indian a hundred years ago. ... They've been living in heaven for a thousand years, and we took it away from 'em for forty dollars a month. (E.C. Abbott & Helena Huntington Smith: We Pointed Them North - Recollections of a...
John Fowles: The Magus
»The Magus« (1966) beschreibt die Geschichte des Ich-Erzählers Nicholas Urfe, eines mit seinem Londonder Mittelklassehintergrund unzufriedenen jungen Mannes, der, um diesem Milieu zu entgehen, eine Stelle als Englischlehrer auf einer kleinen, fast verlassenen Insel in Griechenland annimmt. Dort -...
John Nichols: The Milagro Beanfield War
It's always darkest before the dawn. John Nichols erzählt in »The Milagro Beanfield War« (1974) die Geschichte eines kleinen Dorfes im Südwesten der USA, in dem sich an einem unerlaubt bewässerten Bohnenfeld der Kampf arm gegen reich entzündet. Jahrelang wurden in Milagro dem ärmeren Teil der...