I've decided to post the quotations/passages that stuck out to me on my first read of TTs. These only have to do with the first few pages, but I couldn't write in my book and I didn't want to forget them!
Person Senior had always had clumsy hands but of late the way he fumbled for things in the bathwater of space, groping for the transparent soap of evasive matter, or vainly endeavored to tie or untie such parts of manufactured articles as had to be fastened or unfastened, was growing positively comic. -494
The black laps flipped over untidily and had to be redone, and by the time the eye of the ribbon was ready for use (a tiny tangible circle between finger and thumb) its button had disappeared among the folds and furrows of space -495
Hugh wrenched the umbrella out of his father's hands so abruptly that the old man kept kneading the air -495
Its brown curtain was only half drawn, disclosing the elegant legs, clad in transparent black, of a female seated inside. -497
The pun? 3 Photo poses?-497
When she did, she laughed at her stupidity, swiftly led Hugh to the fitting room and, still laughing heartily, drew the green, not brown, curtain open with what became in retrospect a dramatic gesture-497
He died before reaching the floor, as if falling from some great height, and now lay on his back, one arm outstretched, umbrella and hat out of reach in the tall looking glass 498Henry Emery Person 498
Harold Hall- American consul in Switzerland 498
The general sense of liberation came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away a lot of life's rot. Like many a young man of dark genius who feels in a wad of bills all the tangible thickness of immediate delights...499
For optical and animal reasons sexual love is less transparent than many other much more complicated things -499
Half open, green-checkered grip 499
Person's whore has plunked her voluminous handbag there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the Faust affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. 500
It was not a ghost, however, that prevented him from falling asleep, but the stuffiness 500 (Hamlet reference?)
The thin meniscus overhead was too wan to illumine the roofs of the houses descending toward the invisible lake; the light of a garage picked out the steps of desolate stairs leading into a chaos of shadows, and our acrophobic Person felt the pull of gravity inviting him to join the night and his father 500
The boy did not care "to behave like a ghost" 501
She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse 505
She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end 505
Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up 506
Ask me what I can do , not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric 506
I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree 507
I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius 507
I remember thinking about similarities between Hugh Person and Hamlet when I first started reading- but only in these first few pages, as I lost my train of thought after that. However, the fact that he thought he behaved like a ghost, and that his father died- as well as his personal confliction- reminded me of Hamlet. There were other quotations that I should probably elaborate on, but instead I will reflect internally! I used many of these quotations in my paper, too, as well.
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