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John Gardner Quotes

Total quotes: 7
“The cold night air is reality at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall to show that the world is abandoned.”
— Grendel, Grendel
Tagged: Nature's Apathy, Night
“The painful realization came that he did not feel as guilty even about the murder as he felt about his betrayal of his calling. ”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Conviction, Vocation
“Locked in the deadly progression of moon and stars.”
— John Gardner, Grendel
Tagged: Fatalism, Our Existential Physics
“Her face was like a child's, not yet touched by the shadow of family deaths. Behind her there was a white, Spanish-looking building, large, spear-shaped fronds, and a wide, bright expanse of water. Sunlight fell everywhere, not least (one felt) in the young woman's heart. He had never seen anyone more beautiful, he thought; he was reminded of those French art films of the fifties. Staring at the face, he felt baffled, suddenly depressed. The Jessie of the picture was one he would never know, and childish, irrational as the feeling might be, he felt cheated, a little angry.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Aging, Lost Time, Love, History of Faces
“He'd never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their own natural harmonies, or if the restless spirits of dead animals were to cry out, this might be their sound.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Music, Theology, Perfect Music
“It even crossed his mind, as he stood idly waiting, his hand resting on the wallpaper books, that maybe he ought to get a rifle. Why not? His father had taken him hunting as a boy; the memory rose in his mind with wonderful vividness— creeks, trees, sunlight, squirrels scampering along high, leafy branches, the sky bright blue, like the ceiling at his parents' church. He'd never been hunting since. Ellen had hated guns. Her irrational fear of them had gotten under his skin, her weird conviction— only now did he fully realize how weird it was— that Mickelsson was a man too dark-spirited and moody to be safe with a rifle in the house. He shook his head. Odd what a man could take for reasonable and natural, if the poison was slipped in subtly enough, over a long enough period of time.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Relationships, Slowly Dying
“If music was studied, recreated or now-first-expressed emotion, why was he listening with such strained intensity, as if to learn some answer, solve some important life-riddle? Wasn't it the case, in fact, that he'd been listening all this while for the wrong thing entirely; that music— for that matter, all the arts—told one nothing at all, simply described things as they are, or were, or might be, simply named things as Adam was said to have named things in the garden except that it was the thing named? Was it the case, to put the idea more exactly, that music was nothing more than, as the formalists thought, one more expression of Nature's way, atomic orderliness, no more significant or meaningful— except for the fact that it was created by human beings and in public places flashed its complexity— than a jonquil, an elm tree, that it was simply one more particular thing in a crowded, gasping anarchy of things—itself, simply: meaningless and ultimately as worthless as a soup-spoon, or Donnie Matthews' foetus; or meaningless except in that, like the foetus, it might not have existed and someday would cease to exist?”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Art, Liberal Arts, Meaning, Music
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