2
" I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. " Sadie frowned. " What do you mean?" " A ranking," I said. " You know, what's crazier than what." " Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. " First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." " So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. " Uh-uh," she said. " Suicides are." I looked at her. " Why?" " Anyone can be crazy," she answered. " That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out? "
5
" You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book. "
― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
8
" Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic,' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny,' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous,' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic. "
― , The Haunted Dusk
9
" You feel well, Ali? You have a very faraway look on your face, beta,' my dad said. 'Like you have left your heart behind.'He fixed me with eyes as liquid black as mine and for a moment I felt exposed, like he could see right through me. That irrational childhood thought that he could read my mind maybe.'What nonsense, his heart is here with his mother and his family. Tell him, Ali,' my mother said.'Begum, this generation of boys and girls, you know how they are.' My dad never said my mother's name; she was always Begum, the generic term for 'wife'. "
