[오늘의 한문장] The Love of a Good Woman: Stories (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)

But if she concentrated on the motion of the boat, a slight and secretive motion, she could feel as if everything for a long way around had gone quiet. - P78

They made a horrible smell an...

They made a horrible smell and the smell made her sick. That was the whole beginning of her being sick. That and the paint. - P61

That started her throwing up, leaning over and breathing in that paint. And the pains in her back—that was the start of them, too. - P61

"Oh, Mr. Willens, now, how much do I owe you for today?" - P61

And that was the signal for him to get her down and thump her like an old billy goat. - P62

Right on the bare floor to knock her up and down and try to bash her into pieces. Dingey on him like a blowtorch. - P62

They said his head got bunged up knocking against the steering wheel. They said he was alive when he went in the water. What a laugh. - P62

The smell rising from the body seemed to be changing, losing its ammoniac sharpness. Changing into the common odor of death. - P65

She had the body straightened out and cleaned and the bed put to rights before the doctor came. - P66

"July 10. Patient Mrs. Rupert (Jeanette) Quinn died today approx. 5 p.m. Heart failure due to uremia. (Glomerulonephritis.)" - P67

It was bewilderment that stopped him, not hostility. - P69

"All right," said Rupert, with the careful lack of surprise that country people will show, regarding the frivolity—the rudeness, even—of visitors. - P71

You cannot live in the world with such a burden. You will not be able to stand your life. - P72

She does not think anyone would get a death sentence for this sort of murder, which was in a way accidental, and was surely a crime of passion, but the shadow is there, to sober her when she feels that these pictures of devotion, of a bond that is like love but beyond love, are becoming indecent. - P73

"Lies" is the word that Enid can hear now, out of all the words that Mrs. Quinn said in that room. Lies. I bet it’s all lies. - P73

COULD a person make up something so detailed and diabolical? The answer is yes. - P73

Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person’s mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness. - P74

The biscuit-colored cone with its mound of vanilla ice cream squashed against the woman’s chest and the wrong end sticking into her father’s mouth. - P75

Through her silence, her collaboration in a silence, what benefits could bloom. For others, and for herself. - P75

She woke up unrepentant, swea...

She woke up unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass until her own self, her shame and disbelief, came pouring back into her. The sweat went cold on her skin. She lay there shivering in the warm night, with disgust and humiliation. She did not dare go back to sleep. She got used to the dark and the long rectangles of the net-curtained windows filled with a faint light. And the sick woman’s breath grating and scolding and then almost disappearing. - P51

It was understandable that things should have gone downhill in the last few months, but it looked as if there had been no care, no organization here, ever. - P52

ENID made eggnogs, not flavoring them even with vanilla, and fed them to Mrs. Quinn from a spoon. She fed her a little of the rich liquid at a time, and Mrs. Quinn was able to hold down what was given to her in small amounts. If she could not do that, Enid spooned out flat, lukewarm ginger ale. - P53

Not the recriminations or (if it was possible) the endearments, or perhaps even weeping, that she had been half expecting, but a laugh. - P56

"People tell me lots of things," said Enid. "Sure. Lies," Mrs. Quinn said. "I bet it’s all lies. You know Mr. Willens was right here in this room?" - P56

He had grabbed her leg to keep his balance and her skirt got scrunched up and her leg showed bare, but that was all there was to it and she couldn’t do a thing about it, she had to concentrate on keeping still. - P57

Rupert banged his head up and down on the floor, Rupert banged the life out of him, and she jumped up so fast the chair went over and Mr. Willens’s box where he kept his eye things got knocked over and all the things flew out of it. - P57

Rupert kept banging his big flat hands. She said, Rupert, we got to bury him somewhere. - P58

Like grabbing her leg up under her skirt when he had the thing to her eye and she couldn’t stop him and Rupert had to come sneaking in and get the wrong idea. - P59

Like he just made a mistake. He did. Mr. Willens certainly did make a mistake. - P59

If he hadn’t been so strong they wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place. - P59

If you could call that kissing, all that pushing up against her with the box still in one hand and the other grabbing on, and sucking away at her with his dribbly old mouth. Sucking and chewing away at her lips and her tongue and pushing himself up at her and the corner of the box sticking into her and digging her behind. She was so surprised and he got such a hold she didn’t know how to get out of it. Pushing and sucking and dribbling and digging into her and hurting her all at the same time. He was a dirty old brute. - P60

She did look pretty—or you co...

She did look pretty—or you could see at least that she had once been pretty, with her wide forehead and cheekbones (they almost punched the skin now, like china doorknobs) and her large greenish eyes and childish translucent teeth and small stubborn chin. - P36

They detested the sight of Enid herself, for her sleepless strength and patient hands and the way the juices of life were so admirably balanced and flowing in her. - P37

Enid was used to that, and she was able to understand the trouble they were in, the trouble of dying and also the trouble of their lives that sometimes overshadowed that. - P37

The smell of it and the discoloration, the malignant-looking little nipples and the pathetic ferretlike teeth. She saw all this as the sign of a willed corruption. - P38

She was sorry for them, even when she remembered how determined they had been to get what they had got. - P38

Mrs. Quinn was a harder case. Mrs. Quinn might crack and crack, but there would be nothing but sullen mischief, nothing but rot inside her. - P38

No patience or gentleness or cheerfulness that Enid could summon would keep Mrs. Quinn from knowing. And Mrs. Quinn made knowing it her triumph. Good riddance to bad rubbish. - P38

The girls in this group were dropping like flies, as they said of each other—they were dropping into matrimony. - P41

So, quickly and easily, still in her youth, she was slipping into this essential, central, yet isolated role. - P41

Her hope was to be good, and do good, and not necessarily in the orderly, customary, wifely way. - P41

The man who danced with her most often, and escorted her home, and pressed her hand good night, was the manager of the creamery—a man in his forties, never married, an excellent dancer, an avuncular friend to girls unlikely to find partners. No woman ever took him seriously. - P41

it looked as if her responsibilities might dwindle away to the care of those who had bizarre and hopeless afflictions, or were so irredeemably cranky that hospitals had thrown them out. - P44

And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been just the same old trouble—the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name that people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know. - P47

You couldn’t say that they had chosen the wrong lives or chosen against their will or not understood their choices. Just that they had not understood how time would pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used to be. - P48

His jokey gallantry that made the nerves of her teeth ache, as from too much sugar. - P50

She was a little bird-boned w...

She was a little bird-boned woman, queerly shaped now, with her swollen abdomen and limbs and her breasts shrunk to tiny pouches with dried-currant nipples. - P35

Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. - P36