She, who has always known, al...

She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be? - P189

She has to get to the forest, she must. If she is made to stay here, she doesn’t know what will happen. It won’t bode well. Something will go wrong. She is so certain of this fact, while unable to explain why. ‘I mean, yes. To . . .’ - P191

How can she make them understand the dread that has been filling her, ever since she heard the words of that letter? - P191

All Agnes wants is the green of a forest. She craves the dappled, animate pattern of light on ground, the merciful shade of a leaf-canopy, the not-quite-quiet, the repeating seclusion of trunks, disappearing into the distance. - P192

She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. - P194

그녀는 9월을, 가장 좋은 달을 택해 움직였다. 몬순...

그녀는 9월을, 가장 좋은 달을 택해 움직였다. 몬순이 물러간 케랄라는 산과 바다 사이에서 에메랄드 띠처럼 빛나고 있었다. 비행기가 착륙을 위해 비스듬히 날면서 땅이 일어나 우리를 맞이했을 때, 나는 지형이 이토록 뚜렷하고 물리적인 고통을 줄 수 있다는 사실을 믿을 수가 없었다

-알라딘 eBook <어머니 내게 오시네> (아룬다티 로이 지음, 민승남 옮김) 중에서 - P14

그날 나는 우리들 대부분이 기억과 상상이 뒤섞인 살아 숨쉬는 수프 같은 존재임을, 그리고 우리가 기억인지 상상인지 판단할 수 있는 최고의 판관은 아니라는 것을 깨달았다.

-알라딘 eBook <어머니 내게 오시네> (아룬다티 로이 지음, 민승남 옮김) 중에서 - P21

소설은 어디서 오는 걸까? 우리의 과거, 현재, 독서, 상상력—그렇다. 하지만 어쩌면 미래에 대한 예감에서 오는 것이기도 하지 않을까?

-알라딘 eBook <어머니 내게 오시네> (아룬다티 로이 지음, 민승남 옮김) 중에서 - P22

He feels again the sensation ...

He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. - P167

How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. - P167

‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’ - P168

Beautiful fingers, Agnes has, Mary is pained to notice. Tapering, white, slender. Agnes is, Mary is forced to admit, a striking woman. But it is an unsettling, wrong sort of beauty: the dark hair is ill-matched with the golden-green eyes, the skin whiter than milk, the teeth evenly spaced but pointed, like a fox’s. Mary finds she cannot look at her daughter-in-law for long, she cannot hold her gaze. This creature, this woman, this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite – because she is that, everyone says so, Mary knows it to be true – bewitched and ensnared her boy, lured him into a union. This, Mary can never forgive. - P174

And now the moment has arrived. Agnes conjugates it: he is going, he will be gone, he will go. She has put these circumstances together; she has set it in motion, as if she were the puppeteer, hidden behind a screen, gently pulling on the strings of her wooden people, easing and guiding them on where to go. She asked Bartholomew to speak to John, then waited for John to speak to her husband. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t got Bartholomew to plant the idea in John’s head. She has created this moment – no one else – and yet, now it is happening, she finds that it is entirely at odds with what she desires. - P175

It has come as a surprise to her that she has been unable to picture or divine the child she is carrying: girl or boy, she cannot tell. She is receiving no definite signs. She dropped a knife from the table the other day and it fell pointing towards the fire. A girl, then, she thought. But later the same day she found herself spooning the pap of an apple, sharp, pleasingly crisp, into her mouth and she thought: A boy. It is altogether confusing. Her hair is dry and crackles when she brushes it, which means a girl, but her skin is soft, her nails strong, which means a boy. A male peewit flew into her path the other day but then a female pheasant came squawking out of the bushes. - P178

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion. - P180

[오늘의 한문장] Hamnet (Movie Tie-In Edition)

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown. - P165

‘The house is an A.’

‘The house is an A.’ - P114

‘Because the floor is floating in mid-air, like the cross stroke of the A. There is no ground underneath it. Just empty space and more empty space.’ - P114

It seems strange to Agnes, during this time, that she has, in the space of a month, exchanged country for town, a farm for an apartment, a stepmother for a mother-in-law, one family for another. - P116

Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen. - P116

So she can withdraw into her own place but also mix and mingle with the others. She is at once observer and participant. - P116

Agnes glances at the face of her father-in-law and that of her mother-in-law and then her husband. He catches her eye and gives a barely perceptible nod towards the bread, raising his eyebrows. - P118

Agnes sees this but doesn’t say it. - P120

She sees, too, that all six children flinch if John gets suddenly to his feet, like animals sensing the approach of a predator. She sees Mary blink slowly, as if closing her eyes to what might occur. - P120

‘No. That you see the world as no one else does.’ - P114

She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove. - P122

In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within. - P122

She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things. - P129

But she knows enough to be able to record an approximation of this sentence: The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain. - P129

She says the word to herself – rowan, rowan – pulling out the two syllables. Reddened berries in autumn, used for stomach pains, if boiled, and wheezing chests; if planted by the door of a house, it will repel evil spirits from the inhabitants. People say the first woman was made from its branches. It was her mother’s name, although her father never let it past his lips; the shepherd had told her, when she’d asked him. The branches of the forest. Agnes plants her hands in front of her, on all fours, like a wolf, and submits to another pain. - P132

His mind is traversed, for a moment, by an image of her body in its current astonishing shape, as he saw it last night: limbs, neat ribcage, the spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow, and then this perfectly rounded sphere at the front. Like a woman who had swallowed the moon. - P133

Something has changed. He pauses. The quill rests in the inkwell, point down, fronded feathers up. He frowns. This is something he never does: to leave a quill like that, overnight, in the damp dark of a well. What a waste, what profligacy. It will be quite spoilt. - P133

Who would ever think it could be so thick, so strong, still pulsing like a long, striped heart? The colours of birth assail Agnes: the red, the blue, the white. - P135

‘That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.’ - P137

The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind. - P140

She hands the girl the box of millefiori beads and Judith takes it, her hands eager and quick, her face lit with a smile. - P151

There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever. - P152

He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night. - P155