Author: Chloe Dineen

Commonplacing Hurston 11/26

“Miserable, sullen men, black and white under guard had to keep on searching for bodies and digging graves. A huge ditch was dug across the white cemetery and a big ditch was opened across the black graveyard. Plenty quick-lime on hand to throw over the bodies as soon as they were received. They had already been unburied too long. The men were making every effort to get them covered up as quickly as possible. But the guards stopped them. They had received orders to be carried out.”

– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Ch 19

Commonplacing Hammett 11/1/23

“Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.”

-Hammett, The Maltese Falcon pgs 11-12

Commonplacing Woolf, 10/1/23

“He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was!- a few sayings like this about cabbages.”

-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Commonplacing Joyce 9/17/23

“-God help us! he said piously, to think of the men of those times, Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and Charles Kendal Bushe, and the noble-men we have now, leaders of the Irish people at home and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn’t be seen dead in a tenacre field with them.” -James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Commonplacing 9/10/23

“He recognized his motive and surrendered to his talent. Never, probably, had that talent, such as it was, been so fine. His difficulties were still there, but what was also there, to his perception, though probably, alas! to nobody’s else, was the art that in most cases had surmounted them.”

– Henry James, The Middle Years