(Posting mainly at bunkercomplex.wordpress.com) My name is Andrea, and I'm a 24-year-old Southern California girl. I distract myself from the pain that is grad school with Peter Gabriel, Phil Hendrie, peanut butter and apricot jam sandwiches, bicycles, Korean stationery, movie marathon nights, and baking. I use tumblr to post whatever gets my jollies. You can email me at bunkercomplex@gmail.com.
Folks I Follow
8 Dec 09
"Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you."
Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
7 Dec 09
"Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?… Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?"
Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
5 Dec 09
"I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There never had been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind."
Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping)
29 Nov 09
"Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there."
Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake)
21 Nov 09
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that ‘our most precious resource is our children.’ But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."
Michael Chabon (Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son)
18 Nov 09
"If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it’s too late!"
Michael Chabon (Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son)
7 Nov 09
"‘Hey there.’ I cleared my throat. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m engaged!’
Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question."
‘I’m engaged!’
Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question."
Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake)
4 Nov 09
"You feel like telling him you’re not single in the way that he thinks you’re single. After all, you have yourself."
Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake)
28 Oct 09
"They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself."
Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
Book #60
16 Oct 09
"Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being."
Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)
11 Oct 09
"I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew."
Lorrie Moore (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?)
16 Sep 09
"All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason."
James Baldwin (Sonny’s Blues)
8 Apr 09
"I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas… . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It’s about words. It’s about a man dealing with life. Okay?"
J. R. Moehringer, from The Tender Bar
2 Apr 09
"There was real pleasure to be had eating ice cream out of container and pickles out of a glass jar, standing up at the counter. I wondered whether the cravings associated with pregnancy were really only a matter of women feeling empowered to admit their odd longings to their husbands, to ask another person to bring them the eccentric combinations they’d long enjoyed in private."
Jenni Ferrari-Adler (Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant)
food 2009 Books Jenni Ferarri-Adler Alone In the Kitchen With An Egglplant book passages
26 Feb 09
"Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
‘How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?’ Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. ‘If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and—’
‘All right!’
‘All books are in some way about other books.’
‘I get it!’"
‘How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?’ Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. ‘If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and—’
‘All right!’
‘All books are in some way about other books.’
‘I get it!’"
Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)
