Hugo Cabret

"Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and the type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too." - Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret 

Things I Wish I Had Said

Wasn't it true, had he read it somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 a.m. than any other time...?

Stop! he cried silently.

"Charlie?" his wife said in her sleep.
Slowly he took off the other shoe.
His wife smiled in her sleep.
Why?
She's immortal. She has a son.
Your son, too!
But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.
Three a.m. That's our reward. Three in the morn. The soul's midnight. The tide goes out, the soul ebbs. And a train arrives at an hour of despair....Why?
"Charlie...?"
His wife's hand moved to his.
"You ...all right... Charlie?"
She drowsed.
He did not answer.
He could not tell her how he was.

- Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

Things I Wish I Had Said

I've been reading Mr. Noon by D.H. Lawrence, and I absolutely love this passage:

So he retreated to the kitchen, and his brilliant whistling kept her fully informed of his existence down the long length of the passage. Nay, even if he went out of actual earshot, he seemed to be ringing her up all the time on some viewless telephone. The man was marvelous. His voice could speak to her across a hundred miles of space; if he went to America, verily, she would hear him invisibly as if he was in the back kitchen. The connection between a mother and her infant was as nothing compared to the organic or telepathic connection between her and Lewie. It was a connection which simply never broken. And not a peaceful, quiet unison. But unquiet, as if he was always talking, always slightly forcing her attention, as now by his whistling in the kitchen. When he was right away from her, he still could make some sort of soundless noise which she was forced to hear and attend to. Lewie, Lewie, her soul sounded with the noise of him as a shell with the sea. It excited her, it pleased her, it saved her from ever feeling lonely. She loved it, she felt immensely pleased and flattered. But the dark lines came under her eyes and she felt sometimes as if she would go mad with irritation.

- D.H. Lawrence, Mr. Noon.

image via joel duggan

Things I Wish I Had Said

"My soul is an empty carousel at sunset."

~ Pablo Neruda, from Book of Twilight

image via Flickr