Dreams in books

From the Polish Rider by Ben Lerner, out of the new Yorker that my mother sent me

I'd always been jealous of painters and sculptors and other visual artists, basically jealous of any artist who worked with something other than words. . . jealous because of my unsophisticated but unshakable sense that a work of visual art is more real, more actual than writing.  But maybe the comparative unreality of writing is precisely its advantage... powerful in part because they are so easy to reproduce, transmit. 

From the Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death.  That first night before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and windows and the cracks in the floor so it does not run out of the house like a river.  The living know that at daybreak the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of the past... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far so long that it will forget to come back.  For this reason the living bring their own rituals to a standstill... hoping that sentiment and longing will bring it home again, encourage it to return with a message, with a sign, or with forgiveness. 

You must understand this is one of those moments
What moments?
One of those moments you keep to yourself
...You have to think closely about where you tell it and to whom. Who deserves to hear it?

It does not take me three whole days to fall in love with her.  Only one.

Zora had been wearing a new perfume for two months now and I hadn't been able to get used to the smell of it yet-- but sitting there with the smoke in her hair and the day coming out of her skin... she came back to me completely.  Everything I had expected her to say she let fall between us, and I couldn't remember the answers I had been preparing. 

He was nine but he had known since the encounter in the smokehouse that he and the tiger and the tiger's wife were caught on one side of a failing fight.  He did not understand the opponents; he did not want to.