9. Books and Movies and Inspiration...Oh my.

I know I've already said this approximately 15 times on this blog, BUT...

If I was forced to pick a "favorite" book (blah), it would be The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. I'm blissfully in love with this book (do I need anything else?), for its story, for its characters, for its commentary and especially for it's poetic prose and the wide array emotions, all explained beautifully. It's a book I could read, then go back to the first page and read again. I want to put it, as well as a couple of other things, on here this week because it's what inspires my writing and it's what I hope to one day be able to achieve.

To understand the quotations, you'll have to understand at least a brief context. The book is written in in first person, but through two character's POVs, Henry and Clare...it takes a little while to get used to that, but once you do, it's easy to read. The story, as suggested in the title, is about the romantic relationship between Henry DeTamble (a man with a genetic mutation that causes him to time travel), and Clare Abshire. What's great is that though the book is so rooted in Henry's time traveling, you're able to believe this is a real, everyday kind of thing. As Mrs. Parks would probably say, it's not sensationalized. Henry meets Clare for the first time when he's in his late 20s, but Clare meets Henry when she's a small child (as a result of an older-Henry traveling back in time). At the heart of the story, you really see Clare's loneliness and how it seems she's always waiting for Henry to return. This quote really exemplifies that:

"Sometimes he disappears unobtrusively; I might be walking from the kitchen into the hall and find a pile of clothing on the floor. I might get out of bed in the morning and find the shower running and no one in it. Sometimes it's frightening. I am working in my studio one afternoon when I hear someone moaning outside my door; when I open it I find Henry on his hands and knees, naked, in the hall, bleeding heavily from his head. He opens his eyes, sees me, and vanishes. sometimes I wake up in the night and Henry is gone. In the morning he will tell me where he's been, the way other husbands might tell their wives of a dream they had: "I was in the Selzer Library in the dark, in 1989." Or: "I was chased by a German Shepherd across somebody's backyard and had to climb a tree." Or: "I was standing in the rain near my parents' apartment, listening to my mother sing." I am waiting for Henry to tell me that he has seen me as a child, but so far this hasn't happened. When I was a child I looked forward to seeing Henry. Every visit was an event. Now every absence was a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will hear about when my adventurer materialized at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking. Now I am afraid when he is gone."

The emotion in that, for me, is fantastic. The idea that she was, as a child, so excited to see him (though waiting anxiously for his return, too) but because she had that, she has to lose him now? So sad, but in such a great way.

On another note, a favorite movie (because in this case, the movie is tremendously better than the book). PS I Love You. Again, girly, right? Sure. But it's such concentrated emotion...I love it. Of course, at the moment, I can't find an example of it, but when I do, I'll edit this and put it on. Until then, my favorite quote from that movie is already at the top of my page.

From another movie, though, and I swear I'm almost done... the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Love the very metatextual feel of it, the concept of Writer as God and look at what we do to the people in our texts (because, really, aren't we sort of awful?). From it, this quote:

Harold Crick: What is wrong with you? Hey! I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes. I want to live. I mean, who in their right mind, in a choice between living and pancakes...chooses pancakes?
Dr. Jules Hilbert: Harold, if you paused to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life people led...and, of course, the quality of the pancakes.


I put these on this week, only because they're things that have inspired me, in both poetry and prose. Even if the product hasn't come about yet, I've gotten a specific idea or ideas from each of these.