A Selection of Quotes From Morrissey's List of the Lost

According to the Amazon.uk website, Morrissey’s audiobook for List of the Lost is set to be released on June 30^th. Some chat on Twitter, however, has indicated that the audiobook is no longer available on the Penguin site. There haven’t been any announcements on TTY regarding who the narrator is, or if the audiobook is indeed still set to be released, so we shall see.

My copy of List of the Lost (with cat bookmark!)

Back when the novel was released in September of last year, as I’m sure we will all remember, there were a number of negative reviews, which I feel reluctant to address, as this post will be in celebration of the book. However, as Morrissey himself said, many reviews were clearly nothing more than personal attacks. My additional belief is that many who wrote such scathing reviews just don’t get Moz. Well, their loss. I, for one, have read the novel four times now, and each time I discover something else that strikes me and captivates me, whether it be the nimble poetics of his alliterative prose, or the stream-of-consciousness flow from page to page, or the haunting rhythms and luxe darkness of the imagery, or the fact he addresses intense and controversial topics in a way that allows the reader to truly think about what they are reading, and by extension life -  and the world itself.

How many modern books that are critically acclaimed, or on bestseller lists, actually tell us anything about our lives? Gung-ho-pop-psyc-self-help books merely make us feel inadequate in our grasping search for any kind of meaning in life whilst flinging vague, unhelpful advice in our faces, lacklustre 'chick-lit’ mainly dumbs and numbs us down with its shopaholics and clichéd happy endings, and most ‘thrillers’ are anything but thrilling. Don’t even get me started on 50 Shades of Grey. Am I disenchanted with most modern books? Well...I wasn't ever enchanted to begin with.  I've usually preferred older books.

Like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, LOTL is listed under "Gothic Romance"

But that’s enough about the world's crashing boredom-books, let’s get back to List of The Lost, which is listed in the "Gothic Romance" genre.  Most people I’ve spoken to were either in love with the novel (like me), or just felt it wasn’t for them. My advice? Give it a re-read. Really. Open your mind up and fling yourself into absorbing it stylistically and let yourself delve in. Cast away expectations about chapters, or typical characters, or beginnings, middles, and ends – cast away what your high school English teacher may or may not have told you structurally about reading; I should know (or not know): I used to teach high school English. Truly great works of art divert in structure, form, and style from what is typically expected.

In this post, I decided, with my fourth read, to select some of my favourite quotes (as always, it can be hard to narrow down) from List of The Lost. After quite a few people enjoyed my quote blog about Autobiography, I thought it might be interesting to do this again.  As always, it should be mentioned that to fully appreciate a work it is often best to admire it is as a whole; however, I did want to give you a window, or a nudge towards, how thought-provoking and vividly descriptive these particular passages are. And... as always, I will warn you, if you haven’t read it and want to be surprised, you may want to skip reading this, or... you may want to read it to give yourself a mesmerizing taste. 

Let’s begin:

On mortality:

"How very self-serving of the living to gaze upon the consigned grave spot of another and assume at rest." - p 70

"...but to where, to where? And why must we believe that there is a next stage? Does our sanity depend upon it? - p 28

"Look at them now in their manful splendor and wonder how it is that they could possibly part this earth in dirt, as creased corpses, falling back as the skeletons that we already are, yet hidden behind musculature that will fall in time at life's finishing line." - p 1

Scheletro umano - Andrea Schillaci

On existence:

"It is certainly something to dwell excitedly within a body that fully and proudly shows whatever the person is, since we all, for the most part, struggle in haunted fashion, unaware of ourselves as flesh, looking at a future that does not show promise, or back at a past that couldn't provide any, and permanently petrified at passing through without ever having lived." - p 2

"Look at the blue of the sky and tell me why you held back. Did you think there would be a bluer sky and a better hour?  What did you think before you were aware? - p 4

"But why always stand there, zombified, awaiting life's WALK sign? Are you now incapable of walking unless instructed?" - p 56

"But oh, could there be someone one day who might make sense of me? And if it is not designed to be, then why am I able to imagine it? - pp 78-79

"What is this terrible, terrible world? And how are we expected to behave within it? The doom of the universe all around us, yet the impossibility of touching the heart's desire." p - 108

Sexuality:

"...a certain sexlessness kept the grown child tied to the family, even if the impossibly constricted demands could very easily lead to a form of sexual cremation for the young child. The parental mind would allow the child time to develop political views, but there would certainly be no question of allowing the child time to choose its preferred religion, and even more importantly, the grand assumption that all children are extensively heterosexually resolved at birth whipped a demented torment across the many who were not." - p 11

"This makes the human being a pitiful creature eternally occupied with longing, longing, longing - yet animals, at least (at most?) leap as large as life when ready to cloy in ecstasy.  Humans, on the other hand, require novels, films, food, labor, plays, magazines, pornography, and castles in Spain in order to substitute for the urgings of the loins - and, alarmingly, they accept those substitutes. Well, what choice?" - p 32

via poetryfoundation.org

Suicide:

"He shall travel this path without the strength to cope with anything else, no longer likely to explode from this intensity, yet ready to fuse the physical with the spiritual and to accept that the next moment will be unlike any other. ...Let the minutes spin as a tankard of vodka is clouded by a heavy overjolt of brown and white powder, both of which submerge like falling snow as they enjoy one another and whisper, "I'm the right friend for you.... He was aware of the pain but also of its completeness and necessity..." - pp 52-54

"...For he has fallen to the reality that very few can bear - of being enfeebled to a desensitized and spiritless resignation. Traumatism has left him frostbitten and chilblained, feverous and flushed, fiery and felled...nothing, now, can save the airsick slide of the suicidalist. He was once important only because the life within him had importance ... but when lack of safety is suddenly nothing to fear? When the will finally gives out, and wants no return? No further tears against the dying of the light, as the quiet exit becomes the logical perspective." - pp 113-114

Animals:

"Yet what makes wild bluebells wild? And could they ever be tamed? Is a caged animal no longer wildlife? Or is it in fact wilder still, due to its incarceration? - p 20

The Media:

"Now, peace is regained as his television flickers from commercial to commercial to commercial to commercial, advertising nothing at all that he would ever want or need, yet reminding him that he is nothing and that he will die in debt, reminding him that whatever insurance he might have could never possibly be enough, reminding him that all medications will kill him mid-laughter, shouting at him as if they were the vigilant society - a blatantly sensational phony inflation with that essential TV ingredient of nightmare and pixy-minded publicity with nothing at all to touch the artistic emotions, yet preying umercifully on the viewer's insecurity and lack of ready cash. Whatever you can do will never be enough. You are fragile and possibly already dead." - p. 40

"Local television news...gives a practiced air of impartial reporting but angles its wording at a pre-existing attitude towards whatever it reports. At its core its reporting must influence the moral and emotional nature of its viewers, because television news narratives always assume that every person watching is exactly the same in moral temperament and social outlook and will be sufficiently exhausted by their own private struggle that they will believe everything that they see and hear on television news." - pp 76-77

"Have you ever watched the TV news, and listened to all of their scare-tactic propaganda ...  every story designed to frighten you, scare you off, make you feel small, make you feel alarmed yet hopeless ... and then - bam! 'and now we have some sports news', as if this ought to counterbalance all the shit that's happening in the world." p - 83

Aging:

"Being this old is new to me. This is why I can't take to young people. They think the elderly have been elderly for years and years, but we haven't, we've just turned old from being young - and all we know about is being young! You'd laugh if I said I was no different to you - but it's true. My mind is twenty-one. I can't recognize the body I have now ... because it isn't mine ... I'm new at being old." - p 27

History:

"...so small and lost are they, so petty their actual blood-and-guts experience, yet oh so very ripe for clever positions within the judiciary or the media, and with their narrow historical views the students will become unbreakable in their steely assurances, and whatever the unreliable and self-serving shit story history books have left out does not matter, as long as their own life happens as designed, for it is all and absolutely only about money." - p 14

Politics:

"We never have Anne Sexton or James Baldwin types running the country. They'd make far too much sense."  - p 83

"Politicians are all the same. They are trained to appear to answer questions without actually parting with information. If you're in politics your main skill must be concealing the truth, and that's all you ever need to do. It's almost comical ... this possession of power ... this preoccupation with appearing dangerous." - p 84

"Although Reagan in himself is a past event, he becomes current in the politics of 1975 because America has always feared the future and will forever seek a familiar if untrustworthy 'type' (with whom one at least knows where one stands) rather than seek someone who might glow or advance America's global popularity (the purity of which is in any case not to be questioned). What is happening on the streets of America, and the stormy shouts of the new youth who demand to be allowed to be what they are and were born to be, provided Reagan with a deep commitment to opposing the people, his policies as cruel as the Church. Like all world leaders, Reagan could only be confirmed by the terror he instilled in the people of his country, for this makes for the appearance of solid supervision in a society with no wish to evolve." - pp 97-98

"That must be a hairpiece?"( p. 99): Reliably instilling terror

Despair and Grief:

"Only so much despair can be survived before the mind finally caves in." - p 22

"Gazing into hell he saw the thin line between suffering and mental deficiency, and only darkness could be relief from such unimaginable rapids of fastidious torment." - p 50

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Description and Imagery:

"Here, the vigilantes pulled at stubborn shrubbery of bramble, brier, scrub, and brush; the gnarl of knotted tree-roots and trunk of bough and branch. Thickset greenery twisted into sprigs of twigs and underbrush of stem and stalk." - p 68

"Spot starter Ezra rose courageously from the starting block with a trimly sprint to second baseman Nails - a tight and shipshape acceleration, flat-out throttle of speed, with quickening cannonball blast giving a confident handover to third bagger Justy, who gripped the baton all ataunto, with the old glory rising like the last of a whip at the starboard tip of a mid-storm ship losing its grip..." - p 90

Honestly, I tend to moon quite a lot over description, so I could go on... but in such a case I'd never be able to narrow things down, so for now I'll end with this quote - which struck me as so beautiful since the first time I read it:

"Light rain taps their faces like uncommitted kisses as early evening rush hour begins to hum from beyond the training ground." - p 6

Now, doesn't that make you want to give it another read?