Lurchpoint

Sometimes I sit here and read and then I stumble across what I call a lurchpoint. It's a line or paragraph or section (see how it moves from one to three dimensions?) of a book that cuts to the chase, that provokes and evokes all at once. You suddenly find yourself lurching out over empty space, vertiginous, seeing things which are suddenly all too obvious.

This is from Sheri Tepper's The Margarets:

People on Earth engaged in ritual repetition; most of them thought as little as possible; most of them occupied themselves with things and events that were not very important... in school, the stupid students got the same grades as the smart ones, except for the tiny secret marks the educational archivists made in their records—in case a VIP needed a truthful reference.

It is uncanny how often Tepper does this. Although it is clear that she's got a feminist bias, I don't think that this is a bad thing. It's about the same as saying that Jane Austen is a feminist; the literature escapes such a snare and soars on its own.