“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”
― H is for Hawk
― H is for Hawk
“I did not think I could stand a Christmas at my parents' house, with a plastic tree and no snow and the TV going constantly. It was not as if my parent were so anxious to have me, either. In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs MacNat was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.”
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“It was good to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I laughed myself into becoming someone else.”
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.”
― Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
― Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
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Tessa’s 2025 Year in Books
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