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“...all those weirdos who sit around on message boards
just waiting to lend an ear to some sweet thing who can't
stand one more half hour of driving the dress shirts
to the dry cleaner and buffing the goddamn nogahyde,
who might take a peek at my shapely megabytes
and say oh you poor honey why don't i send you a one-way
plane ticket right out to my castle in beverly hills or san francisco and that would be *that* I swear to christ”
― Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems
just waiting to lend an ear to some sweet thing who can't
stand one more half hour of driving the dress shirts
to the dry cleaner and buffing the goddamn nogahyde,
who might take a peek at my shapely megabytes
and say oh you poor honey why don't i send you a one-way
plane ticket right out to my castle in beverly hills or san francisco and that would be *that* I swear to christ”
― Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems
“The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar—the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.”
― The Blithedale Romance
― The Blithedale Romance
“i watched as they grew legs
and flung themselves over the edge, freedom a thing that first required a great fall. gods of this church. gods of all the others. i am falling and i am asking for so much: a hymn, a pardon, a soft place to land.”
― Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems
and flung themselves over the edge, freedom a thing that first required a great fall. gods of this church. gods of all the others. i am falling and i am asking for so much: a hymn, a pardon, a soft place to land.”
― Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems
“Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there. I couldn’t accept that all his praises—all those affirmations an eighth-grade girl desperately needs to hear—came from a place of malevolence, and I was stupid and vain enough to buy it.”
― Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers
― Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers
“Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off. I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable. I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet? The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling. It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.”
― Spare
― Spare
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