“The scent of moist dirt and fresh growth washes in over me, watery, slippery, with an acid taste to it like the bark of a tree. It smells like youth; it smells like heartbreak.”
― The Blind Assassin
― The Blind Assassin
“I should have screamed. I should have thrown tantrums. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease as Reenie used to say.”
― The Blind Assassin
― The Blind Assassin
“She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone - to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: it tyranny.”
― The Blind Assassin
― The Blind Assassin
“Last time he saw there was a bruise on her thigh. He wished he'd made it himself.”
― The Blind Assassin
― The Blind Assassin
“There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. Light pours down upon it from the sun, true, but also heat rises, from the flowers themselves, you can feel it: like holding your hand an inch above an arm, a shoulder. It breathes, in the warmth, breathing itself in. To walk through it in these days, of peonies, of pinks and carnations, makes my head swim.
The willow is in full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grown underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire. Even the bricks of the house are softening, becoming tactile; if I leaned against them they’d be warm and yielding.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
The willow is in full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grown underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire. Even the bricks of the house are softening, becoming tactile; if I leaned against them they’d be warm and yielding.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
Mila’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mila’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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