Status Updates From The Midlander (The Growth T...

Oh goodness. Venable is back 🤦🏻‍♀️🙄

~ Throughout all the long time since then, there had always been in Lena’s mind a conviction, however obscured or half-forgotten, that some day she would leave her husband.

Me: see? Lena is evil

~ Thus Dan’s vague uneasiness grew, and although he scolded himself for it, and told himself he was imaginative beyond reason, he could not be rid of it. That was well for him; since such uneasiness may be of help when life is like a path whereon tigers leap from nowhere, as it is, sometimes;—the wayfarer will not avoid wounds, but may better survive them for having been in some expectance of them.

~ Like the ardent Sheridan, [Dan] loved the smoke, called it “Prosperity,” and drew his lungs full of it, breathing in it the glory of his city.

~ [Dan] had become a juggler of money, which poured streaming into one hand as fast as he hurled it aloft with the other. He was one of those men of whom it is said, “Nobody knows what he’s worth. He couldn’t tell you, himself, to save his life!”

The Ambersons, the Sheridans, the Morgans and the Vertrees were all just mentioned

~ ...the people of best reputation...went to church and seemed to believe in God and the Bible with almost the faith of their fathers. But many of these people went down with their falling houses; a new society, swarming upward above the old surfaces, became dominant. It began to breed, among other things, a new critic who attacked every faith...

~ Amongst the latter, it had furnished Europe with a caricature type of the American—the “successful American business man.” On the shelf, beside the figure of the loud-tweeded Boxing Briton with his “side whiskers,” Europe set the lank-and-drawling, chin-bearded, palace-buying Boaster of the Almighty Dollar, the Yankee of the great boom period.

~ For these men saw, not the destruction, but only the city they were building; and they shouted their worship of that vision and were exultant in the uproar. They shouted as each new skyscraper rose swimming through the vast drifts of smoke, and shouted again as the plain, clean, old business streets collapsed and the magnificent and dirty new ones climbed above the ruins.

~ For she and Harlan had already fallen into a relation not uncommon among those she had spoken of as “left-overs”: a relation that becomes a habit—a habit that in turn becomes a relation.

~ I think I used to believe I’d always be in love with Dan, and in a way that was true—whatever is left in me of the girl I used to be will always be in love with the boy he used to be. But I don’t know where that boy is any more.

~ Only certain tribes biologically very low worship children, I understand; but that seems to be our most prevalent American habit to-day. We’re deliberately making this the age of the abject worship of children...

~ Between the two silent people appear to have taken place communications so imperceptible that neither is definitely aware of them, yet each may be affected by them as if by words spoken. It would seem that there is a danger here; for with couples not well wedded the unspoken words may be too true, or may carry altogether too much revelation.

~ ...Harlan was amused by his own perception of a little drama: his grandmother, clinging with difficulty to one extreme edge of life and prophesying only black doom for this new person who had just crawled up into life over the opposite extreme edge.