rainydae > Recent Status Updates

“at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling... for the moment, she hung suspended.”

“In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That's what I shall do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree.”

“she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”

“‘so you have a mother, then?’ ‘yes! just like you!’”
me tryna make small talk fr

“was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?”
——
“beauty convinces” anne carson

“beauty is truth” john keats

“beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation” oscar wilde

“beauty is the wonder of wonders” oscar wilde

“beauty is terror” donna tartt

-mr ramsey: philosophy prof
-charles tansley: idk? a tenant?? argumentative and likes mrs ramsey
-lily briscoe: ??? painting mrs ramsey but like why is she there
-william bankes: i actually have no idea who he is. admires mr ramsey? went on a walk (does so regularly?) w lily? mrs ramsey thinks bankes and lily make a good pair?
-marie: maid whose dad has throat cancer in swiss alps
-augustus carmichael: ??opium??
help

beginning to realize that this is a book best consumed in one (or two) very long sittings not sentence by sentence as i have been oops. also aild is my only base of comparison but i was struck so suddenly by its likeness on this page. i think it’s the characteristic lack of proper character introductions paired with an unusually large family. and the many motifs strands, and i am sure i have missed some

another motif i forgot to mention—the most obvious of them all—beauty
(reminiscent of the secret history in many aspects)

not sure if i ever will, but would be lovely to do a deeper complete reading of this collection someday—as in reading all of the references mentioned, layered and elusive

“not a bird not a breath in sight”

some motifs so far: letters, the number four, ray (rays my favorite). keats, of course. many many references, often greek. night (hazards of the night) and war.

also utterly unrelated but i wanna be emma chamberlain so bad. idk why im thinking this so hard rn i needed to include it in a goodreads update but ive been overcome with an atavistic desire to become emma chamberlain. i think its her new hair. idk

such an excellent bookstore bookshelf find. also pairs — surprisingly? serendipitously? suspectly?????? — not well, but still in some way of note with chase atlantic

“Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”

“my gratitude for good writing is unbounded; i’m grateful for it the way i’m grateful for the ocean.”

“writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.”

Write down all the stuff you swore you'd never tell another soul. What can you recall about your birthday parties the disasters, the days of grace, your relatives faces lit up by birthday candles? Scratch around for details: what people ate, listened to, wore-those terrible petaled swim caps, the men's awful trunks, the cocktail dress your voluptuous aunt wore that was so slinky

start w ur childhood:
Who were your teachers, your classmates? What did you wear? Who and what were you jealous of? Now branch out a little. Did your family take vacations during those years? Get these down on paper. Do you remember how much more presentable everybody else's family looked?
Do you remember how when you'd be floating around in an inner tube in the river… you’d scratch new welts? And how…”

“I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, or ever being taken seriously. I became a socialist, for five weeks. Then the bus ride to my socialist meetings wore me out.”

mild vertigo

spoiler?
//
“Crossing over now towards the Abbey, brown brickwork handful of rain he thinks he feels and turns up his collar. Picture them all there together. To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live. Hard cold wind blowing in from the sea, blowing his coat back, raising white hackles on the river. Nothing is fixed.”

“An experiment bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another, and yet attaining for these few hours and days to a miraculous success, a perfection of beauty, inexchangeable, meant not to be interpreted, meant only to be lived and nothing more.”

“I wouldn’t want to be a woman, he said. Who would? No offence, but the level of disrespect, I couldn’t take it... Is that the sum total of your gender identity, she said.”

“Is it shame he feels, that hot blood pounding in his ears, or only embarrassment: the minor trifling embarrassment of an awkward situation or the true shame of a moral wrong”