Maeve > Recent Status Updates

“That’s what practice can offer - miracles and also limitations.”

“It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs if my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.”

“People are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.”

“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”

“You must consider what happens to this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns - home: search, in his shoes, for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying ‘White’ and ‘Coloured’, and especially the signs that say ‘White Ladies’ and ‘Coloured Women’ […]”

“Il n’était pas donné à tout le monde de dominer la ville du haut du quarante-quatrième étage.”

“Priests and nuns and school-teachers helped to protect and sanctify the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were indeed seeking a city, but not one in the heavens, and one to be made, very definitely, by captive hands.”

“I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door.”

“But who, in living history, ever understands their part in the tapestry?”

“There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation - a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”

“The obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.”

“Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”

“It still looked like a city carved out of the past […] Its buildings were still so reassuringly heavy, solid, ancient and eternal. The lights that shone through arched windows still promised warmth, old books, and hot tea within; still suggested an idyllic scholar’s life, where ideas were abstract entertainment that could be bandied about without consequences.”

« [L’homme] possède l’un des droits humains les plus fondamentaux : celui de rêver, d’espérer. »

« Tu as pour devoir d’être belle. Si tu y parviens, ta beauté ne te vaudra aucune volupté. […] Si tu admires ta propre joliesse dans le miroir, que ce soit dans la peur et non dans le plaisir: car ta beauté ne t’apportera rien d’autre que la terreur de la perdre. Si tu es une belle fille, tu ne seras pas grand-chose; si tu n’es pas une belle fille, tu seras moins que rien. »

“They were speaking not in terms of ethics, but of logistics, and this made Robin feel as if they’d stepped into an upside-down world where nothing made sense, and no one had a single problem with it but him.”

“But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.”

“You’ve made at least twelve errors on this page, and your sentences are far too long —“
“They’re not long; they’re Ciceronian.”
“You can’t just excuse all bad writing on the grounds that it’s Ciceronian —“

- me with Ciceronian sentences, poetic license and the Oxford comma XD

“Well, it’s a particular kind of mental state. You do speak the words, but more importantly, tou hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them.”

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular.”

“But what is the opposite of fidelity? […] Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

“‘Heimlich.’ German for the secret and clandestine, which is how I’ll translate it to English. But ‘heimlich’ means more than just secrets. We derive ‘heimlich’ from a Proto-Germanic word that means “home”. Put together this constellation of meaning, and what do you get? Something like the secret, private feeling you get from being somewhere you belong, secluded from the outside world.”

“At night, the moon conspired with streetlamps to bathe the city in a faint, otherworldly glow. The cobblestones beneath their feet seemed like roads leading into and out of different centuries. This could be the Oxford of the Reformation, or the Oxford of the Middle Ages. They moved within a timeless space, shared by the ghosts of scholars past.”

« Tout le temps que j’ai écrit, je corrigeais aussi des devoirs, je fournissais des modèles de dissertation, parce que je suis payée pour cela. Ce jeu des idées me causait la même impression que le luxe, sentiment d’irréalité, envie de pleurer. »

« On évoquait les gens du quartier, mariés, morts, partis de Y… Je décrivais l’appartement, le secrétaire Louis-Philippe, les fauteuils de velours rouge, la chaîne hi-fi.
Très vite, il n’écoutait plus. »

« Ma mère écrivait, vous pourriez venir vous reposer à la maison, n’osant pas dire de venir les voir pour eux-mêmes. J’y allais seule, taisant les vraies raisons de l’indifférence de leur gendre, raisons indicibles, entre lui et moi, et que j’ai admises comme allant de soi. »

« Dans un ensemble de faits et de choix, j’ai l’impression de perdre au fur et à mesure la figure particulière de mon père. »

« Chaque fois qu’on m’a parlé de lui, cela commençait par « il ne savait ni lire ni écrire », comme si sa vie et son caractère ne se comprenaient pas sans cette donnée initiale »