Rachael > Recent Status Updates

"Though every day is a challenge for Cinderella, this love, and the rescue that accompanies it, comes with ease. She is passive as the fairy godmother transforms her exterior, and again when she is being chosen by the prince who lifts her out of a life of poverty and servitude. All she had to do was work hard and be kind."

"...she could feel them squeak under her white button-down, her rimless eyeglasses sliding". Button-down and eyeglasses??? WTF! The character is Australian in western Sydney in the 90s.. No Australian uses these words now, let alone in the 90s.

"Mrs Crumpler-a heavy woman, who, for some reason which nobody ever thought worth enquiry, danced in a clean apron, moved so smoothly through the figure that her feet were never seen-conveying to imaginative minds the idea that she rolled on castors."

"Rose clasped her hands tight around her knees. How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again,-not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of the millions, to oneself."

Unspeakable Conversations: Only an American would take offence from an email addressed "Dear first name". In the 21st century Americans are so precious about using titles and surnames. You're not the Queen or the President, or a school teacher.

"I'm not a journalist. I'm a lawyer. This means that while I have no obligation to be factually accurate in this book, I have been. At any point in this work where my views differ from those of the federal Coalition government, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, or anyone else, I am the one who is correct."

"'Everyone loved the princesses because of their great beauty, their gentle ways, and their ability to settle all controversies fairly and reasonably."' sigh....this book shows it's age; women are beautiful peacekeepers, men are intellegent kings.

"Of the men, all were personable, confident, in the way of Italian men; each one interesting to himself."

A Glass of Tea: "'In embroidered dresses, amongst the pomegranate bushes, on summer evenings - all those girls, waiting to be picked.'"

Beautiful drawing of Lupin.

"People constantly checking their messages seems to me rather like endlessly opening the front door just in case an unexpected visitor has turned up"

"The introductory essay explains that the title is based on the Mao Zedong quote: Women hold up half the sky....... If women hold up half the sky, then why are we so disposable?"

"I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somehow inside the city's structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an Advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows"

"My school environment meant it never entered my head that a brain and a sense of humour weren't irresistible traits for any girl to have."

"At the crossroads, the soldier stands unmoving on his plinth, keeping his head down, observing the same moment's silence he's been observing for the best part of a century.'

"Cats, I have found, seem to exist in more or less the same form in every world; it is my belief that they have been slipping in and out of doors for several thousand years. Anyone familiar with house cats will know this is a particular hobby of theirs."

"Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our existence is necessary-someone who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, someone in whose life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two."

"This is the most godless occupation in which it has been my lot to engage. I did a great amount of thinking while feeding them - for, by the way, I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her."

"You don't talk much, do you? he said. I shrugged. That's cool, he said. I like women who don't talk. The stranger gestured to his lap, as though to suggest that I might like to sit there."

Eighteen Bells Karaoke Castle: "Like I said, my family doesn't live here anymore. They moved to New Zealand following the Year of Seven Different Prime Ministers."

"The procession passed. He was gone. How careless he was, to leave a girl wanting to slow dance with his shadow and not even stopping to ask for her hand."

La Mère Sauvage: "Sometimes, our thoughts return to one part of a forest,......perhaps seen only once, on a happy day, but they remain in our hearts like certain women you happened to meet in the street, one spring morning, women wearing light, transparent dresses who leave an unforgettable feeling of unrequited desire in our bodies and souls, the sensation of having briefly encountered happiness."

"'The doctor will come', I said, 'the doctor will come. He's coming now'. I manufactured that damn doctor in my mind. I built his car and gave him road. I turned on his headlights and drew him towards me."

"For a brief time he was employed by John Highett, whose huge cattle run lay between Dandenong and the Carrum Carrum swamp."

"Many people who experienced violence in childhood are able to reject those role models in adulthood and live kind, empathetic lives, but it almost never works the other way. People who grew up with kindness, empathy and positive attitudes to gender equality rarely go on to become abusers."

"In this scenario, if one of the men fell asleep and was raped by his friend while unconscious, it's highly unlikely that anyone in the community, media or justice system would imply the victim brought it on himself by having too many pints in the company of another man. No one is likely to insinuate that being drunk, or agreeing to go back to a man's house meant he was being sexually suggestive."

"Mina thought of her Dad in the cold darkness, shoved in a drawer like some limp iceberg lettuce, a forgotten carrot, a whole lot of secrets, and shivered, cold on his behalf."

"They say that you should name things to know them. But sometimes Anna wondered if there wasn't more wisdom in not naming anything you truly feel, so that you might keep feeling it. Every name fixes something to the cross, stops it mid-flight; every name, thought Anna, is a bullet seeking a target to kill."

"It was like living with a chronically sick smoker except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs."

"The sun stumbled into each day a guilty party, a violent red ball, indistinct in outline, shuddering through the haze as if hungover, while in the ochry light smoke smothered every street and the smoke filled every room, the smoke sullied every drink and every meal; the acrid, tarry, sulphurous smoke that burnt the back of every throat and filled every mouth and nose blocking out the warm gentle smells of summer."