Alana > Recent Status Updates

"I feel certain that somewhere very near here - the first house down the road, maybe - there’s a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody’s having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight." (62)

"Everything everybody does is so - I don’t know - not wrong or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way." (26)

"Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you." (378)

"I only wanted to see and be near you, and actually it wasn’t going to matter what either of us said as long as we could be in physical proximity to one another, making eye contact, breathing each other’s breath for a while, how does that sound?" (282)

"Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard….Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do…hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them-the unspoken subtext of it being because I am a woman." (59)

"And without legible traumas to point to, what would pain make her? At best, a trans version of those Didion-worshipping Bourgeois white girls who subscribed to a Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain…minor-wound-dwelling brooders with no particular difficulties but for an inchoate sense of their own wronged-ness, a wronged-ness that fell apart when put into words but nonetheless justified all manner of petulance."

"Amy’s performance had created a fundamental separation between the two of them. Something that hadn’t existed before. Something animal in her. A brute who could take a woman. Delia talked to her differently-like she had more respect for Amy, but also, had to maintain a careful distance. This was a budding man, after all." (129)

"Reese wanted to end their games, to get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness, her infuriating attractiveness…Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence." (59)

"You said I killed you—haunt me, then! Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you!" :(

White Nights: 9.5/10

More quotes:

"We thank some people just for living alongside us. I thank you for the fact that you met me…" (37)

"I don’t love him, because I can only love someone who is chivalrous and high minded and understands me." (50)

"A whole moment of bliss! Is that not sufficient even for a man’s entire life?…" (56)

"And you ask yourself again: what have you done with the best years of your life, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not…your fantasy world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die…will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret? Because everything I have lost was nothing, all dreaming and no more!" (27)

"And all the time we knew that Maureen Pearl was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The thing to fear was the thing that made her beautiful, and not us." (74)

"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief…Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion, he saw it as an act of becoming." (195)

"I think profit is actually sort of an inefficiency. Say if you take the example of a teacher. The school isn’t making any profit, but I think we all agree, the children should learn to read, so we better pay someone to teach them. If we organize everything in view of profit, we get things happening in the economy that make no sense." (106) (Ivan speaking)

Annual Sally Rooney re-read