Madeleine > Recent Status Updates

"Many times he regretted in secret that she had not been in fact what he thought she was on the afternoon he met her, so that he could wipe his ass with his principles and make love to her even if it cost nuggets of shining gold."

"The Mayor of West Condon, upon being asked why, when the moment of the Judgment arrived, he was discovered by the Angel of Death masturbating in his own bathtub, replied that the Chief of Police was using the official one at City Hall."

I can always tell when I've been in a reading/writing slump when I've been logging onto Facebook far more often than Goodreads.

Aaaand now there are dogs, which means I am instantly more emotionally invested in their survival than anyone else's.

"But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermission."

Oh my god, you guys, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is dead and I am barely holding my shit together.

"Derek's father had tried to raise his boys to believe in technology, not an invisible spirit in the sky. God was not going to rebuild the world, but human ingenuity might."

"Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many of these actions himself as possible, adjustment was easier."

"They knew not this enemy and what a man knows not, he fears unreasonably."

"I dismissed rote courtesies, female manners, all those insidious social arts that exist in any age, principally to defang one."

Julia Glass makes me wish I liked more people like I like her characters.

"Hindsight is sick with regret."

"Homer wondered why changes couldn't do the same; why they didn't put things back where they'd found them or return them to their owners after they'd had their fun with them."

"... the fortress most couples try to build for their children was no more than a tumbledown shack, and therefore you felt exposed to the elements, unprotected, vulnerable--which meant that in order to survive it was essential that you toughen up and figure out a way to fed for yourself."

Hello, GR friends! Quick question for you all: Does anyone have any novellas/short (less than 200 pages, the closer to 100 pages the better) novels published in the past 12 months they'd like to recommend? Thanks much in advance!

'He said to me: "You will not be a writer, Elizabeth, until you are willing to take off your clothes at high noon in the middle of town square." '

"Certain creatures of the past, and this was one of them, may lie dormant for thirty years as this one had, while their natural habitat undergoes calamitous alterations."

This is presenting the same problem as Infinite Jest (if one can rightfully use the word "problem" in regard to thoroughly enjoyable books) in that it's hard to pin down what page you're on when the reading experience demands jumping between sections for maximum enjoyment.

But what remained intolerable, she thought, sitting upright, and watching Macalister's boy tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness and tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and remembered some command of his; some insolence: 'Do this,' 'Do that'; his dominance: his 'Submit to me.'

"How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?"

"I never knew a zucchini could be so painful."

Glen Duncan is really the only reason I'll ever read a paranormal-beasties novel, let alone a trilogy about such things.

"I had to steal minutes from the day to read. I would creep into the lavatory with Ulysses or hide in a deserted gazebo with The Brothers Karamazov. I was forced to go in search of stolen time to read In Search of Lost Time. I would pinch hours from my lunchbreaks; every day, I would pinch on and this was how I read Against the Day."

Such a satisfying reread. Such crappy feels over nearing its end.

BRB, being terrible at GR for months means that the number of books I've acquired in that time and have yet to catalog is just ridiculous.

"—I love sweatshirts, Rich confessed. They’re so versatile. You can wear them anywhere: to class, to the gym, to a fancy restaurant, to a job interview, to bed, to play softball, to graduation, to a keg party in a parking lot, or to a funeral."

"A corridor as long as Marcel Proust?"

I was reading this during a lull at work and found myself wishing bodily harm on all who interrupted me.

"It must be rather wonderful to assume that the world would receive with interest whatever came into your head."