Mimesis > Recent Status Updates

So she went to the door. She wasn't dressed, so she thought she might ought to grab a gun on the way down. It wouldn't do for it to be a bad guy at the door when she didn't have time to get any clothes on. So she reached under her bed and fished out the gun safe she kept there.

"Henry was in the ground, dead from the car crash that took his life and that of his Mercedes. Both were blackened hulks now, one burried in the ground of exclusive Peach Barrow Cemetery, the other in a police impound lot. She would miss that Mercedes."

"He sat stonily and goggled explicitly and gaped impassively as if he were a fish precipitously extracted from its appropriately aqueous environment."

Can deliberately bad writing become a masterpiece?

"Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening; the extent of the ruin was still undetermined; he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own condition urgently required soothing and renovating at the hands of the classics."

"Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katherine was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers."

On spring:
"Lives frozen by age, as far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes and colors of the past."

"The imagination of this loneliness frightened her, and yet to speak - to lose here loneliness, for it had already become dear to her, was beyond her power."

"She could not blame him for loving Katherine, but that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him - that seemed to her the cruellest treachery."

"She squints more, moving to the ship's stern so that she can continue to peer that way as the Clalsu peels away from the coast. If only she had one of Innon's spyglasses. If only she could be sure."

"She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him."

"One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference, and it makes no sense for Damaya to be judged by the behavior of children who share nothing save the curse of orogeny with her.
But Damaya understands now that the world is not fair. They are orogenes, the Misalems of the world, born cursed and terrible. This is what is necessary to make them safe."

He was stuck dumb by finding that Katherine was quite different, in some strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in order to accept the new one.

"Yet the wisdom of the old seems to apply more to feelings which we have in common with the rest of human race than to our feelings as individuals, and Katherine knew that only someone of her own age could follow her meaning."

"Long brooding on his failure, continual arrangement and rearrangement of his deserts and rebuffs, had made Sir Francis much of an egoist, and in his retirement his temper bacame increasingly difficult and exacting."

"Don't look back," Schaffa advises. "It's easier that way." So she doesn't. Later she will realize he was right about this, too. Much later though, she will wish that she had done it anyway.

"It'll be such a great day," said Mrs. Seal, with a toss of her locks. "A great day, not only for us, but for civilization. That's what I feel, you know, about these meetings. Each one of them is a step onwards in the great march - humanity, you know. We do want the people after us to have a better time of it - and so many don't see it. I wonder how it is that they don't see it."

But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended very much upon the amount of acceptance it received from other people, and in private, when the pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let himself swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances upon stange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe.

How they talked and moralized and made up stories to suit their own versions of the becoming, and secretly praised their own devotion and tact! No; they had their dwelling in a mist, she decided; hundereds of miles away - away from what? "Perhaps it would be better if I married William," she thought suddenly, and the thought appeared to loom through the mist like solid ground.

"Left alone, Katherine could not help laughing to find herself cheated as usual in domestic bargainings with her father, and left to do the disagreeable work which belonged, by rights, to him."

"It's very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly," Mrs. Hilbery reflected. "I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you. Perhaps they'll come to that in time, but meanwhile I confess that dear William-"
But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and the more solid part of the evening began.