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THE LITTLE SAINT

“Behind him was a woman around the same age as my grandmother. She lived in the neighborhood and came here every day. It was just an excuse to get out of the house, she told me.” I’m gonna THROW UP

“Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates”

“The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien”

“When two people are once parted- have abandoned a common domicile and a common environment- new growths I sensibly hid upward to fill each vacated place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten” Thomas Hardy why would you SAY that

“Anyway, there are mountains of oedipal phobias between us”

“All around us, people were ironically doing Jell-O shots”

This would have hit so hard at age 20

Ngl this book is a slog so far bc the genre is illegible to me but “and they discussed that opinion long and earnestly, as if they could influence a mind across half the globe; but in reality they discussed it because the sentiment of love can enter into any subject and live ardently in remote phrases” really took me out.

“There’s no pressure for us to be ethnically pure, noble.”

“If we meet each other in Hell, it’s not Hell”

“We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle”

“Calling up psalm 22 to try to self-soothe” WHAT a way to describe Jesus on the cross. I’ve never thought of him as self soothing

“Scumbag Caesars vivisecting God”

The problem with Conrad is that he unfortunately does write some really great things like for example “a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched flesh of defiant heretics”

“The drawing room of Europe” GREAT line.

“Plash” is my favorite turn-of-the-century verb and I’m going to be bringing it back into use.

Need Miss Rooney to sweep in and just write the throuple.

Henry James can’t write a dinner party scene to save his life.

Schrödinger’s Milly

“So crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table.” Ooh

“The elements melted together and seasoned the draught, the essence of which might have struck the girl as distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted from somebody, while a fuller flood somehow kept bearing her up— all the freshness of response of her young life, the freshness of the first and only prime.” Did not know they had iced coffee back then

“The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea of the island, the margin flood the text.” ok purr

Might as well call this book Our Mutual Friend

You can’t convince me that Mrs. Stringham isn’t a lesbian.

Gonna start telling everyone about my “bright little nippers”

“She was little more than a relic, a plain prosaic result of him - as if she had somehow been pulled through him as through an obstinate funnel” ok but that’s a GREAT line

Hey I fear it might just have been worth reading all these pages just to hear Dobbins say “No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you”

Dobbins really said “I’ll bark”

I feel bad for Becky until she opens her mouth.