ashley > Recent Status Updates

“Will. You’re not hurt, are you darling? It’s a different sort of thing.”

“That was very bad of me,” Nathaniel said the next morning, pouring me a coffee from the pot he’d made for both of us… “Let’s take the day. Do something fun.”

“At one point, I laughed so hard tea dribbled from my nose; at another, he took my hand, in plain view of everyone on the street” !!! ((So confusing))

“Lili rushed over to hug me, too. “You’re late, you’re late,” she said. “Now we’re only waiting on Reg.” Nathaniel didn’t look up; I felt the effort it took him, and it pleased me”

“If I didn’t leave soon, I might not see him at all before he left – would that bother him? It bothered me, but caring in that way did not seem part of our terms.”

”You could love someone for that alone. For holding both of who you once were, and who you wanted to become. I could. I went to him, and he wrapped his arms around me.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. What I meant was, I don’t want to. In that instant, all I wanted-and I wanted it so badly-was to be alone. But he was already picking up my backpack.

”A sex thing, as Leah had said, yes- but was that what they were angriest about? Or was it that my presence suggested there was a different set of rules for some people, depending on what they were willing to do?”

“We’re more socially isolated than ever, and we pass that isolation down to our children. Our religion has changed –built around churches, heavy on emotional rhetoric but light on the kind of social support necessary to enable poor kids to do well.”

“My primary aim is [not to prove a problem] to tell a true story about what that problem feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.”

"I had missed the moment. Maybe she'd been expecting it, who knows. I'd been seconds away; seconds, and a lifetime. I often think if I'd asked, now we'd have two kids and a house with no view, who knows."

"Alcoholics hate two things: the way things are and change."

Finishing Chapter 5 and I'm completely captivated.

"A year and a hald later, I was taking 55 of those pills a day. I weighed 128 pounds when I checked into Hazelden rehab in Minnesota, my life in ruins. I was in raw fear, certain I was going to die, having no idea what had happened to me. I wasn't trying to die; I was just trying to feel better."

"But addiction wakes up before you do, and it wants you alone."

"Given everything, there is no way I wouldn't change places with Craig, and David Pressman, and the guy in the gas station down the block- I'd change places with all of them in a minute, and forever, if only I could not be who I am...I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time; it's no idlethought- it's a coldhearted fact."

”I hit the planet about a month after the moon landing, and one day after Woodstock ended – so, somewhere between the cosmic perfection of the heavenly orbs, and all that shit down at Yasgur’s farm, I became life, interrupting someone’s chance to build hotels on Boardwalk.”

This is so miserable

”The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don’t make Loans to people who can’t repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don’t keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income department of big Wall Street investment banks, which will in tern package them into bonds and sell them to investors.”

I admittedly bought this because I liked the color scheme of the cover

Listening to this on my evening walks. So far I’ve learned which planet AND ancient deity I’m most closely aligned with (and all of cost me was an audible credit)

“The familiar hum of Mom's white noise machine blares. I picture Dad sound asleep next to her in his noise-canceling earplugs. I listen closely for signs of life coming from Jamie's room, and hear the faintest sound of giggling. For a moment, my chest tightens so intensely that I think it must be acid reflux…But the sharp ache is accompanied by the feeling of being completely and utterly alone.”

Celebrity Book Club read w. Kristen 💗

”What happened to your green card?” he asked in an accusing tone, hovering over me where I sat, as if I had casually thrown it in the garbage. Without giving it a thought, I snapped back. “I got mugged!”... He came around and apologized and asked me if I was okay. It was then I realized, no amount of paper can replace the deep confidence that comes from a lifetime of being given the benefit of the doubt.

“I got out of the car at the lodge gate and we kissed goodbye. “Put on some wait next time I see you,“ she said, “it doesn’t suit you to be so thin. Give Maxim my love, and forgive me for to-day.” She vanished in a cloud of dust, and I turned in down the drive.”

B the Baddie

“Analyzing things with a certain retrospective rigor, it strikes me that everything was the consequence of a prior reality that I would never know. She was interested in me more for reasons related to circumstances in her past– domino’s lined up behind me– than for my own seductive endowments. Fortunately or unfortunately, you see this only later.”

“They do not see it. For weeks, they have worked together. How do they not see it? I have searched my collection many times over, considering whether any of these objects might point them in the right direction. A useless endeavor.”

”He had the face of one who walks in his sleep, and for a wild moment the idea came to me that perhaps he was not normal, not altogether sane.”

“Just that we would be married. Short and definite, very original. Original proposals were much better. More genuine…Not like younger men being very incoherent, very passionate, swearing impossibilities. Not like him the first time, asking Rebecca.”

!! Cathy meets Heathcliff !!

this is maddening

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathclif! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again.”

:( how is the author going to separate geminii and my girl pipsy lee like that

i need to read this creepy ahh little book during the day time

local authors are my favorite authors

“But there was Jordyn beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.”

“… and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started it off on a three months’ trip to the south seas. I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband” P76

“She was incurably dishonest…It made no difference to me. Dishonestly in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply”

“…for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.”