Laura Bies > Recent Status Updates

Abandoning this for now. Not my vibe.

There's a lot of good men working in the Quarry. Men like David Evans.
Yes. And like Will Starch Collar.
Yes. But he's a real Godly man. He was converted.
We might have been converted too, you know. But I don't want to be Godly. I just want to be good.
And me too.

Is it us that's going up or is it the River that's going down? I said to Huw at last.

Dew, it's great to get a ride on the Bridge for nothing, isn't it? said Huw, laughing.

Oh, she had the nicest face I'd ever seen. I'll never forget it as long as I live.
How old is Ceri, Canon's daughter, Mam? I asked when I'd gone home.
Oh, about eighteen, Mam said.
And I went to the bedroom and lay on the bed and cried because she was so old.

I know that my reactions to the facts I write down in detail lead me to know myself more intimately every day. Maybe there are people who, knowing themselves, are able to improve; but the better I know myself, the more lost I become.

I thought of taking the notebook to the office, but there's so little time available, I'd be forced to jot down my impressions rapidly without getting into so many of the details that depress me.

I had no desire to go home, and yet seeing the time marked by the green spheres of the luminous clock, I felt the usual hurry gripping me. I didn't know for whom I had to go home or for what, but I knew that I had to return, and that implacable, absurd duty caused me great bitterness.

I was alone in the empty house, in the Sunday silence, and it seemed to me that I'd lost those I love forever if in reality they're different from what I've always imagined. And if, above all, I myself an different from what they imagine.

The strangest thing is that when I can finally take the notebook out of its hiding place, sit down, and begin to write, I find I have nothing to say except to report on the daily struggle I endure to hide it.

I imagined holding the anorexic man in my arms, soothing him - but then I pictured his face vacant and ghastly against my shoulder, his eyes unseeing, pointed toward nothing. This frightened and then incensed me, his ingratitude, and instead I pictured throwing his bony frame into the woods, his limbs splayed out in flight, his body falling to the ground with a thud. His legs like kindling, I would light them on fire

"Their tiresome conception of the State has one comforting effect; it creates so many moral lepers that no one of them, if he has a little patience, can long be lonely. The flotsam of the nation is washed together into an unrecognized, nameless, formless secret society. There isn't much that the bits of scum can do to help one another, but at least they can cling and keep silence."

"Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too."

"And right in the heat of passion he says, 'Do you have an extra shoe tree?'"

"Lord Jim has turned bright yellow in the woe withered moon of morning like white smoke against the blue stuff, and shirts whip in a cold spring wind on limestone cliffs across the river, Mary, and the dawn is broken in two pieces like Dillinger on the lamster way to the Biograph."

"It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido...The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido...The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a fish trader."

With a gesture full of old-fashioned courtesy, Mr. MacFrolick offered me a china dish (quite fine) on which rested his own moustache. I hesitated to accept the moustache, thinking that perhaps he wanted me to eat it. He's an eccentric, I thought.

I went to fetch my car, but my chauffer, who has no practical sense at all, had just buried it.

'I did it to grow mushrooms,' he told me. 'There's no better way of growing mushrooms.'

'Brady,' I said to him, 'you're a complete idiot. You have ruined my car.'