Jamie Steinberg > Recent Status Updates

“The whole Walk seemed nothing but one looming question mark. He told himself that a thing like this must have some deep meaning. Surely it was so. A thing like this must provide an answer to every question; it was just a matter of keeping your foot on the throttle.”

Just started my reread, one chapter in, DAMN this book is so fucking good.

“I must laugh or die”

Her short story “Bliss” is also quite good 😭

I never read short story collections, much less ones that would be considered classics, but thank god I started because “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” must be one of the best out there.

“There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t-“

I feel like I can’t breathe- this book is insane

“On that night, the gun is set upon the mantelpiece. The metaphorical gun, of course. If there were a literal gun, you’d probably be dead.”

I think this might just be the scariest book I’ve ever read.

“I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering me; I am in fear - in awful fear - and there is no escape for me; I am encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of…”

“As a woman, she would always lose. It was not her place to stage a battle, but to back away to preserve what life she had left to live.”

I love Ottessa Moshfegh.

“Help?”

HOLY SHIT. You know, I was worried. I had my doubts. I really loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation and I felt like the beginning of Lapvona didn’t do the work the former did to pull the reader in- I WAS WRONG. 58 pages in, the perfect inciting incident told in Moshfegh’s classic removed voice. Hopefully the rest of the book is this fucking good!

“He was not afraid, but he felt that identifying himself as Thomas Phelps Ridley was going to be one of the saddest things he had ever done in his life.” Oh my god

“It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.”

“Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

IM FOAMING AT THE MOUTH GOD. I read this book to see if RF Kuang was actually good or if her marketing is just insane. KUANG IS GOOD.

Im speaking my truth. This is too good to not be marked on Goodreads.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want god. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin… I’m claiming the right to be unhappy… I claim them all.”

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you- haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe- I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always- take any form- drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, god! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

The sea-angel reveal absolutely killed me.
“Because not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.”

“ The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“Stay. Stay in Ketterdam. Stay with me”
“I will have you without your armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”

I AM BREATHLESS. THIS NEVER GETS OLD.

I don’t know if I can finish this

I cannot believe this is Tess Gunty’s first novel. It’s incredible.