Lisa > Recent Status Updates

“Even as the leaves are falling, the buds of next year’s crop are already in place, waiting to erupt again in spring. Most trees produce their buds in high summer, and the autumn leaf fall reveals them, neat and expectant, protected from the cold by thick scales.”

“Ghosts may be a part of the terror of Halloween, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire that we do not fade so easily from this life.”

“That’s the idea. Animals are unpredictable things so our whole life is unpredictable. It’s a long tale of little triumphs and disasters and you’ve really got to like it to stick it. Tonight it was Soames, but another night it’ll be something else. One thing, you never get bored. Here, have some more whiskey.”

“It is good for one to be reminded of the depths of idiocy to which one can sink even when, or perhaps particularly when, one means well.”

Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity, are not worth regret.

“I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and to obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”

“For the moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside.”

“Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

“It is fortunate, that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.” Charles Dudley Warner

DNF. This would be an excellent book for someone who(like the author) lived in Manhattan, had an unlimited budget, and made lunch for Martha Stewart everyday. For the rest of us, perhaps not. The four types of mandarin oranges required for the cover recipe proved a bridge too far.

Also, harping on her grandmother’s terrible cooking seemed gratuitous.

Well, he supposed they did share it, now that he’d told her of it. And somehow this had always lightened its effect on him — even, on occasion, cheered him right up.”

when he’d told her about some savage teasing he’d got from other children, upon which Miss Perumal never offered advice — which would have been useless — but only nodded and clucked her tongue, smiling sadly at Reynie as if his memory were her memory, too, as if they shared it.

He reflected upon the pleasant afternoons they’d spent walking in Oldwood Park, discussing this thing or that — her mother, or the aged trees in the park, or baseball, or dogs. And the times, too,

“Long after Kate had gone her dusty way and the boys had gone to bed, Reynie lay awake, calming his nerves by composing a mental letter to Miss Perumal. He could never actually write the letter, of course — he could never send it — but it soothed Reynie to think of Miss Perumal, in a setting far from this responsibility and danger, sipping her tea and correcting his Tamil grammar.

“Halmoni would take bites from the core so none of the fruit would go to waste, while my mom ate from the perfectly cut slivers, just as I did when she cut fruit for me at home.”

“Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.”

Really dear. The illustrations are adorable, they’d be great as a print.

“If I were asked to say what is at once the midst important production of art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, ‘A beautiful house.’”

Morris urged us to take “Nature and History” as our teachers and to embrace “simplicity, everywhere, in the palace as well as in the cottage,” declaring, “I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”

“The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”
Marshall McLuhan

“Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.”

“His was a kind of naïveté, an innocence of the just.”

“‘Open your eyes’ concludes the man, ‘and see what you can with them before they close forever.’”