helmi > Recent Status Updates

river

snow

”Tiedättekö mitä, Katri, sanoi Anna ja kääntyi, minä jotenkin pidän teistä enemmän silloin kun te nauratte kuin silloin kun te hymyilette.”

”My secret is life. I tell no one I’m alive.”

”Do let us have some tea! We are as dry as fishes!”

”—to realize there are parts of herself that she misses, then win them back and make them fit the woman she's become, who doesn't live for herself anymore but who lives through the person trapped in the body of a baby girl who smiles and wants her and has her wrapped around her little finger with a force that can't be matched, because it belongs to the stars and the earth. In other words, to no one.”

”I hold her like I want to get her drunk and make her forget love and all the coins in her newfound treasure. Rain begins to fall. Life tears open like a wound that rots and bubbles. If anyone talks to me about happiness, I swear to God I'll break their face.”

”mun on ollu pakko vaan todeta et meissä on jotain samaa”

”eihän kukaan joka oikeesti suree pysty pitää mitään puhetta”

”Go on in any case living.”

”They look at one another again, tired, and tender, affectionate again. Pitying themselves and one another. The old fond familiarity in her look, without which he thinks he could not live. Yes. When he saw her waiting for him at the gate: to encounter not only her, the beauty of her nearness renewed, but also himself, the self that is loved by her, and therefore worthy of his own respect.”

”When I look back, I can't believe how much things I never discussed with him. And even when we did talk, nothing got written down. It's all just memory, and what if the memories fade?”

”I feel like maybe I still don't accept it. The idea that my dad is gone. I don't really get how it could be the case, if you see what I mean.
I think I do, she says.
Like he just sort of exited from time, and we all have to keep going, within time.”

”…he feels a tender wounding gratitude, a sense of blessing, that he exists simply in this body, in this mind, that he is himself, this one person, rich in priceless resources which to his conscious mind remain almost infinitely unknown.”

”She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. Well, if there is a God, she says, I'm sure he loves you very much. He lowers his eyes. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes, he says. Like when I'm with you, I can. If you don't mind me saying that.”

”I actually hate you. I've hated you my entire life. Without stirring, without looking around to see whether the other diners or the staff are watching them, Peter just answers: I know.”

”Looking at her, his eyes communicate: I know that you are a person with desires, and so am I, even if I am helpless to do anything about this knowledge.”

’”Have you been to the river?’”

”When had he so greatly changed? Or was it that he had not changed, but that her eyes had been opened through the pain he had caused her?”

’”He wouldn’t never of left me,” said Elizabeth, ”but he died.”’

’"Well," she said helplessly, after a long pause,
"good-bye."
"Good-bye?" You ain't going away, is you?"
"Oh, no," she said, in confusion.
"Well," he said, and smiled and bowed, "good day."
"Yes," she said, "good day."’

”Pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before the fall.”

”’I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.’”

”’But I can’t help it if you done things that you’s ashamed of, Reverend.’”

”This was not belief but unbelief, not humility but pride: there worked in the heart of such a one the same desire that had hurled the son of the morning from Heaven to the depths of Hell, the desire to overturn the appointed times of God, and to wrest from Him who held all power in His hands powers not meet for men.”

”—I opened my mouth to the Lord that day and Hell won’t make me change my mind.”

”And the hands of death caressed her shoulders, the voice whispered and whispered in her ear: ’God's got your number, knows where you live, death's got a warrant out for you.’”

”I know the Lord ain’t as hard as Daddy”

”His father was God's minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father. On his refusal to do this had his life depended, and John's secret heart had flourished in its wickedness until the day his sin first overtook him.”

”His father's face, always awful, became more awful now; his father's daily anger was transformed into prophetic wrath. His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arced before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.”