rachel > Recent Status Updates

“…my friend has a way of sitting silently in a garden that helps me understand how I might open myself up to hearing the welcoming wonder of this world.” page 120

i fear this book is not for me… i hate reading about women who fill their lack of self respect with men!

“She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.”

what am i supposed to do with myself after i finish this series

kam

jesus christ

“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”

pregaming shameful activities by reading feminist literature

god i love elena ferrante

“Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”

“The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.”

this book tears out my soul and fills it with fire. well done, ferrante.

i just read a story that my dad wrote when he was my age in college, obv can’t log it since it’s not published but it was very candide/siddhartha-esque, telling the story of a pretentious man who thinks he’s better and smarter than everyone else who sets out on a spiritual journey but doesn’t end up where he wanted. classic.

“He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last…” i love how such a seemingly endearing passage can make the reader hate the subject even more for it. i cannot got over how successful ferrante is at exposing the deep flaws in every character (especially men)

the way that i have to read 700 pages in 5 days while packing and moving

some parts of this have me giggling and kicking my legs about socialism and motherhood while other parts have me raging about men and the state of the world

picking it back up i guess while i wait for the next book in my series to arrive in the mail

oh my god literally biting my knuckles and covering my face and crying at this. how does elena ferrante convey such vile and twisted concepts with such ease and simplicity.

“As he spoke I heard clearly the ridiculousness of his trained voice, the crudeness of his poeticizing, the sleazy lyric using behind which he concealed his eagerness to put his hands on me.” GOD let me forget i read this chapter please

dostoevsky is actively menacing me from my bookshelf

accidentally removed this from my bookshelves oops

nino sarratore is the exact type of boy i would fall in love with: intellectual, tall, ugly in a pretty way, and very much into someone else

i bought three used books online for $20 last night and i don’t think i’ll ever step into a barnes and noble again

the accuracy that elena ferrante depicts the mental conflict that happens in a maturing girl’s brain, especially about relationships/sex is so crazily accurate, i feel like she looked into my brain and stole my thoughts.