Alison Rose > Recent Status Updates

[if this dude doesn't get dead at the end of this book, I'm gonna be very mad]

She was always mad about cats, but I never let her have one because I personally don't like them very much. I hate how it's up to them whether they like you or not. Like you should be grateful for their attention. It annoys me, the same way that young women annoy me. They make me feel cruel.

[the Venn diagram of men who hate cats and men who hate women is basically a circle]

The Duke of Ruin, they said. Penny didn't know if the man lived up to his scandal-sheet moniker, but he was certainly the Duke of Ruining Her Afternoon.

[this is not living up to the first book]

[Jean is not very bright.]

Not since JRR Tolkien had there been a ring so fraught with meaning.

[Okay that made me LOL]

It was like watching Mrs Danvers give the second Mrs de Winter an unsolicited tour of Rebecca's room.

[excellent metaphor and reference]

[damn, this is intriguing...I'm having fun weaving a dozen hypotheses about what's going on beneath the surface]

Whatever was happening in the world, the witchers did not want to know.

[can't blame 'em]

'He'll kick your arse so hard you'll soar over the town roofs with such magnificence that the few people passing by at this hour will take you for a Pegasus.'

Hate me if you want to hate me, I'd love the attention. Let me be delivered to the Devil and wait in Hell for a second Harrowing. All I'm doing is trying to love people. All I need is the right kind of love back.

It's hard not to be demolished by the thought of her, b/c I live in a body that has loved her & see w/eyes that have witnessed her ... Presumably, if she ever remembers me, it is only when she catches a perfume that is vaguely familiar, & it takes hours to recognise it as mine. I bet she laughs because she hasn't thought of me in a long time, & then puts my memory away, folded up in a drawer in the back of her mind.

Everything about me is washed away, until there is nothing left but love. This is why I am doing it, for the blinding glory of Susannah, Susannah in the Highest. What she doesn't do to me. All my guilt disappears into the condensation. My hair is damp, my skin is flushed, I don't mind how I look. Before her, I was just one of Dad's rocky fields. She came and picked all the stones from me, she made me useful & green.

Moving away from my mouth, her eyes look so deeply into mine, deeper than my cells, deeper than my soul. With this look, she takes a piece of me, and she will have it forever. I don't mind. For the first time in my life, I am not afraid to be seen for what I am.

Remember that, left alone, Susannah would just be a piece of the earth. She cannot be held responsible for my reaction to her, for the scream of her sun-kissed skin against the blue bikini. Remember that, without the sweat on her sternum and the Autumn color of her, in her most basic and fleshy form, she is only another piece of the earth, the same as me. We are all just pieces of the earth. I must take a breath.

It feels as though I am an island, apart from everybody else. Perhaps we are all islands, apart from each other. Perhaps everyone else feels foreign in their hometown too. Yes, perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects. Perhaps there is no remedy for it, and all we can do is learn which parts of ourselves to deny and which parts to bring into the light.

We have never been the type of family to argue; we feel things very strongly, but we feel them quietly. Our deepest emotions may be manifested in the lightest of sighs, but not much else. The silence says a lot. All that upset has to go somewhere; I sometimes feel it moving under my skin, waiting to be lanced.

It is the purest form of hypocrisy there is. It has existed since the dawn of time. Think of Adam & Eve. Oh aye, the Devil tempted Eve w/knowledge & she thought to better herself. So she took the bait, and then Adam grew curious & envious & wanted a piece of it all. Just like a selfish child. But go ahead and tell me again how man is governed by his mind & woman by her heart. They have lied to us from the beginning.

He held her in his arms until the whole of him, his body, sank into the earth beneath the wood floorboards, where he was cool and made of rocks, and the rocks were impenetrable, and he no longer felt the loss like a knife in his heart twisted over and over, over and over. His heart was a lump of granite, he had turned to stone.

Memory clouds often in the most poignant moments. It is as though even Memory knows it must watch what momentous thing is transpiring and forgets to record the details.

'Power resides in gold, and gold resides in power.'

[This writing style where, from the get-go, the reader is presumed to know as much about the characters as the author does............not my fave.]