Jessie Adamczyk > Recent Status Updates

Jesus, those neurotic, frustrated, middle aged kids! Full of unsatisfied yearnings and never being able to satisfy them. A 40 year old is significantly worse off than an inexperienced youngster, since he's aware of the time he has wasted, is unstable, and tends to act rashly

"I had fallen so low that if i had to choose between falling in live with a woman and reading a book about love, i should have chosen the book, "

Just as love songs prepare boys and girls for love, so the ardent florentine verses prepared italian youths for the day of deliverance. From generation to generation, all communed with the souls of the poet and so transformed their slavery into freedom

"Every age produces it's own particular dust that settles on every surface and in every corner,"

The catastrophe is displaced, the hole is resealed, things find their places once again, everyone is alive, there are no omissions, no silences. It is, in it's own way, Paradise Before the Fall (there are far too many people now who think that Europe in 1929 or Russia in 1913 were such paradises)...but "there" does not exist.

"There is so much documentary cinema occupied with this archaeology, that any scene, even any face, looks instantly familiar...the ancient division between important and unimportant is everywhere: The hero speaks, the girl eats icecream, the crowd loiters as crowds do... the author tells a story, the passerby illustrates the story. It's never about them, they are cutaway scenes... they fill the pauses, delight the

"She was reflected darkness, just as she was a borrowed light. "

Towles love affair with Russian stereotypes are grinding. This introduction of Osip, a man obsessed with "Russian gentleman", is no doubt going to open the door for more fan-boying

He was gone and she was left asphyxiating on his image....he felt like a better madness to her than anything else... she pulled out ger diary to write to him, 'we'll follow these rules because when it comes down to survival, we have to....if you take a break from this world, I will come to you and we will steal time.

"Love is transformative that way, it can bring out the prophet in you. You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters...in loving, he became a God...he made me suffer, but I still cast idols in his name. When the years accumulated and exposed the cracks, I covered them in gold and bronze...is there any story of a human loving a god that ends well?"

"This is all, ultimately, a litany of madness-- the colors of it, the sound it makes in heavy nights, the chirping of it across the shoulder of the morning. Think of the brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones you were born with, tucked behind your liver"

"And then there's that look in her eyes. The lounmok of Eve in Eden... some amalgam of devotion and brutality that's only really satisfied by encounters of the interior,"

"It didn't matter what state he was in as long as he knew what state he was in"

"Painting is the act of seeking out Allah's memories and seeing the world as he sees the world"

Blindness is percieved as the ultimate gift these minaturists can get

True talent couldn't be corrupted even by the love of gold and fame

"I don't want to be a tree. I want to be its meaning"

"Aroused in me a recklessness peculiar to the luckless, to murderers and to sinners"

Traverses that line, reinforces American conceptions of Palestinian men, important to tell these stories, characters not very well developed, repeated lines of "it's not that simple" and "what do you want?" , written for Americans, complete with a very classic america reading list, references Aladdin Mental illness and parenting, ferida supposed to be villainous, author lacked imagination about these characters,

he seems racist and classist and weirdly elitist but is unapologetically himself

The mind is treacherous--how can it turn on you and trick you so fully? Terrifing b/c of the reactions of educated people
You do not know what

My heart breaks so badly for little Lena, for Kayla, for Perl. This story is painfully beautiful. It reminds me so much of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. It breaks my heart.