joy > Recent Status Updates

rilke i adore you!

5/10 letters finished.

listening on spotify

it’s been 2 weeks since i saw the film which was 5 stars! i read 65% of the book before seeing it. after watching, i realized that the only reason i kept reading the book (even at a slow pace) was because i was looking forward to the plot twists, having lost the element of suprise, the book felt even slower. i believe it is a 3 star read personally but translates extremely well on film.

i have some thoughts.

missing venice right nowwww

starting off strong

a story filled with paranoia that is so similar to crime and punishment which i love

excited to see how this wraps up

rocky🥹

getting back into it

it’s a bit slow but i have high hopes

enjoying!

i have missed reading sci-fi books!

oh wow

love margaret and cosmo’s story! not a big fan of hayden and alice, idek why i just don’t feel it!

finished the winter section! great journal entries!

listening on spotify

listening on spotify

listening on spotify

“life is a question of nerves… in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams... a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… it is on things like these that our lives depend.” 207

“youth! there is nothing like it. it's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth… they seem in front of me. life has revealed to them her latest wonder.” 206

“there are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and i have to live the strangest month of my life over again… life has been your art. you have set yourself to music. your days are your sonnets.” 207

“by the way, dorian, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

“i thought of telling the prophet that Art had a soul, but that man had not. i am afraid, however, he would not have understood me.”

“the soul is a terrible reality. it can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. it can be poisoned, or made perfect. there is a soul in each one of us. i know it.”

205

“romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art… each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved... we can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

“even when one has been wounded by it?”

“especially when one has been wounded by it.” 188

listening on spotify

“this book is for the child you were who still lives and feels, the person you are today whom you love and whom you take care of, and the person you wish yourself to be tomorrow and beyond.”

“nothing seems to us changed. out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.” 127

“it is the face of my soul.” 150

“but youth smiles without any reason. it is one of its chiefest charms.” 155

“he glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stances up one Venice:” 157

“a wild longing, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed… the past would have little or no place, or survive, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.” 127

“it was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. yes, basil could have saved him. but it was too late now. the past could always be annihilated. regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. but the future was inevitable. there were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their real evil.” 115

“to become the spectator of one's own life, as harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.” 107

“dorian, from the moment i met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. i was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. you became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” 110

“you are more to me than all art can ever be.” 84

“women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. they lived on their emotions. they only thought of their emotions. when they took lovers, it was merely to have someone with whom they could have scenes.” 89

“i don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. i want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” 105