Emily Eich > Recent Status Updates

“Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat?

…Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light…

…Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?”

WOW WOW WOW!

“Human beings cant make one another really happy for long…He wanted your merely instinctive love for your child (tigresses share that, you know!) to turn into something better. He wanted you to love Michael as He understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.”

“Baba’s America…Was a co-worker who said wasn't it so hurtful to be asked where are you really from, and feeling he had no choice but to agree when he felt he truly wouldn't mind, not even after decades of living in America, that he would always like the opening to speak about his city.

The pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound. Didn't they understand that?”

“'But, I tell you, they'll see me.'
'An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don't you remember on earth-there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right?
Shame is like that. If you will accept it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.’"

“You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it
like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. Your thirst shall be quenched…

…We know nothing of religion here: we think only of Christ. We know nothing of speculation. Come and see. I will bring you to
Eternal Fact, the Father of all other fact-hood.”

“The needs of others were always smaller than the needs of one's own child. Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one's own pain.”

"Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death a state which I feared yet did not understand.”

“His hair is getting long, hanging down over his forehead. He doesn't seem to have any of that sticky stuff in it, because it looks soft and fluffy, the way it did when he was a boy. I feel an urge to ruffle it, but don't have the energy to lift my arm.
I realize now that I never really knew my old man, not the way I know Hans. Despite all our squabbles, we belong together in a way my father and I never did.”

“Hans turns his head and focuses on me with the same look he
used to as a boy. The one that tells me we belong together.”

“Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour. The very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it. Even guests, after a weekend visit, carry some of the smell away with them. The dog and the cat are tainted with it. And a house full of the impenetrable mystery.“

The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret, the Enemy replied, “I wish with all my heart that you did.”

…WOW. Incredible stuff!

“The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance…As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

“Didn't you foresee that pleasure would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself?”

phew. what a marathon this has been. looking forward to being done!

omgggggggg wow. this book is gonna mess me UP!!!!!!!!!

“She closed her eyes tight before opening them again to see if she felt any different, now that she had heard someone say something aloud she had wished and wished her parents had said…When she opened her eyes there were stars on the ceiling, because PJ had turned on the star projector that he'd bought at IKEA, in case the kids were afraid of the dark.”

Only 90 pages in, and I am already GUTTED…

“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.”

“The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.”

“Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?
If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.”

“People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent…they begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”

“But they’re just boys, Wendell.”
“It’s always boys who go to war, Angie.”

“He returned to his car and drove away, leaving behind him a trail of yellow dust that took a long time to settle in that still morning. Charlie couldn’t help thinking a lot more than dust was being stirred up in Black Earth a county and whatever the outcome of Noah Bluestone’s trial, it was going to take a long time for everything to return to normal, if it ever did.”

A great tenderness for her mother came into Francie. "Maybe," thought Francie, "she doesn't love me as much as she long Neeley. But she needs me more than she needs him and I gues bring needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better."

francie has learned how to read!!!!

i adore francie and the way she sees the world! also noted the part about francie and her mother being so different but becoming alike in their hardness. i loved hearing ahout all the little things that make up this sweet character!

“But for now, the experience resists narrative. Nothing rings true. For the transition from birth to mother is a space of true wilderness, that is, a space of entanglement which cannot be commodified. In the brief interval of its duration, it isn't available for consumption. It's just like the author told me, months ago: I have no words to describe what has happened to me.”

reminding myself to come back to day #16. great perspective on love and luck and what makes a person fortunate is that they are curious in life.