Whitney FI > Recent Status Updates

He liked it well enough, but here must be a bigger library somewhere, even bigger than Victory Mansions, or the Ministry of Truth. A library that was dizzying, eternal, and who presence he might -with a little luck- lose consciousness, just like the characters in the novels he read, when they encountered the Absolute. And it dawned on him then: a library was the closest thing humanity had to the idea of an Absolute.

We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. It’s wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.

He felt smothered. Contained. Imagination would always find miniscule pores in the delicate skin of reality - he knew that now. It would squeeze its way through to the surface. He tried to ignore the facet that he'd just come up with a completely mad metaphor, and then he remembered the cat's words: we're all mad here.

He was the most beautiful person I had seen in all my life. The train, when it came, was crowded, and he put an arm around me for protection. I suddenly looked up into his face. No one can describe this, I really shouldn’t try. His face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face.

Perhaps the child was made of the dark matter that fills the universe, no different from a black hole that allows the elements to travel through time and space, confounding humanity to no end. But people only travel through time in stories. The books must be trying to get even with him, not because he was working on banning them, but because he read them. They were trying to take over his world.

It doesn’t do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.

Fonny had found something he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren’t worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it.

The little one didn't seem interested in playing with other children. She would speak to stuffed animals, trees, ants, fairies, spiders, bedbugs, stray cats, goldfinches, and wolves. Any kind of creature - real or imaginary - as long as it wasn't a human being.

If you cross the Sahara, and you fall, by and by vultures circle around you, smelling, sensing, your death. They circle lower and lower: they wait. They know. They know exactly when the flesh is ready, when the spirit cannot fight back. The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.

He remembered somewhat foggily that the books had thrown his wife out. But was that yesterday or yesteryear? Her spot in the bed was empty. Somewhere in his memory, he recalled that she had lefty the bed, her face red with rage, because of a forgotten book under the covers that had knocked her elbow. How accurate this was he wasn't entirely sure; more likely than not, the book had bitten her.

I’ve just arrived from the United States and I’m looking to do something fucked up. My name is Domald Tromp and I’m very, very rich,” I explain matter-of-factly. “Have you heard of me?” The concierge nods. “I’ve seen your show The Apparent Ass. It was quite good.”

If Joe Friday were real, he'd be chasing after Robbie right now because the judge said Robbie deserved to be locked up. Even Joe Friday, who never made a mistake, would be on the wrong side of justice in Gracetown. #ACAB

Robert remembered what Mrs. Hamilton said about how the dead can hear all the way to heaven, so he took a deep breath from his belly before he played his high C, the saddest sound of all. Birds flapped from the trees, shamed by its perfection. Robert held that note for an impossibly long time, until Tex was nodding and smiling at him. The memory of his music floated over them long after he laid his trumpet down.

The crows flapped away in a sudden flurry while Robert waited in the growing shadows. At first he barely noticed Henry Jackson standing at the corner of the cedar grove, still in his cap, as if he'd always been there. He wasn't floating like the boy in the infirmary or a giant like the man in the church; he just looked horribly ordinary. Robert heard a low voice singing words he could not hear, a song of the dead.

"We'll get you out of here, I promise," Robert said, finding words somehow, voice gentle like a parent's, hoping there was something he could say or do to quiet Cleo's rage. Gloria could look in anyone's eyes and know almost anything about them, and maybe this was how she felt every day. He stared straight into the heart of Cleo's life story, all of it bad and sad and wrong.

She gazed at the wide-open fangs of the snake surrounding the mirror, and she turned her face and rested her chin on his shoulder. And like that they sat for a long time, she dark and he pale, making an odd contrast amidst all the snowy-white sheets, and around them, like a vignette, the darkness of the house blurring the borders.

And like the wretched creature that Florence had mentioned, that does not know its place nor how to find it, Noemí sat on the stairs for a while, staring at the nymph on the newel post and contemplating the motes of dust dancing in a ray of light.

"What am I gonna do?" Robert whispered. He didn't care that he sounded like he was crying. All around them instruments peeped and squealed while boys enjoyed their moment without troubles. Many were practicing scales as if their lives depended on it. "I dunno," Redbone said. Now his voice was an old man's too. "But we'll figure it out." We was a mighty and beautiful word.

A heart, raw and bleeding, she thought, and the image lingered in her mind. The anatomical heart, like in the Lotería cards, red, with all veins and arteries, rendered bright crimson. What was the saying? Do not miss me, sweetheart, I’ll be back by bus.

"Wasn't no grease fire." Waymon didn't say Klan, but he didn't have to. Sherriff Posey froze, surprised. He wasn't used to answers to his lies. He turned to scan the street, where everyone was posted on their porches or by their windows. Miz Lottie was awake now, listening by her front broken window pane. The sheriff suddenly busied himself with wiping his shoe in the grass. Gloria hoped he'd stepped in dog shit.

She recalled, grimly, that certain fairy tales end in blood. In Cinderella, the sisters cut off their feet, Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother was pushed into a barrel full of snakes. That particular illustration on the last page of one of the books Catalina used to read to them suddenly came back to her, in all its vivid colors. Green serpents, the tails poking out of a barrel as the stepmother was stuffed into it.

He walked behind Robert's chair, leaning over him to place a photo practically under his nose. All of Robert's skin prickled with the warden so close, like a bear was standing behind him. When Warden Haddock rubbed Robert's shoulder, Robert's eyes started at his long, pale, pink fingers instead of the image. The warden wore a gold wedding band. Robert wondered if the warden's wife knew him even a little bit.

Her voice was like fine glass, contrasting with the heavy furniture and heavy drapes and the equally weighty faces turned toward her. She didn’t mean to be a nuisance, but her carefree nature had little understanding of solemnity. She smiled, hoping for a smile in return, for a moment of levity inside this opulent cage.

Caught up!

The house loomed over them like a great, quiet gargoyle. It might have been foreboding, evoking images of ghosts and haunted places, if it had not seemed so tired, slats missing from a couple of shutters, the ebony porch groaning as they made their way up the steps to the door, which came complete with a silver knocker shaped like a fist dangling from a circle.

“…he is trying to poison me. This house is sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment. I have tried to hold on to my wits, to keep this foulness away but I cannot and I find myself losing track of time and thoughts. Please. Please. They are cruel and unkind and they will not let me go!”

I’ll start updating with quotes again once I’ve reached fresh story (past where I was with the audio).

I’ll start updating with quotes again once I reach fresh story (past where I stopped with the audio.

I needed a dose of that bitter 1990s edgy malaise. I also need to rewatch this movie.

I do not see why you say I can only see a representation in this World,’ I said with some sharpness. ‘The word “only” suggests a relationship of inferiority. You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay.