hika ୨୧ > Recent Status Updates

love this so far 👯‍♀️ hazelwood never fails me

book club in 2 days.. locking in 🙏🏽

“i think of Charlie waiting at the window. his life is not mine to throw away. i’ve just borrowed it for a while, and now i’m being asked to return it.”

“i see now that the path i choose through that maze makes me what i am. i am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths i have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what i am becoming.”

“it had been all right as long they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. i began to see that by my astonishing growth i had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. i had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.”

feeling maternal towards charlie 😔 this book is gonna make me cry, i feel it in my bones

“and the sense of his loss, that he had for so long dammed within him, flooded out, engulfed him, and he let himself be carried outward, beyond the control of his will; he did not wish to save himself. then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love.”

“he began to know that it [love] was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

“in his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”

edith’s usage of grace as a weapon in their marriage genuinely makes me sick to my stomach. also, walker’s annoying af. and i think stoner’s lover just got introduced?? Ooooh

“slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. and they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”

honestly very confused my edith’s intentions and motives. also, postpartum it sounds like?

oh edith does not like this man one bit 😭

reading this book at snail pace. i really like it so far but just feel super unmotivated omg. maybe will lock in tomorrow 😵‍💫

i love this book. i’m so invested in what’s going on omg. i’m afraid this won’t give me actual answers though. the not knowing might be the point