Emilie > Recent Status Updates

light a match and the whole country could go up in flames

I, in fact, am the only fictional character in the book until I catch up with myself.

“Nastia’s mother had once said her strangeness was what made her special. Wasn’t this a lie all children heard at some point, because all children are born strange before they learn to smooth down the edges?”

"You know how there are some people out there, people who.."

Her mother didn't like where this was going.

Yeva tried again. "People who like both men and women."

Her mother closed her eyes. She was trying, trying her hardest to expand her mind to fit such

But unlike Hesiod - or indeed the moralists of our own era - Dad did not feel he had to take sides, to be either a technophobe or a tech-enthusiast. If light can have two contradictory natures, and if all of nature rests on a binary opposition, then hardened iron, steam engines and networked computers could also be, simultaneously, potential liberators and enslavers. 1/2

Hysteria is the language of the protesting body

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humor of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

[You’ll be grateful that I’ve cut all the weird shit about women from this otherwise gorgeous J.G Ballard poem]

I want to live with myself,/I want to enjoy the good that I owe to heaven, /alone, without witnesses,/free of love, of jealousy, / of hate, of hope, of fear.

by 1877, Pater had already stated that all the arts aspire to resemble music, which is nothing but form.

The second argument is written thus: Suffering should be infinite because so is the sin of offending the majesty of the Lord, an infinite Being. […] arguing that an error against God is infinite because He is infinite is like arguing that it is holy because God is, or like thinking that the injuries attributed to a tiger must be striped.

“You are afraid to die?”
“Yes, every one is.”
“But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together.
Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see—each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.

Finally a classic which is actually as gay as advertised!

“Nobody should put their own success above their children's happiness it's selfish, if you're asking him, unnatural. As a method of surviving, it's a worthwhile trade: your family's comfort in exchange for your own absence.”

How much imagination does a fella need to build a livelihood upon? A sight more than he's got, no doubt. He can't yet write a song that doesn't borrow from a hundred other tunes.

Thomas Flett relies upon the ebb tide for a living, but he knows the end is near. One day soon, there'll hardly be a morsel left for him to scrounge up from the beach that can't be got by quicker means at half the price. Demand for what he catches is already on the wane, and who's to say the sea will keep on yielding shrimp worth eating anyway.

People don't live history, they live their lives. History is a catastrophe that passes over them.
—Chus Pato

Off to an absolutely phenomenal start… already my favourite of the booker’s dozen (mostly because One Boat has to stay firmly at the bottom and I haven’t read the others)

If Anata was reminiscent of an eighteenth-century preindustrial village, Abed was born into its aristocracy. Both his grandfathers-who were brothers-had at separate points been the mukhtar, village leader, and together they had owned much of the land.

Gobineau said. "The only history is white." M. Caillois, in turn, observes: "The only ethnography is white." It is the West that studies the ethnography of the others, not the others who study the ethnography of the West.

[on the Narrator’s forgetfulness] “It’s only normal,” people tell him. “All narrators are like that. It’s why they write fiction, in fact”

“When you see someone you love continually weighing in secret, like gleaming copper weights on the pans of a copper scale on the one side her life, on the other her death and you see her stooping to examine precisely on which side it tips, how can you help but peer over her shoulder?”

"... Some of us live in cities so we can be alone", Wojnarowicz wrote in his memoir, Close to The Knives, "so we can avoid ourselves..." There he found another society, that helped him escape himself. As he writes of one temporary lover, "I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life".

But where you and I say "I," she would say the "I" of someone else, then someone else again, never quite managing to say her own.

No doubt we all have someone else inside us, thought the Narrator, though, to tell the truth, I've never felt this with anyone but Fanny. And if I examine my conscience, the Narrator went on, I know that I myself am that character, the writer's secret twin, the one writing this story and the stranger within.

So there was the word that made the name and there was the dog that it conjured in the mind and there way beyond it totally free of it himself was the real dog wagging or not wagging his tail. It was me who was tethered to the word.

I shouldn’t be telling you this but you two are coming up on facial as possible UVs. And when she said did that mean Ultraviolets, he looked at her like she was a person walking a tightrope without a net.

Even though they're breathing and moving they're like the things in one of those old paintings of globes and skulls and fruits and lutes, I said.

the huge lit candles in the glass jars burning pointless against the daylight.

Christ, he said.

He said it like a question.

Which house is burning?

The country where you live, or Europe, or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have already burned down - who knows how long ago? - in a single immense blaze that we pretended not to see. Some are reduced to just bits of frame, a frescoed wall, a roof beam, names, so many names, already eaten by the flames.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveller.
- Franz Kafka

I wish you were here so I could bend a mirror
around your face, pour you back into you.