alma > Recent Status Updates

And he said, "You know—we've had to imavine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God—' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.'" (p135)

His vision of the outside world was limited to what he could see through a narrow slit... which concealed his baby face... He was so snug in there that he was able to pretend that he was safe at home... having survived the war... he was telling... a true war story—whereas the true war story was still going on. (p53)

The space felt empty sometimes, full at others, and bitter or aching at still other times. This strange little space... could suddenly blow up in size and consume her... But the well of thought taps a deep spring, and no matter how much she tried to bail them out, her thoughts kept overflowing the brim.. (p17)

Needless to say, I am invested in the family drama going on here

Perdido would smell the flood. It had seeped into the boards and beams and very bricks of the houses and buildings.

It was getting quite dark on the sad campus. Above the distant, still sadder hills there lingered, under a cloud bank, a depth of tortoise-shell sky. The heart-rending lights of Waindellville, throbbing in a fold of those dusky hills, were putting on their usual magic... (p79)

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. (p20)

...an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them. (p422)

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things – naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror – are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself – quite to one's surprise – in an entirely different world. (p312)

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely... If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look at that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn." (pp44-45)

Everyone in the world, my past self included, lived under a constant illusion of repetition. Only I, as I headed toward death, no longer believed that I would repeat the present.(p93)

Perhaps nausea is simply an unconscious device of the egoist, who, when he hears of horrors outside the course of his present serene existence, allows only his stomach to respond.(p106)

What a sentence... Of all the wishes people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. (p174)

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. (p23)

"Surely, I thought, we do not deserve even a little happiness. Or perhaps we had acquired the bad habit of regarding even a little happiness as a big favour, which we would have to repay." (p97)

"...I feel as though I were going thieving... My conscience was pricked by the happiness of being loved. Or perhaps I was craving some still more decisive unhappiness." (p129)

"By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. He is no towering oak tree with luxuriant branches... rather he is like the sayal bushes in the deserts of Sudan... defeating death because they ask so little of life." (p73)

"...just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child... that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it..." (p3)

"It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure." (p251)

"And human beings... can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradiction. And while this sparks off the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason." (p145)

"I have often wondered about the consciousness of animals, how it must be more shadowy than ours, more dreamlike and fleeting, small thoughts like half-burned candles, their outlines never fully formed. And perhaps that is also the case for many of us who must strain to think with clarity." (p54)

"Laughter comes later, like a wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time." (p495)

"You're growing up... Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that's not the worst... Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now." (p491)

Forever thanking Lee's wisdom for carrying me through early adulthood.

"Adam," he said. "I am incomparably, incredibly, overwhelmingly glad to be home. I've never been so goddamn lonesome in my life." (p419)

I haven't read this book in months (kept putting it off bc I couldn't bear the thought of finishing it). And yet! On the first sentence, it feels like homecoming. 🥲

I really need to finish this behemoth before the year ends

"The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing... The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others." (p114)

"The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing... The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others." (p114)

"The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing... The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others." (p114)

"It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk." (p54)