Helena > Recent Status Updates

"It is terrible to be twenty, Lady Slane. It is as bad as being faced with riding over the Grand National course. One knows one will almost certainly fall into the Brook of Competition, and break one's leg over the Hedge of Disappointment, and stumble over the Wire of Intrigue, and quite certainly come to grief over the Obstacle of Love."

"In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous acceptance of herself."

"I'd like to take what I know and just hand it over. But there is always a problem for a woman: being believed. [...] My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself - smarter, deeper, colder. [...] prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution..."

Some books are just soooooooo ridiculously French

Reading a second time because I don't know what's good for me.

"...the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense. The American Cancer Society's Reach For Recovery Program [...] encourages this false and dangerous nostalgia in the mistaken belief that women are too weak to deal directly and courageously with the realities of our lives."

Obviously I had some knowledge of what Metamorphosis was about but it really still is a shock to read.

"As a Black lesbian feminist [...] I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly [...] without the restrictions of externally imposed definition."

So much better the second time around... I swear I can't have been reading this properly before

The homoeroticism between clare and irene is kind of crazy...

Really need to stop reading books about uptight, closed-off women who are unable to love because it makes me actively suicidal

"All private lives are alike. Why would you be different from me? Suffocating fear makes freaks of all of us."

Elaine Kraf is kind of like Jesus to me

"Do you know what I mean? Perhaps if you can accept the pain that almost kills you, you can use it, you can become better [...] Otherwise, you just get stopped with whatever it was that ruined you and you make it happen over and over again and your life has - ceased, really - because you can't move or change or love any more."

"When she had been safe and respectable, so had the world been safe and respectable; now the entire world was bitter with deceit and danger and loss; and which was the greater illusion? [...] Richard had been her protection, not only against the evil in the world, but also against the wilderness of herself. And now she would never be protected again."

"He knew that Yves' silences meant that he was fighting some curious war of his own, was coming to some decision of his own; [...] oddly enough, for it seems not to be the way we live now, for Eric, merely hearing Yves' footfalls at his side, feeling Yves beside him, and watching that changing face, was joy enough - or almost joy enough."

"She slept. He felt that she was sleeping partly in order to avoid him. [...] He felt that she had decided, long ago, precisely where the limits were, how much she could afford to give, and he had not been able to make her give a penny more."

Currently feeling that I might find a time machine in order to go back in time to persuade my 20 year old self to read this book and change the trajectory of her life for the better. But maybe she wouldn't get it anyway

Chapter where Bolanle visits the hospital with her ageing polygamous husband and he soils his trousers in impotent rage on learning she had an abortion in the past is, well, incredible.

"I used to think of marriage as a plate glass window just begging for a brick." goddddd she's too much

Kind of a life-changing book ngl

"It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame. For years I thought my sister was right: it was my fault. I had planted them too far down in the earth. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding."

First 100ish pages were kind of dragging but I'm getting into it now

"...I thought at the time that I'd fooled her with some kind of radical point of view, [...] the cold wisdom of my gaze, my general attitude. I wasn't radical at all. I was simply unhappy."

Makes almost no sense whatsoever so far (seemingly intentionally) but I am vaguely charmed despite this

"...this experience in particular was utterly humiliating. A psychoanalyst may term it something like a formative trauma, but I know little about psychology and reject the science entirely. People in that profession, I'd say, should be watched very closely."

Eileen and I are still one and the same even now it seems ffs

Have a vague memory of thinking this was the greatest book of all time or something like that the first time I read it. Not 100% sure it's how I'll feel this time

"On the whole, Pyotr Petrovich belonged to that category of men who, when observed in society, appear extremely amiable and make a special virtue of their amiability, but who, as soon as anything is not quite to their liking, at once lose all their inner resources and become more reminiscent of sacks of flour than easy-going cavaliers whose task it is to enliven the company."

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Can't help but think of Jenny Holzer's "expiring for love is beautiful but stupid". It's mostly stupid though.