Helena > Recent Status Updates

"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.

Told my dad I was reading this and apparently he's read multiple Svetlana Alexievich books before... can't have anything for myself smh

'... but he could not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him: such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on which his life had gone aground."

"It was bad enough to have no motor of her own, to be avowedly dependent on 'lifts,' openly and unconcealably in quest of them, and perpetually plotting to provoke their offer [...]" wow the eternal struggle. I get it

"Undine Spragg" ideal protagonist name

Nice thing about reading books like this is that it drives home that there have been women who are keenly aware of misogyny in all places through all of history and it's actually not a new realisation me and my pals had the other day or anything

And what can I do? What can I do with happiness? What can I do with this strange and piercing peace, which is already starting to hurt me like an anguish, like a great silence of spaces? To whom can I give my happiness, which is already starting to scratch me a bit and scares me.

The degree to which this book requires you to suspend your disbelief w.r.t the main character's ignorance of literally everything is unbearable. Genuinely reads like it's her first day on planet earth.

Getting through this incredibly slowly on purpose because I would like it to last forever

"... it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region."

Hmmm Edith Wharton's kind of an unrivalled genius you know.

This book is definitely going to make me miserable but I am persisting anyway.

Was looking forward to getting home from work today specifically so I can find out what happens next, which is genuinely impressive given barely anything has happened at all for most of it

This is very different to the other Woolf books I've read and I like it a lot more to be honest. Mostly because of the sense of humour/whimsy and the fact it's all kind of ridiculous.