Helena > Recent Status Updates

It was a senseless sort of dance, artful and confused. Blue and Maura had their own orbit; Maura and Calla another. He watched Maura's bare feet circle on the kitchen floor. It was the opposite of everything he had cultivated for the past five years. How he wanted to stay. This isn't a life for what you are, he told himself. But for tonight, he would pretend.

This lived in him. This punch, the first time his father had ever hit him, was always being thrown somewhere in his head.

He didn't want to kidnap a boy, he didn't want to anger Maura, he wanted...he just wanted. Cicadas sang madly from the trees. It was so impossibly summer. He wanted to stay.

She beamed at him. She had one of those lovely, open, perfect smiles, genuinely happy and very beautiful. The Gray Man thought, This is the worst decision I've ever made.

“There wasn't a day during his first month at Aglionby Academy when he hadn't doubted his decision to come there. The other boys were so alien and daunting; he would never be able to look like one of them. How incredibly naive he'd been to think he would ever possess a room like one of the other Aglionby students did.” Me @ Rollins

He looked nothing like the Adam who'd lost his temper and everything like the Adam she had first met. That was what was frightening, though — there d been no warning.

Noah had not been Catholic when he was alive, but recently he had decided to find religion. No one in the church ever noticed him and it was possible God didn't, either, but Ronan, as someone God possibly ignored as well, didn't mind the company.

Adam knew it was a favor. Did that make it wrong? He'd said no for so long that he didn't know when to say yes…He hated the careful way Gansey had asked him about it. Tiptoeing, just like Adam had learned to tiptoe around his father. He needed a reset button. Just push the reset button on Adam Parrish and start him again.

Sometimes Ronan thought Adam was so used to the right way being painful that he doubted any path that didn't come with agony.

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!

"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed curtains in his arms. "They are not torn down, rings and all. They are here—I am here-the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!"

“…This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the spirit, stretching out its hand toward the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!"

"Business!" cried the ghost, wringing its hands again.
"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my busi-ness!"

He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough…

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.

"I'm not dying in fucking Sanford!"

“Memories have always been loose things, his past full of holes and his long years of recovery fuzzy thanks to pain and meds, and he's wound up from trying to piece together clues and not freak out over the way his life has been upended.”

Me too kid 🫩

…vocational awe is why teachers, nurses…and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students, patients, and patrons, and their bosses don't, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than increase their pay, they are held hostage by their own sense of duty.

…companies start to enshittify when they can. In other words, anytime you see good products produced ethically and offered at fair prices, it's because the world from which those products emerged punishes cheating: low quality, poor labor practices, and high prices all cost the company more than it stands to make from indulging them.

"I settle back into place next to her as she brushes her bangs cutely out of her eyes."

BARF :/

Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.

“A word that is so often preceded by a hitch in the throat or said in a whisper in the mouths of others.”

yeah y’all what is up with that? why can’t people say “lesbian” in the same volume as the rest of their sentence 😡

Sometimes, you can half believe you’ve been hurt so much you’ve basically been vaccinated. Rendered immune. And then someone says something like that to you.

“I should probably explain why I was sipping on a nonbinary beverage while wearing the world's most middle-class excuse for fetish gear in a basement in Shoreditch.”

Alexis Hall my beloved!!! :)

“…Do you think any of the nuns at the abbey fell in love? With each other?"…

Georgie tried not to look at Elf.

"I'd like to know is all," said Anne. "Wouldn't you? Not just about nuns. When I go to see the Old Master paintings at the Pall Mall Picture Galleries, I always stare at the women and wonder. Who were you really? What did you want?"

…government…was detective from the start, requiring several amendments, civil war, & momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, & its respect for the individual freedoms & human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite The Constitution they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct 2 centuries ago

Don't worry. It wouldn't affect them because they were careful. And even so, there would be a cure or something coming soon.

We're fine. But they weren't. Fatalism proved the easiest way to handle the trauma of the unknown. They had begun the watch. They knew that it was too late. Soon they would lose more people than most people lose in a lifetime.

Censorship confronts us with literature's opposite. Where literature opens conversations, censorship closes them. Where literature provokes questions, censorship insists upon answers. Where literature unsettles us with ambiguity, the realization that the "meaning" of a text is never final, censorship seeks to comfort us with moral absolutes.

He wasn't old. I called him an old man in my head, but he wasn't old. It's terrifying, in that sense, how quickly you can disappear. How ineptly one person can love another without getting the time to make amends.

I joke about the abandonment of my personal experimental God, but really, you have to give it up for nature. It's almost better if it's all a breathtaking accident. It's a reminder that from chaos can come peace.