Lily > Recent Status Updates

I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice. This is a recollection which ought to make me forgive every one sooner than myself. Six years of separation and suffering might have been spared... I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I must endeavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.

Captain Wentworth left his seat, and walked to the fire-place; probably for the sake of walking away from it soon afterwards, and taking a station, with less bare-faced design, by Anne.

She now felt a great inclination to go to the outer door; she wanted to see if it rained. Why was she to suspect herself of another motive? Captain Wentworth must be out of sight. She left her seat, she would go; one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half, or always suspecting the other of being worse than it was.

Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

Her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.

"I think you make a mistake in feeling yourself cut off and alien. One has a curious idea of the norm, as a being full of conventional virtue, free from temptation, rather stupid but nevertheless someone whose judgment of one's own sins and weaknesses one fears or resents. Yet there is probably more sympathy and understanding abroad than one will ever risk discovering."

He said aloud: "I know exactly how you feel. But there's something wrong with things when a man can't find an opportunity to serve the community until high explosive bombs are raining on his neighbors' heads."

Here is a chance to explain my point of view, perhaps to make a convert of it. But I shall say nothing, or nothing that matters, because you are a likable honest man and I have neither the heart nor the courage to tell you that just your kind of easy-going acceptance of the world's injustices have brought you and the world to such a pass as this.

Life was acquiring a large simplicity, all lesser insecurities swallowed up by that one enormous vulnerability. Time enough to worry tomorrow, when tomorrow might never come for you.

Hell is having arms but no-one to embrace.

Perhaps it will never be possible to buy what matters most, no, of course not, that is unfortunately not the case, or, to put it better, thank God.

Red stands on the cliff at the end of the world and holds out her hand, and her heart breaks to see herself weeping in the world before. She wishes she could take herself into her arms, crush her in a fierce embrace.

There's a kind of time travel in letters, isn't there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could never return - and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

It was like falling asleep, sliding from that strange wide-awakeness into just normal, everyday, well... being awake. It felt as if everything was blurred and muffled.

This is how we always feel, she thought. We sleepwalk through our lives, because how could we live if we were always this awake?

He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.

And all the stories had, somewhere, the wicked old witch.

The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you had no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch.

For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him.

She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived.

"Ask Baby what is a friend."
"He says it's somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not."
"Ask Baby can you truly part of someone you love."
"He says only if you love yourself."

"The only advantage which Lone possessed under these circumstances was a valuable one: he had no impulse to question his sanity and start a confusing debate with himself on the matter."

Perhaps that is what it is like being with other people. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.

You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay.

But what is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?

I didn't realize how much I missed Susanna Clarke...

But it was from the differences between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us.

Fear and fire, good servants, bad lords.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

The First Mobile must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

time to see what all the fuss is about >:)

"There are many scholars, but few seekers after truth. Humans believe the things that make them feel safe. They care little for difficult facts."