Marta > Recent Status Updates

“Remember the words of Laozi. ‘If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are going’.

“She refused to be a tenant of her face, rather than its owner” 💪🏻

“All I wanted was more, everything, and maybe that’s how I became a person who has an affair in a hotel room-maybe it was the sheer relief of the fact that I wanted it”

“I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another”

“In Ireland no one looks at you on the beach,” Ellis said. “It would be bad manners”.
“In Italy it would be bad manners not to look”

A brilliant quote here on the main character’s feelings as she is about to emigrate. I remember feeling a very similar displacement and excitement myself before moving to the Hnited Kingdom.

Not my usual cup of tea at all 😂 let’s see…

From the short story P&O, “you saw the crowded masts, a bare straight forest, of the native junks. In the soft light of the evening the busy scene was strangely touched with mystery, and you felt that all those vessels, their activity for the moment suspended, waited for some event of a peculiar significance”.

On audiobook as I train for my walking half marathon. Lots of golden nuggets I needed to hear, and would want tattooed on my inner arm 💪🏻

Making for a good summer holiday read so far! I predict this will quickly develop into a Agatha Christie-type thriller with all characters deeply involved. Let’s see…

It’s making for a good summer read so far. I have a few predictions that would make this somewhat into a Agatha Christie-type of thriller… let’s see…

“The opposite of love, you think, isn’t hate. It’s complacency”

“Life isn’t fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but that’s a terrible thing to do. It’s not only a lie, it’s a cruel lie.

“It isn’t!” I said, so loud I really startled her. “You’re right. It’s not fair.” But it meant so much to me to have it said and out and free and flying- that was the reconciliation I was trying to make and couldn’t.

“There are moments that feel more like spun sugar than time. A summer evening on a stretch of grass, when your tongue is blue with the heart of a popsicle…Blink, and it’s like it never happened”

I can tell this will be wildly out of my comfort zone. I will love it or hate it. But it’s been staring at me from my bookshelf for too long: it is time.

“Trying is the first step to whatever comes next”

Utterly wonderful. Like a cinematic Downton Abbey-esque experience. The quotes about sibling relationships and marital woes are especially vivid and emotional 🥹

Got this from my Secret Santa back in December and I’ve incorporated reading each day’s poem as part of my routine- with a few cheats of poems skipped or read in a clump. It’s a lovely thing to look forward to!

“Loneliness wasn’t the absence of people, she realised. It was the absence of people who understood you.”

One of my “resolutions” in 2024 is to read more books in my first language so… here we go 💪🏻

Loving this in audiobook with Dolly Alderton herself narrating it. I am laughing and sighing deeply in equal measure! If only I had had this book available through my own time at university.

Whew, had to take a little breather; it is so well-written but emotionally draining and should come with a trigger warning for hypochondriacs like me 😂

“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage Union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which society would register the quick motions of man”

“It is stupid for anyone to tell you that time will heal all the wounds or that you’ll move on from it. You won’t. Not completely. But you will learn to live with it. It’ll be a part of you always, and you will come out the other side of this changes, and that’s okay”

“Falling in love is really quite simple,” she says. “You want to know the secret? It’s the same thing we are all doing about life every single day”.
I look to her.
“Forget there’s an ending”

Some fantastic quotes about the dating scene to start with! 😂 so glad I listened to the BookReccos podcast interview to the author!