Tracy > Recent Status Updates

You don’t have to like your work to be good at it.

Celeste felt her advantage tipping away and she changed her tack like a little sailboat on a windy pond. “Oh, Danny.” She put her hand on my arm.

Give your evidence, said the King; and don’t be nervous or I’ll have you executed on the spot.

Everybody says “come on!” here, thought Alice… I never was so ordered about before in all my life, never!

It was success that dazzled her—she could distinguish facts plainly enough in the twilight of failure.

She was quite aware that she was of interest to dingy people but she assumed that there is only one form of dinginess, and that admiration for brilliancy is the natural expression of its inferior state.

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

"What are you thinking?" Joanna asks. Not a question you should usually ask a man. By and large, if a man is thinking anything halfway acceptable, he'll say it and, if not, he'll just carry on thinking it instead.

There are moments when you show your love for a cat most by leaving them to their personal business.

Is this written by the Captain Underpants author?? Twenty odd pages into an otherwise good story and farts have come up 3 times.

Alcoholism alone would have made him intolerant enough of questions; but children who notice and ask are especial problems for people who additionally possess grim secrets with which they themselves can barely live.

There’s also a range of emotions considered by conventional paradigms to be normal, and emotions outside of that normal range of 97.6F and 99.6F, so to speak, are also pathologized. Such as anger. For example, a client once said to me, “I’m afraid my anger is going to get me fired.” As he shared more, I realized that his boss was an asshole.

Elizabeth Montagu: the woman who dared criticize Voltaire’s opinion of Shakespeare. I like her and admire her. And I like Voltaire too. It’s just one of those Anglo-French beefs. So entertaining!

Then Florence Allen did the most remarkable thing. She put her hand on my wrist, just set it there like it was the most natural thing in the world to put your hand on the wrist of someone you barely knew. She looked at me squarely when she spoke. “Everybody has parents. Very few people take care of them.”

A slice of cake never made anybody fat. You don’t eat the whole cake. You don’t eat cake every day of your life. You take cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious. … A cake is what’s served on the happiest days of your life.

Deep in his heart he knew his marriage wasn’t working. If he cared to look inward he would discover he was fifty percent responsible for the failure. Fair had no intention of looking inward, a quality that doomed his marriage and would undoubtedly doom future relationships as well.

I’m on a Fannie Flagg bender and I don’t care who knows it!

Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?

To count as nothing the annoyances, the bitterness, or the suffering of others, that was Clare.

The lady’s name was Mrs Ives. I would remember her kindness for a very long time. She chatted to me and asked questions, and told me it was quite all right not to try to be like Boadicea all the time as it was impossible to keep up. Sometimes you just had to give in to the odd watery day.

“In his Sermons, Fordyce stated that the only kind of woman who would read any of the racier novels available at the time ‘must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will.’ This is a real quote. From a book.”

Now she was angry.

Mr Rushworth was an inferior young man, as ignorant in business as in books, with opinions in general unfixed, and without seeming much aware of it himself.

Anytime you feel your unhappiness turning into bitterness, you have to check yourself. You can live with unhappiness, but bitterness will kill you.

Mrs Bennet: “No man will look at you,” she declared, “and every woman will pity you.” Mary: “I hope I will be equal to bearing that, if I must.” This, over getting spectacles, so Mary can read. God, Mrs Bennet is horrid. But we already knew that.

DNF