Phyllis > Recent Status Updates

Lucy does not want sense , and that is the foundation on which every good thing may be built. -And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit-it is not possible that it should be so.

[Austen’s heroines] were inexperienced and needed to discover their feelings, or they were neglected and needed to stand up for them… Their problem…was that they had too great a belief in their own feelings. They had achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence-learning to trust yourself-but now they had to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They needed to learn to doubt themselves.

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she'd been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference what-soever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton's mother, was a good-humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar. She was full of jokes and laughter, and before dinner was over had said many witty things on the subject of lovers and husbands; hoped they had not left their hearts behind them in Sussex, and pretended to see them blush whether they did or not.

"To be sure," said she, "it is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But then if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years, we shall be completely taken in."
"Fifteen years! my dear Fanny; her life cannot be worth half that purchase.“

It would be very satisfying to be a sad-eyed, beautiful ghost who drifted through the halls, gazing up at the moon and weeping silently...she was still short and round-faced and sturdy, and there were very few ghost stories about short, sturdy women. Marra had not managed to be pale and willowy and consumptive at any point in eighteen years of life and did not think she could achieve it before she died.

Until the end of time he would never forget his first sight of Gokumon Island. To the west, the autumn sky was clear and bright, bathed in late-afternoon sunshine. But the gloomy sky over Gokumon Island all the way to the east hung heavy like molten lead. The island itself loomed out of the sea, just at that moment shimmering as it caught the light from the western sun.

“Summer grass —no trace of mighty soldiers' dreams." (Uncredited haiku)
…
"That noise."
…
"The more distant sounds are the mines," replied the priest. "The closer sounds are from that island over there. They're knocking down the military installations. As if toppling what is left of 'mighty soldiers' dreams! Doesn't it remind you of that haiku? I'd like the great Basho to be able to see all this."

Travelling was a still a hardship in the autumn of 1947. Even getting a train ticket was no mean feat. …since the trains tended to be packed with black marketeers and their buyers, they were not places where public displays of police presence were welcome... So now, Kindaichi found himself squeezed into this sardine-can of a train car looking like a crumpled handkerchief and gasping for breath.

"It's been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up."
—Herbert Richardson

By the end of the decade, some justices had become openly critical of the review that death penalty cases received. Chief Justice William Rehnquist urged restrictions on death penalty appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions. "Let's get on with it," he famously declared at a bar association event in 1988. Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence.

"Bryan," he said at some point during our short flight, "capital punishment means 'them without the capital get the punishment.' We can't help people on death row without help from people like you."

This is surprisingly good so far; the audiobook includes 1940s era snippets from newsreels, interviews, etc. including one voiced by Ronald Reagan during his B movie days.

By the time I started to experience freedom, my dreams had faded, like a watercolour left in the sunlight. The colours thinned, the night warmed, the birds and the night creatures quieted, the fear and confusion dulled. And even though I never forgot them completely, they began to take up less space my life.

"Most of us, the decisions we make today shape our tomorrows. ... But your gift is that you have a chance to start over. It's like life is a notebook, and the page you're on is full of mistakes and places where you've erased too much, and maybe you've written some boy's initials in the margins over and over, but now you have a chance to turn to a fresh page and start over.”

There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories.

Enumerating the gifts you've received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing "enoughness" is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

The cool breath of evening slips off the wooded hills, displacing the heat of the day, and with it come the birds, as eager for the cool as am. They arrive in a flock of calls that sound like laughter, and I have to laugh back with the same delight.

Glancing away from Mr. Wilson, she met the small brown eye of his mother, and surprised there a most unexpected expression: the old lady looked extremely amused. But she said nothing. She had retreated too far into the narrow world of age—in her case bounded by food, warmth, and the villainy of her neighbours—to be bothered with the younger generation.

As his physical powers declined, making hunting impossible, Sir Henry had taken to the Pen; all over the world the friends of his youth began to receive very long, very dull letters from him. … So the letters took a long time to get there, and the replies even longer to get back, and all the news was out of date; and this gave his correspondence a peculiar timeless quality which was very soothing.

Bambleby stayed put in the sleigh wrapped in two blankets and speaking only to complain about the cold. His nose turned a brilliant red from blowing it, the sound of which always seemed to coincide with moments when I was spellbound by the quiet loveliness of the snowy wood Finally I demanded that he eat one of Poe's cakes and was relieved by his acquiescence, which spared me the effort of shoving it down his throat

“An unaccountable lump rose in Ronnie's throat as he stood there looking down upon his sleeping father. He was an ass, of course, but he was his father. Mother must have loved him once…

I love him, too, he thought with surprise, and felt an impulse to wake him and tell him so. But he turned away and went silently from the room.”

“If we don't get shut of Miss Plum soon, Ada thought, slashing at the raisins with deep animosity, Alison will go an' do summat daft, like getting hersen wed to yon flabby-belly Hartley, or happen the vicar-and then where shall we be!

It was a thousand pities, in Ada's opinion, that Miss Plum had not been allowed to walk slap into her duck pond, and have done with it. ...”

"But there must be a story everywhere" persisted Joan.

“All right,” she conceded. "But I'll have to follow my own special line. Something like this. This village seems an earthly paradise, with a population of kindly gracious souls. But the flowers are growing on slime. When twilight falls, they light their lamps and draw down their blinds. And then —when no one can see them they lead their real lives."

“A perfect spot. Viewed from an airplane, by day, it resembled a black-and-white plaster model of a Tudor village, under a glass case. At night, however, when its lights began to glow faintly, it was like some ancient vessel, with barnacled hull and figure-head, riding in the peace of a forgotten port.”