Ariel > Recent Status Updates

Believe me I am all for descriptive prose but I have my limits. The constant changing timelines are feeling as though the places are still being set over 15% in.

I had to take a deep breath when a description of a canned goods container led to the plot stopping for a trip back in time to its whole creation and the parent’s marriage. I respect this book immensely so far!!! Doesn’t mean I am loving it yet 🥲

"Let me tell you. The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does."

"He wondered how his brother felt, wondered whether now that his passion was chilling he would feel panic or sorrow or sick conscience or nothing. These things Adam felt for him.
His conscience bridged him to his brother and did his pain for him the way at other times he had done his homework."

"I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but it's true. I love you better. Else why would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you?"

"And Adam was more afraid of the gentleness than he had been at the violence, for it seemed to him that he was being trained as a asacrifice, almost as though he was being subjected to kindness before death."

"For alice had been naked- she had been smiling."

"Sometimes when she was alone, and knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled."

"He contributed to the quiet he wished for by offering no violence, no contention, and to do this he had to retire into secretness, since there is some violence is everyone."

"When a child first catches adults out- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true... his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone.
And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."

“It’s late- I have all the windows open, and the air outside, is just as soft as spring… Why do they make spring a young girl, why does that illusion dance and yodel its way for three months through the world’s preposterous barrenness.
Spring is a lean old plough horse with its ribs showing.”

“She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave.”

“In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant.”

“After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity.”

“In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think.”

“My mind is full of any number of material things. I want a warm bath too much to worry about the importance of my work or what percentage of us are pathetic figures.”

“Not I” he said softly, “I was born tired.”

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fiber of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen.

Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.”

“These days seem so short- June seemed- to- have- longer days when I was a little girl.”

“How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt when everything is devoid of meaning?”

“Torture rests on a whole quantitative art of pain. Torture correlates the type of corporeal punishment with the gravity of the crime. There is a legal code of pain… it is calculated…. Justice pursues the body beyond all possible pain.”

“Punishment… leaves the domain of everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness… it’s effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability and not visual intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime.”

“It is always the body that is at issue- the body and it’s forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.”

“And we all stood there, looking at one another, keeping up these little barriers between us.”

“The fact that I loved him in a sick, hurt, desperate way, like a child or dog, did not matter. It was not the sort of love he needed.”

“Why must I be the one to supply the interest, and have all the criticism?”

“The smile was my reward. Like a pat on the head to Jasper. Good dog then, lie down, don’t worry me anymore. I was Jasper again.”

“They are not brave, the days when we are twenty one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.”