Hayden Gilbert > Recent Status Updates

“…the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek that followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all. It was difficult to judge.
…What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night.”

If I gotta read this for work, you’re damn right I’m logging it

I’m finally at the infamous “whale facts” portion of the book…at least the first mention of them, and at 32 chapters in…I feel like it’s surprisingly early.

I gotta jump off this one. I guess I see the appeal; it’s kinda like a Guardians of the Galaxy thing…but man I just cannot stand this tone. Every single line of dialogue is a cheeky, sarcastic, foul quip. I’ve always believed you should finish every book you start, including the ones you dislike. It’s important to be critical and to express dissatisfaction. But, life is just too short.

It’s hard to imagine James Cameron reading this, let alone adapting it into a film lol

“One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”
—Charles Fort

“We cannibals must help these Christians.”

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times til morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”
Aww wtf no one ever said this book was cute

“Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can…If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

**** yes.

“whispering…voices without words like dead leaves without wind…
…the sound of a cat drifting across frost-stiff grass, a breeze across water, the moon behind clouds…whispering…”

Broooooo this dude and his words 😩

“A favorite place, a secret place, a world not bonded to grownups and growing…”
I’ve been really enjoying stepping away from my horror-heavy reading diet this year, but I finally hit my annual reading slump about the time school let out. I should’ve known, my boy Charlie Grant was there for me to lull me back. Man, it’s like slipping into a warm bath every time.
It’s like going home

“I have told this story before…In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, it is so easy to forget one thing: We were kids. We were kids. We were kids trying to do our best…”

I found the long-lost final chapter of Stoner!

Chapter XVIII:
“And then he woke up and the last 20-so years of his life were just a bad dream. He put his wife and his crippled colleague in the Rack Trap from Saw III, and he lived happily ever after.”

Bro just hit this annoying pissant with “Name three medieval dramas…”
Man I know Stoner’s whole deal is that his entire life is miserable and nothing goes right for him, but I’m really happy for this win here. This is like watching Captain America catch Thor’s hammer

“Of all forms of tyranny… the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”

“Thus he found it possible to live, and even to be happy, now and then.”

I’m gonna write a fan sequel where he puts his wife in “The Rack” trap from Saw 3

I’ve been trying to remember what movie it is, where this guy is in slow-motion waving someone away, silently screaming for them to turn back. The scene is POV, so he’s directly facing the camera. It’s a really haunting scene. Thrashing in suspended animation, his warning unheard. I couldn’t get this image out of my mind while Stoner is about to marry this lady. God help me, I think it’s Jeepers Creepers 2

“‘I never have sympathized with the mediaeval idea of a saint—an abject, whiney-looking specimen, with a straw hat instead of a halo. Thank heavens, they were all martyred.’”

I’m reminded of a quote by Abraham Lincoln:
“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.”

This book rocks

Bro it me* 😭

*but like, the kinda me I’ve always wanted to be**

**except for the problematic stuff 😭

*GOTTA* start with the SLot chapter, but gonna go back and read the thing from the beginning after

“This may seem like contradictory counsel: to both accept the inevitability of change and attempt to remain constant. But to live well, sometimes you will need to hold two seemingly opposing truths, one in each hand, and carry them both comfortably.”

“I don’t think I could stand it if I had to go to war. I really couldn’t. It wouldn’t be too bad if they’d just take you out and shoot you or something…”

Dude is funny af lol

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move…Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

“I wasn’t watching the game too much. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places and I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”

“A war comes always to someone else…And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn’t true either.”

“Then there’s your last dream gone.”
“Good riddance.”

“I remembered my grandfather, my sister, and various aunts and cousins, in their coffins and gone forever in the tombyards where the butterflies settled like flowers on the
graves and where the flowers blew away like butterflies over the stones.”

“It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”
“And memory.”
“Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.”