Alexandra > Recent Status Updates

"To you she was [beautiful] because you built her. I don't think you ever saw her- just your own creation."
"I'd like to know what kind of blood is in my boys. When they grow up- wont I be looking for something in them?"
"...not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them... I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted"

When a child first catches adults out...that adults do not have divine intelligence...his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety is gone... It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

Reflections, echoes, reverberating back and back to infinity: I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me... I catch sight of it just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.

"They were in love with liberty. It seemed to them that the whole world was tailor-made for them. They lived at the exact tempo of their thirst, and their exuberance was irrepressible; their enthusiasm knew no bounds"

"Impatience, thought Jérôme and Sylvie, is a twentieth-century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed."

Joan continued to be alert, vigorous, and confident... All their lives those men had seen womenfolks hitched up with a cow and dragging the plough in the fields while the men did the driving... evidences that women have far more endurance and patience and fortitude than men. It had taught them nothing, they did not reflect that a great soul, with a great purpose, can make a weak body strong and keep it so...

"Hans lies on the beach, reads, dozes, makes desultory conversation, goes into the water, tries to master his desires and doesn't know how, tries to find shade, reads, dozes... doesn't want to feel, but feels anyway, that desire hurts, only he can't track track the pain to it's source..."

"Contrived a mystique to draw people in, then claimed to resent their intrusions. One of many strategies for turning an essentially passive life into boilerplate mythology."
-on Paul Bowles lol. Scathing.

"with a sort of terror, she could feel the instant of her own defeat coming closer; she endured Chéri like a torture. . . sank into the abyss from which love resurfaces pale, taciturn, and full of nostalgia for death."

You can't get out of childhood, it clings to you like a bad smell.

"why duty before happiness? The question of happiness is banal, but the question that follows is not, the question of meaning."

05/11/45
it does not matter what happened, but what you think of it.

06/06/41
"I am constantly disappointed because I'm not in love! One could kill oneself for that . . . Arthur is falling in love with me, and get serious. I can't tell him what I feel - because I feel nothing - for or against. How I would like to tell him that I'm in love with - someone!!!!!!!"

02/12/41
When I start buying clothes with generous hems; when I stop eating something I like when I've eaten all I should; when I don't fall in love with someone because I don't think their quite good enough; when I start going to bed at an hour when I can do my best work the next day; when I think of you without desire, without hope and without longing - that I shall know I am getting old. That I am old.

"I'm not sure where I wanted to go. I only know it was... away"
Picking up this book for an unconventional October pick was a great choice. As Marjorie begins describing her extreme loneliness and moving into a dilapidated medieval castle.

"The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies."

Harry filled his emptiness with flying, and with friends, who were for a time a solace. And with booze and drugs. And with novelties and pretty girls and dangerous women. And with the worship of art, and the courtship of madness, and pagan rites. All led, by degrees, to emptiness. The emptiness was not sharp, like sudden hunger, or painful like the loss of love. It was a want unsatisfied, evidently unsatisfiable.

"if there was one thing Harry learned to love more than the sacred, it was the sacred in ruins."

"I had always fantasized about delicious deprivaties. Like a heroine in a gothic novel, I wanted to be seized by terrible and voluptuous emotions. I wanted to know why it was forbidden."

A Mans Soul Under Socialism;
Socialism would relieve us from the sordid necessity of living for others. With the abolition of private property, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.

The Decay of Lying;
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Art should never express anything but itself through the telling for beautiful, untrue things.