Madelyne > Recent Status Updates

This is likely the last one I will read.

And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.

"Barriers?"
"Yes. You have a lot of them. They stop you from seeing the truth."
"About what?"
"About yourself. And you really need to start trying. To see the truth. Because this matters."

"Librarians have know. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines."

"She had forgotten how often during their relationship Dan's humour hinged on other people, specifically Nora. When they'd been together, she had tried not to dwell on this aspect of his personality."

All of Chapter 16

"I had denied myself Chopin because everything that belonged to my past had to be abandoned. And when I heard it again, I realized that no, not everything had to be left behind. All I to do was retrieve the things I loved and get rid of the things that were destroying me. I didn't have to taint everything. That's the mistake I made. I was destroying what I loved in order to be free of what I hated."

...a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Love the use of altering timeline narrative here. It is making it difficult to put the book down.

Started for #24in48, finished my time before I could finish the book. Still going to finish this even though it hasn't aged well in my opinion. I'm stubborn I guess....

Started for #24in48, finished my time before I could finish the book. Still going to finish this because it a riot!

"We want splendid books, books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep us there; books that prove to us that love is at work in the world next to evil, right up against it, at times indistinctly, and that it always will be, just the way that suffering will always ravage hearts. We want good novels."

Chapter 36, but especially pages 278-280... WOW!

Sometimes I think I'm late to the game...

(cont.) "It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who will say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature informs, instructs, It prepares you for life."

"Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? ...(cont.)"

"Don't you think that in France, at every meal, in every restaurant, there is at least one table where people are talking about literature?"

I liked to think in the US this is my family 😁.

He showed them discreetly to a little corner in the bookstore that was still valid: two shelves where, at his own risk, he had brought together the best of his selection: he called it the "honey shelf." Bliss guaranteed, provided they were trusting enough to buy any book on that shelf.

Nothing else mattered but that desire. Anne-Marie parked her car wherever she could--anywhere at all, off to the side, on the shoulder, beneath a tree, at the edge of a cornfield. She'd made it a habit. The moment she switched off the engine, all she had to do was jot down the words, words that I ask for nothing more."

"She had discovered this through experience: the moment she climbed in behind the wheel, provided she was alone, and did not have any children to pick up at the other end of the ride, she broke off with life, with its obligations, its ties. Ideas came to her. She had an urgent desire to write."

I don't want this collection to end.

I was already smitten with Curtis' writing, but this book further cements it! I don't want it to be over and from what I have read online this is by far the best of the Austen Project series... so let's let Curtis write them all instead *wink*.