Shannon > Recent Status Updates

Rosamond Lehmann: A bit worship-y and overblown but this: “She lived under the shadow of the fear of madness; but her sanity was exquisite.”

"If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flick of its lights -- that is our desire."

“She could make very cutting remarks, but seldom, I think, with real bitterness: there was an underlying humor, an irony, that saved them from being truly malicious. This, indeed, was a sort of Bloomsbury ‘game’, in which Lytton Strachey, was perhaps the supreme champion, and which has not been sufficiently understood by people, who never knew them personally and have taken their sharp remarks too seriously.”

“And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.”

“But I do not think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness; but only reached now in middle age.”

“The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure & being read the superficial.”

"The place of reading is a kind of yonder world, a place that is neither here nor there but made up of the bits and pieces of experience in every sense, both real and fictional, two categories that become harder to separate the more you think about them."

Dinesen as haunting as ever: "Madame," he said, "I have been telling you a story. Stories have been told as long as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished sans water. You will see the characters of the true story clearly, as if luminous and on a higher plane, and at the same time they may not look quite human, and you may well be a little afraid of them."

Through Oxen of the Sun.

Through 1917-1921.

Through Monday or Tuesday

Today: Max Beerbohm (like) and G. K. Chesterton (love). Both delightful.

Today: Robert Louis Stevenson.

Today: Hazlitt. Love.

Yesterday: Steele & Samuel Johnson. Today: Edgeworth & Lamb.

Abandoned for the longest while, going to start making some progress with this.