Candi > Recent Status Updates

"Some people have within themselves a room so small that only a miniscule amount of the mysterious thing we call the spirit can find a home in them. Others have so much that what the world calls their characters explodes from the pressure... this thing refuses to be bounded, circumscribed or even judged... Without it there can be no life; with much of it no easy life."

"And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect"

"Florrie explained that she didn't want the same view from every window for the next sixty years when there were translucent frogs in this world and emerald seams and hotel bars like this one, which overlooked a street of fruit-sellers and car horns."

It was as though waves swung her up and then down, tossing her high-and then the darkness came from below and she felt terror and struggled...she saw that her life was different, might possibly be very different or might not be different at all, and both ideas were unspeakably awful to her, except for when the waves took her high and she felt such gladness, but it did not last long, and she was down again...

"He had never taken root. He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found books and art and love."

Her lips were flesh like his, cherries dyed them as cherries dyed his. And if so with her lips, then was it so with all of her. She was woman, all woman, just like any woman… Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a cherry could stain… all his soul was singing.

"She did not know the actual fire of love. Her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights... She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes."

I didn't know Mr. London wrote of romance :D

"If you were a painter, you could try to paint the way people who love each other can be untogether. You could try to paint that. It would be hard to paint, but you could try if you just used shape and color. You could have two shapes of two different colors almost touching but not quite, not anymore."

”Maybe each of us is a sort of village, with lots of different beings living together under one head of hair, around the river of your pulse, the crossroads of who you were and who you wish to be.”

”That’s the final frontier for all of us. To take off as many masks as you can pry off and just be you.”

”Dave is happy for his family, and he finds himself watching his mother’s pleasure in Maria’s pleasure; being happy at someone else’s happiness, he is beginning dimly to realize, is a form of love.”

Goodreads is totally wonky the past couple of days! Trying to figure it out has been a time sucker for me :D

"My year in Sonderho is a cello's sound inside me. I have only to glimpse the Chimneys of Esbjerg Power Station and it begins to play. It sounds like an old-fashioned piece, Bach or Part. The silent space, a lonely string instrument, and then that long-suffering bending to the wandering of the moon and the clock of the tides."

"The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived... like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?"

"...she asked herself what precisely was the nature of her interest in the foreign and unfamiliar. She knew she was often bored. Profoundly bored by the life around her: its familiar contours, its repetition, and the several people she knew very well, really too well...What can we know of other people? How much of the mystery of another person could one's own perspicacity divine?"

"Despising himself, he explores her night and day for confirmation of her awfulness. He is repelled by her and therefore drawn to her. He is punishing her for her power over him - and punishing himself for giving way to it. 'You're a hotel girl! People buy space in you, pay you and check out!' Yet at the same time he is consumed by her."

I've got Tom Hiddleston on the brain now :D

"I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night...But what of the mind which is born of the sun, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect?"

"It has always seemed strange to me, the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second."

”A child could make you love bone-deep, make you try to see further into another person than you ever thought possible, to understand who they were, what they needed, wanted. But with that astonishing depth of love came the realization that no one else was doing the same for you. And that could make you lonely.”

Some keen perceptions that seem so easily put into words!

"The Englishman is universally derided for being unromantic, bad at sex, uptight, mean, not washing his underpants enough - all that stuff. But it turns out that women actually quite like English men."

This book is making me laugh. So crude and funny!

"... a fierce sharp joy came to him stronger than any known sensation, something primitive like the lick of a flame and the first taste of blood, as though a message ran through his brain saying: 'I for this - and this for me.'"

"He wondered if he would always be like this, making use of men and women for his own purpose, but sufficient unto himself and definitely alone."

"At that moment, I could feel something opening up in me and I realized how hard it was to walk through the day when you had an obsession and you couldn't say a word about it."

Yeah, it seems the doctor ordered the right prescription to get me out of a reading rut!

... there are times... I've felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn't sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy's desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it..."

What is it about the pain of others? Easier to pretend that it doesn't exist. Easier to refuse to make the effort of empathy, to believe instead that the stranger's body on the sidewalk is simply a render ghost, an accumulation of coloured pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze.

"If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would." - David Wojnarowicz

"If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can't exist if the participants aren't willing to make themselves known, to be revealed... Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether..."

I'm finally getting a wave of notifications dating back at least a couple of days ago. I'll spend my Valentine's evening catching up with all of you! :D I hope everyone else finds the problem resolved soon, too.

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the words 'I have something to tell you', the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice in the morning echoing from the kitchen...

"... happiness doesn't mean much to me, I still think life is better. Happiness is a mean son of a bitch and needs to be put in his place. Him and me aren't on the same team, and I'm cutting him dead. I've never gone in for politics, because somebody always stands to gain by it, but happiness is an even crummier racket, and there ought to be laws to put it out of business."