christine > Recent Status Updates

“It is sufficiently notorious and well known how for some time past, a woman calling herself Joan the Maid abandoned women's clothes and dressed and armed herself like a man, a thing against divine law and abominable to God, and condemned and forbidden by every law.”

“I bowed my head and thought of all the times I'd tried to be one thing or another, my body tugged between places, people, ideas […] I'd heard something about there being a right wing and a left wing, and one bird. The two sides I'd been pulled between were just two of infinite points on a circle. I had to stop trying to choose.”

“I tried to stop thinking about that rose-brimmed path, like rose-headed lettuce, rose trees, rose planets, roses blooming out of cages and eye sockets, palms, belly buttons, mouths, and pubes, like saints' bodies miraculously not rot-ting, smelling of roses, people said.

Was it true, or did they just say it?”

I smiled again, for the things I couldn't do that she could, and I knew it had nothing to do with who our mothers were but with our times, with the mother of culture that it took waves and waves of people to diminish. And the ones who'd come before me, they'd made the world a little more tender for me, beating against it with all their fists and firsts.

Hitchcock made me feel like straightness had claimed me. If I were to become gay now, that meant that whatever had gone on between me and Hitchcock, or me and my dad, had been destructive and had made me an angry lesbian. It would be like a relapse into something that was a sign of a wound.

Jesus just had to die for us on the cross, but our mothers' personalities died for us in laundry rooms, kitchens, delivery rooms, backyards, stairwells, driveways, long after we kids had fallen asleep. Eventually Mom's eyes started to look different, more still than they used to be. Her face, and everything else about her, got harder and harder to recognize.

340 pages of banter 🫩

a little more quippy than i tend to prefer but so far i’m definitely enjoying this more than a house with good bones

"Do you approve this transaction, May?" the hum said.
She wanted the gumdrops.
Jem shook his head no.
"I approve" May said.
And then the gumdrops were in their mouths, even in Jem's, dissolving fragrantly on their tongues, scarcely a moment between the idea of the desire, the desire itself, the fulfillment of the desire.

“They didn't obey him because they loved the law. They obeyed because they were more afraid of retreating in front of their companions than of doing the job. They obeyed because they couldn't defy the ant-under-the-magnifying-glass fascination of watching helpless things go bang. They obeyed because obeying was simpler than not.”

absolutely riveted by this, i haven’t been able to put it down

“I’ve seen photos of the egg. It’s gold-and-green enamel with garlands of diamonds and rubies and while you’d think you’d open the house to find the kids inside it’s actually the other way around—the house is inside the kids, which must be, I suspect, how the mother had wanted it all along.”

“Anyway, I like it now,” I said. “I mean right now. Sitting here with you and just chewing the fat and horsing—“
“That isn't anything really!”
“It is so something really! Certainly it is! Why the hell isn't it? People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it.”

“Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”

“If somebody, some girl in an awful-looking hat, for instance, comes all the way to New York—from Seattle, Washington, for God's sake—and ends up getting up early in the morning to see the goddam first show at Radio City Music Hall, it makes me so depressed I can't stand it. I'd've bought the whole three of them a hundred drinks if only they hadn't told me that.” he just gets it

definitely getting a looot more out of this as an adult

There was nothing for her here, not anymore.
Let the tide wash her away. Let it wash her far, far away, out to sea with the fish and the whales and the creatures man had never glimpsed. Let it wash her away from developments and golf courses and money and lawyers.
Just let it wash her away.

“Once more she knew the humility of being born a woman, when the breaking down of strength and spirit was taken as natural and unquestioned.”

“She was alone in a grim and rather hateful world, with little prospect of changing it for the better.”

“Peace, Eleanor thought concretely; what I want in all this world is peace, a quiet spot to lie and think, a quiet spot up among the flowers where I can dream and tell myself sweet stories.”

“Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heart-breakingly mobile.”

"I am entirely selfish,” he said ruefully, “and always hoping that someone will tell me to behave, someone will make herself responsible for me and make me be grown-up." […] The only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting. "Why don't you grow up by yourself?" she asked him, and wondered how many people how many women—had already asked him that.

Eleanor looked at her feet again. "It's wicked," she said inadequately. "I mean—on my feet. It makes me feel like I look like a fool."

"You've got foolishness and wickedness somehow mixed up."

“Why raise children on the promise of magic? Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied—for revelation, for transformation—and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world?”

“She looked at him, stood on unsteady legs, turned the volume up. "It’s going to kill you," he warned her. "It’s already got your liver." She turned the music up louder. It did get her in the end. He had to buy a new black suit. But he couldn't blame her for not being able to stop. Things you love, things you need, they don't stop taking.”