Emma > Recent Status Updates

I simply don't remember why I had such a grudge against this book as a teenager, beyond being an insufferable vampire purist. (Why?)

Anyway, this is the dark academia the girlies are longing for.

A new Pamela Belle? After 20 years??? Wintercombe and Alethea are two all-time desert island faves so I am DELIGHTED

sooooooooo this is a maglor-awakes-in-aman fic, right? we're all on the same page here?

https://www.altaonline.com/books/fict...

The creeping noises of this old town never ceased; for as long as there were wars and she remained the terminus of the longest railway in the world, her back to the continent and her face to the Old Country, she would lie here in all weathers unchangeably the same, and her bells would ring in the darkness.

Actually there was little difference; winter had always made it look bare, stripped as ruthlessly as the rest of Halifax. There was no town anywhere that changed in appearance so quickly when the foliage went.

'I thought to myself: Dear Jesus, please let me one day hang out with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and turn all my grief into hits.'

Halifax is home to me, and page 1, on the Explosion - "Halifax afterward looked as if God had raised a giant burning boot and stamped." Shivers.

…His speech was permeated with a will-o'-the-wisp, a tingling richness that evaded definition. You will have to imagine it. There shall be no vain attempt to set it down. Besides, you always skip dialect.

It seems my brain needs something soothing, as I'm enjoying nothing so much as Dean Street Press's middlebrow reprints at the moment.

"Law and order they're getting," he said, "and they want justice already."

The riff on The Man in the Black Suit, my favourite King short story, was unexpected but delightful.

For all his glib pedantry Marks never loses sight of the work he's doing. "Ten minutes later the air commodore taxied across the runway which led to my desk, and I found myself staring into eyes full of dead pilots."

‘Have you heard “Love, Love, Love”?’
‘Yes. I mean no. I’m not sure.’
‘The record about us?...’
She then put on the record, a calypso: ‘It was love love love and love alone that caused King Edward to leave his throne’ – ‘that lady from Baltimore’ etc.
‘I’m going to call our lawyers Monday about it. I think it’s libellous.’
We played it twice, the Duke jigging vaguely to it.

‘I had forgotten the number one truth... which should be axiomatic for anyone having to interview or get tangled up with royal persons: it is courtiers who make royalty frightened and frightening; taken neat like whiskey they are perfectly all right. This does not mean that they are as others, but you can get on to plain terms with the species, like an ornithologist making friends with some rare wild duck.’

Q: ‘Didn’t Queen Alexandra and her daughters make fun of P.M.’s clothes, thinking her less elegant than themselves?’ A: ‘Well they weren’t elegant at all, just one mass of sequins, they looked like Liberace.’

Re Sandringham: ‘To sum up: this is a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue, and everywhere were their faces, painted, drawn or photographed... Almost monastic in its seclusion, with the added safety that where a monastery would have religious paintings they lived with nothing higher than paintings of themselves.’

‘I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.’

My brain did not have the capacity for this at the beginning of lockdown when I picked up my copy. So hopefully now I can savour it!

A reread before The Mirror and the Light.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t remember me. You never even saw me coming.

They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in.

He turns to the painting. ‘I fear Mark was right.’
‘Who is Mark?’
‘A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer.’
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

At New Year he had given Anne a present of silver forks with
handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with,
not to stick in people.

There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

[Grace] backed off, into shadow; the feathers were the colours of ash and cinders as she moved towards the stairs, and he said, ‘Grace, are you going to bed in your wings?’

‘Till I say my prayers,’ she said, darting a look over her shoulder. He followed her, afraid for her, afraid of fire and some other danger, but he did not know what. She walked up the staircase, her plumes rustling, her feathers fading to black.