Meghan > Recent Status Updates

'Hateful Things […] A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.'

'But riches are unable to quench insatiable greed; power does not make a man master of himself if he is imprisoned by the indissoluble chains of wicked lusts; and when high office is bestowed on unworthy men, so far from making them worthy, it only betrays them and reveals their unworthiness.'

'This is hardly the first time wisdom has been threatened with danger by the forces of evil.'

'A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it.'

"Often the evidence for a 'race of invaders' consists of cultural changes, which, in prehistoric societies, primarily means new kinds of pots. I have a prejudice against this sort of argument. I get idiotic mental images of invading armies brandishing pots, which they thrust threateningly into the trembling hands of the conquered indigenes."

'His character remained unaltered, but his style had become less precious, as happens to certain people who shed their mannerisms when, ceasing to compose symbolist poetry, they take to writing serial novels.'

'(stupefying habit, which during the whole course of our lives conceals from us almost the whole universe, and in dead of night, without changing the label, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne that procures no delights)'

'People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.'

'…in fact a bird is able to put one hemisphere of its brain to sleep while the other side works. This is especially important to migrating and oceanic birds who must sleep on the wing. That is an evolutionary advancement that our teenage daughters could also use.'

'[…] it must be conceded that in the early years of his reign Marcus enjoyed almost unparalleled popularity, as attested by a wealth of epigraphic evidence. The worst that his detractors found to say about him was that he sometimes took books from city libraries for his own use.' Scandalous!

'“I think onions, in any form, the unpardonable sin,” said Nigel.'

'Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will emerge.'

'It is difficult, he reasoned, to refuse an invitation from someone in whose bathrobe one is.'

'It is difficult, he reasoned, to refuse an invitation from someone in his bathrobe one is.'

'It is difficult, he reasoned, to refuse an invitation from someone in whose bathrobe one is.'

'I had promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her, I would settle down to work. But in the morning, just as if, taking advantage of our being asleep, the house had miraculously flown, I awoke in a different weather beneath another clime. We do not begin to work as soon as we disembarking strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves. And each day was for me a different country.'

'We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of the day. Even more than diplomats, politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes are due less to an excess of ambition than to a deficiency of memory.'

Marius Pontmercy: possibly the only person who has difficulty deciding between Team Valjean and Team Thénardier.

"That old cruiser's going to see something," said Joe. He called her old that the paint was hardly dry on her, not because he did not know she was new but because he was a Norfolk boy who would talk of "that old cake" even if it was still warm from the oven.

Not that I should expect better from the publisher who accepted Alisa Valdes's memoir where she celebrates a frankly abusive relationship as the corrective that feminists need in the first place, but it's still incredibly gross to see ads talking up the book and the relationship when the abuse has since escalated to the point that even the delusional Valdes has seen the light to the extent of leaving this man. Uncool

'It was a sign of my mental state that I was thinking of myself as "one", which meant that my English was becoming stiff and formal.'