Cassandra > Recent Status Updates

10% through as of 10 Feb 2025 - Depressing. Felt too heavy to continue so I actually stopped then!

“Love is not the weakness. People get in its way. People are weak and perilous, not love.”

“Why didn’t you call me?’ you say in nearly a whisper.
‘When?’
‘When your mother died.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I guess you’d met Silas by then.’
‘I met him six months later. I was a wreck. But he understood.’
‘I wish you’d called me.”

Maturing is choosing Silas...

“Most of my writing comes out in the form of letters to Yash, in which I try to stay upbeat and anecdotal and not overwhelm him with my longing for him, and the journal I keep for the overspill of that emotion. I am so in love with him it is hard to take a full breath, I write in the journal. His absence feels like losing a lung.”

“If he knew how much I loved him it would terrify him.”

“We’re both flying Delta. We’ll meet at baggage claim. He received the keys to the apartment. He promises he won’t forget them.”

“Gastrell claims that nothing in Greek drama is random and that Greek drama wouldn’t have survived at all without this tragic irony that they invented. Yash insists that the power and poignancy come from the very randomness itself, the sense that any one of us, not just a good king with a built-in flaw, is capable of making a mistake, that we are all vulnerable to tragedy because we are human.”

“It’s fine. He wasn’t my type.’
‘I could have told you that last fall.’
‘I wish you had.”

“Claudette told me to give you a sign.’
‘This is a good sign. I love this sign.’
We get his clothes off, too, and we are still standing, looking at each other and grinning.
The feeling catches me off guard.
Oh.
Love.”

🥹

“So that wasn’t why Sam noticed me?’
‘No, it was a little before that. And I noticed you. First.”

“He looks at me. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve made all the wrong choices.”

Mmm chaotic

I was going to write a remark about how I'm not captivated by this book after a proper page in because I am no longer pretentious old me but...

"“The movie has made these buildings, these quads, these years of our lives seem unbearably naïve.”

Now I'm captivated

“Too many people had refused when she had wished that they would beg her to stay, and now, because of them, she had let him go so easily, unclenching all her fingers at once.”

“He would have to keep her, somehow, and that would mean solving her. That would mean making her his impossible problem.”

Helppp I am tired and exhausted of these twooo

“It’s not that,” she said quietly. “I just … I like us like this, I like us how we are. I don’t want them in it, around it. Near it, even.”

“Besides, if we fuck it up, you can just go back in time and fix it, can’t you?”

“Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.”

“Are you ready? his green eyes had asked, Because if I let you in, I will not let you go.

She exhaled, understanding.

“No,” she said. “No. Not yet.”

----------

Reading about these two requires simply too much emotional stamina...

Reading this requires a ton of stamina...

“Not bees?”
“Not bees,” he said, and handed her the blunt. “Bees are for you.”

“You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.”

"Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?”


“Regan,” Marc said again, “if this guy is … I mean, if he’s just something you need to get out of your system—”


“She wished he’d flinched, but he hadn’t. She hadn’t really expected him to. Do enough drugs and nothing could faze you; choose a woman who gambled on her shock value and eventually you went numb just to cope.”

“Aldo,” she said.
“Regan,” he replied.
“I—” Don’t hold hands with anyone ever again.

These two and their church scene was so weird and clunky and awkward and I'm all for it

“The first time she’d used his name, she’d been pretending at unfamiliarity. That time, though, he could hear the way it had previously crossed her mind.”

This book is so intimate that at times I feel so shy reading it...

Jude :(