Netta > Recent Status Updates

Mo-Maw swept the curtain aside and leant on the window frame like a woman looking for company. She raised her tea mug in one hand and tapped the glass with her pearlescent pink nails. It was a colour she had chosen to make her fingers appear fresher, because if her hands looked younger, then so might her face, so might her entire self.

Suddenly, the world was divided between those who wanted to believe and those who simply visited the loch to laugh at those who wanted to believe. Because there were those who believed, and were happy simply believ-ing, and there were those who didn't believe, because they couldn't, and weren't going to allow anyone else to.

I mean me and Tomas, it was not a decision so much as something that simply happened. I fell silent. People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

Sometimes I wake up with a loneliness so heavy it feels like motion sickness. Sometimes I wish that instead of a quiet life I would rather somebody screaming at me. I want somebody to scream at me so badly.

I swear to God Dionne is like a shark, she will never evolve.
Like a shark, she will never have to.

He doesn't stop me, which tells me yes, and I climb on top of him,which also tells me yes,and I spread his legs and push them back,which makes him grab his cock, which tells me yes. I spit in my hand and wet his hole and he moans,which tells me yes. But when I brush my cock against it he says no.
"Your dick saying yes", I say.
"And if I was a girl my mouth would be saying rape", he says, and it shuts me totally down.

"Call him Havelock. Locky. Lock and key. Cock—"
"Shut up, Brown. Use the name God give me."
"God give names like Enoch and Methuselah. Not Have—"

His book: The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace surprises me because Havelock looks and sounds like he has a favourite Brontë sister.

There is this thing about Jamdown, which I never notice in foreign, that by evening even the city starts to smell and sound like country. Crickets and dewy grass and car tires rolling over what sounds more like mud than road, and mosquitoes that think they sing like birds, and won't leave you alone. And just this, I don't know, sadness. I love it.

And she asks if he sensed there was someone waiting for him, and he says he often felt he wasn't alone, that someone was thinking of him, and that was one reason he consented to the advertisement, but he says it to make her happy, it's a temptingly simple view of life, if you want something badly enough it just happens, oh, if only the world did work that way [...].

And she asks if he sensed there was someone waiting for him, and he says he often felt he wasn't alone, that someone was thinking of him, and that was one reason he consented to the advertisement, but he says it to make her happy, it's a temptingly simple view of life, if you want something badly enough it just happens, oh, if only the world did work that way […].

And he sees himself stepping into the no-man's-land, he stands there completely unprotected on that precious, coveted patch of earth fought over by half the world, and God is cruel, but people are crueler, and he hunches down and begins zigzagging through the rain of bullets to the barbed-wire entanglement, between the lifeless bodies of his predecessors.

…just tell me how you want me, she says, standing in front of the romanticized battlefield, and he issues hesitant instructions, but whatever he says, she does meekly, and he understands why she loves photography, why he used to love it too, it creates the illusion of complete control, a few square inches of the world in which no disappointment, fear, or sorrow exists.

And they look at each other across the sun-striped table, and the strange thing is, now that they've both admitted they're unhappy it no longer matters, and he thinks he understands what it is to be married, to be linked inseparably to another human being until your death, it's impossible to have enough of her, to leave her, she's part of him, like his legs or his eyes, […].

…they still haven't found his body, she says, and he hears the hope in her voice, vain hope, she knows that, […] and he tells her about his memory loss and how four years after the war, when no one thought it might still be possible, his wife and children found him, and it surprises him how easily his life can be reshaped into an inspiring story, correct in every factual detail, yet a lie from beginning to end.

No, she says, not like that, I wont have it, and she says it softly and can't look Dr. De Moor in the eye, but she is adamant, and Noon is so proud of her, and she is his wife, his wife, and for the first time he understands what it is to belong to someone, why people get married, a woman standing up for you as if for herself, and he'll never face anything alone again, as long as she's with him he knows he'll be safe

And she doesn't say it, but […] this simple man who stands before her in his scruffy asylum uniform, could never live up to the standards she's set for her Kamiel, who's been missing since December 1917, she's had almost five years to perfect him,he is her masterpiece, her sanctuary, and she's outraged that Dr. De Moors advertisement persuaded her that her Kamiel could ever assume the shape of a madman with amnesia

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It's nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they'd get to the point a little faster.

Carmen's ex-boyfriend Tom was a social worker and weekend DJ who eventually left her for reasons I never quite managed to grasp. Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world's living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.

The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.

What you have to understand is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.

Как наука история не нужна, как мифотворчество - постоянно востребована. Это неудивительно. Наука разрушает иллюзии, без которых люди не могут жить.

A key premise of the myth is that she [Helen of Troy] is attractive in some absolute and total way that defies description […]. As Blondell neatly puts it, 'A beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.'

Readers of contemporary fiction are likely to expect a
'good' translation to read smoothly and fluently in English, masking its status as a translation, whereas readers of canonical ancient literature in translation are less likely to have these expectations, no matter how smooth or fluent the original may be.

Sappho appealed to later poets because she created a new way of speaking about distance, alienation and desire. If her work is universal, it is not because she invites us in - even if 'we' belong to particular marginalised groups, as women, lesbians or oppressed minorities - but because she shows us what it means to be excluded and alone.