Rabeea > Recent Status Updates

So confused! What is this completely new layout?

I just logged onto Goodreads after a break of 4 months and I'm utterly baffled right now. It has changed so much!

“Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface."

“Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac. He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those who slept; those who didn’t. The great line in Transparent Things, one of the saddest novels in English: ‘Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible.”

“He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don’t do that. Except when we’re pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces. He grinned. No he didn’t. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you’d better chop his head off before he chops off yours.

“Everything is winding down, me, this, mother earth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. I hope there are parallel universes. I hope alternatives exist. Who stitched us up with all these design flaws? Entropy, time’s arrow – ravenous disorder.”

“Everything is winding down, me, this, mother earth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. I hope there are parallel universes. I hope alternatives exist. Who stitched us up with all these design flaws? Entropy, time’s arrow – ravenous disorder.”

Was that how the final picnic had come about - with each of them knowing that in a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another, or, if they met, saying, "We've got to have lunch sometime!" but never doing it?

“It’s activism that’s poison,” Rob says. “The police are out there beating the shit out of ­people, breaking ribs and hip joints like they did to Jazz at RNC—­the Republican National Convention—­and nobody minds if she walks in their march with a fucking cane, but they don’t want her walking with a cigarette. And that’s where I say somebody’s consciousness is fucked-­up.”

“There is tacit agreement among Norm’s followers that they make the world a better place by living in it. They don’t change it. They redeem it, through the searching way they live their lives. The cult is populated by realist aesthetes.Expecting nothing more from life than self-­actualization, accepting nothing less. Willing to settle for others’ self-­actualization if their own turns balky.”