Ilaria > Recent Status Updates

”The world requires so little of you, my mother tells me,” he reads. “These expectations are all in your head. Go, question, and find what you require of yourself. That is all you owe…. P.W.”

Per quanto in effetti starmene da sola o in compagnia non cambiasse granché per me, avevo l’impressione di dover in qualche modo privilegiare la seconda soluzione. In realtà con la mia ricerca di una gioiosa solitudine non davo fastidio a nessuno.

”[…] It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”

”[…] Knowledge is a wellspring, and I happily drink from it.”

Thorne had no time for people who were indiscriminately friendly.
Friendly people made him itch.

Then, as sweetwater cascaded down the stairs, smelling of flowers, of fruit, of delicately spiced vanilla, of a hotel slowly weeping from every seam, June led Hannelore away.

With her expression, June told her beloved staff: Thank you.
With her heart, June told the water: Be free.

We’re fumbling in the dark, but at least we’re in motion.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.

In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But then I open my mouth, it all collapses.

[…] fretted over global warming, the greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone layer. Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemise terror into art.

Perhaps one day, thinking about this very moment, about this dismal moment at which I am waiting, round-shouldered, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I might feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: ”It was on that day, at that moment that it all started.” And I might succeed - in the past, simply in the past - in accepting myself.

We were a heap of existents inconvenienced, embarrassed by ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason for being there, any of us, each existent, embarrassed, vaguely ill at ease, felt superfluous in relation to the others.

”People,” I say to him, “people… in any case you don’t seem to worry about them very much: you are always alone, always with your nose in a book.”

The past is a property-owner’s luxury.
Where should I keep mine? You can’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house in which to store it. I possess nothing but my body; a man on his own, with nothing but his body, can’t stop memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I have ever wanted was to be free.

I liked yesterday’s sky so much, a narrow sky, dark with rain, pressing against the window-panes like a ridiculous, touching face.

That's the magic of stories.
They entertain you. They challenge you. They comfort you. They transport you to somewhere only you can find, and somewhere you can stay for as long as you like.[...]
Like a tattoo on the heart, the story stays.

I think that's what makes your favorite book even more powerful, because not only did you read it and experience it in the only way you, but it lit the exact right parts of your soul to make you fall in love. You, in all the world, found home in that moment. [...]
Every reader deserves that.

There is just something enchanting about meeting your favorite book, like locking eyes with a stranger across the room and knowing - immediately - that they are the other half of your soul. Books are magical that way, how they can hold small bits of you, written by people who never knew you existed.

[…] maybe she liked van Gogh’s work for other reasons, too. Maybe she liked how he created things while never knowing his own value. Maybe she liked the thought of being imperfect, but being loved anyway. Maybe she felt some sort of kinship with a man who, for his entire adult life, warred with his own monsters in his head.

Who can believe the wicked? The wicked could believe in themselves. The world was hard and cruel. It bore down and broke you into a thousand pieces. When nobody believed in you, when even you couldn’t believe, you must arrange your broken pieces into a terrifying new shape. You could believe in the fantastic recreation of yourself.

”[…] People meet and create a new story between them, inventing love to believe in. Unless I have someone to care for, I’m barely a person, but you taught me to write. Now I know any tale can be rewritten. Tell me the sky is red and truth a lie. You can be the centre of the world and the meaning of the story. I will make every word you ever say true.”

Finding a favourite character was discovering a soul made of words that spoke to your own.

"For anyone who wants it all," she begins, "may you find something that is more than enough."
She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations.
She doesn't know. You never can.
She turns the page anyway.

Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world.
It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.

So what happens, she asks him.
What do you think, he asks back, though he knows her answer, now, as the sea stretches ahead of them and the geese call from over the trees. Coming home, maybe, or taking off from the nearby fields, two things that are one and the same, really, if he takes a second to think about it.

To Me,

If there are still seasons, you're lucky. If there's still a world, you're lucky.

[...]

Take in the air and the light, the smells and sounds, then the silence. Take in one last kiss if you can.

Take in this still life.

Another part of the legend was that he fell for a girl from town who helped him with his project. They traveled to New York together where, for one night, he was known as a great artist. He gave her a chair with roses in it, which she treasured.
And their love would endure until the day that rockets hailed from the sky in a silver storm, extinguishing the sun.

What remained was a local legend. About a Marine who came home from the wars which still rage on, to make a mosaic from ammunition. Then he went back to those wars and died there.