Emma > Recent Status Updates

I am finding this very readable, although moving quite fast between plot points. I would like to linger more with each new setting, each new (or old) dynamic between characters, but maybe this is just the fault of the very first chapters.

I am...intrigued.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

He eases himself down to die. He thinks, others can do it and so can I.

He has lived by the laws he has made and must be content to die by them. But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in the world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

goethe ist schon irgendwie arg unsymphatisch

Henry glances back over his shoulder. No one has approached them. They are alone, as in a wasteland. Henry says, "Her breasts are slack and she has loose skin on her belly. When I felt it, it struck me to the heart. I had no appetite for the rest. I do not believe she is a maid."

my guy, have you looked in the mirror as of late?

In short, the construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic wool-gathering.

Never underestimate Walter, his violence and cunning. The first blow came from nowhere and stunned him. There was blood in his eyes and after that Walter could do what he liked. He did it with his feet and he did it with his fists, till he, Thomas, was a bleeding jelly on the cobblestones, and his father stood over him and roared, 'So now get up!'

Weil ich bin jetzt auch nicht mehr dieser fanatische People Pleaser, der ich noch vor Kurzem war. Ich hab mich selbst aus meinem Blumentopf gerissen und begonnen, wild zu wuchern. Und deswegen zerstör ich die Stimmung jetzt, und es tut mir überhaupt nicht leid.

she felt in her heart a sort of wild affection for them, wanted to go to the, to stand next to them and pull them tightly to her side; and yet she also knew that to intervene in this way would disrupt something sacred that - at twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old - they were learning about themselves and the world. And this, too, was how she thought of God.

spent the better part of yesterday (sunday) reading this. Enjoying it immensely, very fast-paced, immersive. A particular favourite is the 1950s-60s timeline that scratches my need-for-historical-fiction itch

'But think, my lord. If you call a traitor everyone who has voiced a dislike of the king or his proceedings, who does that leave alive?'

'Me,' he says. Henry and Cromwell. Cromwell and Henry.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

He believes the king wants to scramble onto a fast horse: away he spurs, over that same mountaintop, where out of sight a new day dawns, where the past has ceased to repeat itself, caught up in a loop, a stitch, a noose....He leaves his queens, before they can leave him.

..what was clearly at stake, Graves argued, was the need for 'much better American understanding of the forces which are contending with the American idea for acceptance by the Near East. The principal of these are, of course, communism and Islam." Out of such a concern, and as a contemporary adjunct to the more backward-looking Am. Oriental Society, was born the entire vast apparatus for research on the Middle East.

The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime.

It's as if the lights have fused. I'm here in the black truth.

Of course I looked sad. But I didn't really feel sad. Or it wasn't a sadness that hurt, not an all-through one. I rather enjoyed it. Beastly, but I did. I sang on the way home. The romance, the mystery of it. Living.

I had a feeling I've had once or twice before, of the most peculiar closeness to him - not love or attraction or sympathy in any way. But linked destiny. Like being shipwrecked on an island - a raft - together. In every way not wanting to be together. But together.

Mit einem kombinierten israelisch-amerikanischen Großangriff auf den letzten großen Gegner der Dominanz Amerikas in der Region, den Iran, im Sommer letzten Jahres (!!) führt Trump vor, dass die USA über allen Gewaltdingen im Nahen Osten stehen und entschlossen sind, sich die Region von dieser Warte aus komplett neu anzueignen...

I don't want much.
'I know you don't. Only the things that I have to give anyway. The way I look and speak and move. But I'm other things. I have other things to give. And I can't give them to you, because I don't love you.'

Even if I'd led a normal life, like the women before, I would still have found myself at the dawn of my last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

'Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that's not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it's any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I'll never be able to use it.'

His dreams are oppressive: he finds himself at a landing stage, the opposite bank out of view. The river widening, nothing but the grey still water stretching away, polished pewter reflecting a silver sky: no bank in view because there is no bank, because the water has become eternity, because his flesh is dissolved in it; because his stories merge, all memories flatten to one.

You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day?...is this my essence, twisting into a paper's flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself- slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon?

Isabel did not startle. She knew Eva was there, knew she had approached. She would never not know. She would never leave a room again and not leave half of her behind.

Arousal, when it came, was an inconvenience - a wrench in the routine and a distraction. It was a heavy blanket weighing her down in the night, it was the drag of honey into lungs.

That night, she woke up with the dredges of a dream still hot in her mouth: a pooling heat in her belly, the drag of a hand, the puff of breath on her neck. She thought someone had been in her room, but there was no one. There was only she.