Emma > Recent Status Updates

(about british writer Kinglake): "His ostensible purpose in the book is to prove that travel in the Orient is important to 'moulding of your character - that is, your very identity,' but in fact this turns out to be little more than solidifying 'your' anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general all-purpose race prejudice." wow, he reads these victorians to filth!!

Very readable, relatable, immersive. Appreciate rooney's own take on stream-of-consciousness narration and the distinct voice of each brother

so enlightening (and encouraging) to read about the methods of effective activism put forth by chomsky. weighing the risk of potential backlash against the very real possibility of change on the ground.

this man really hates his wife huh.

The inmate of an asylum; someone who could not possibly look back at his life with any kind of pleasure. Yet there was, in the thin light of his winter eyes, a certain slaty grandeur, as if failure had raised him up, had scoured him in a way one might almost envy.

The rest was glass and concrete. Angular dummies in winter modes. Doors opening into scented air. Some excitement of money.

very juicy first chapter. quiet suspense. the feeling of something terrible about to happen.

they're in love!!!

All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks.

But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike.

Everything now was transferred to the surface of her body, which began to avenge itself, and feed unhealthily.

completely forgot about victor's post-partum psychosis / depression - what an icon

oh me? re-reading mary shelley's frankenstein because of guillermo del toro's cinematic masterpiece in the year of our lord 2025? i am so normal about this film, i swear.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye.

I pretend to wake up, and turn to him, but not opening my legs. I want him to open them for me. He does, and I be soft and wet where his fingers are strong and hard. I be softer than I ever been before. All my strength in his hand.

never knew forster could be this funny

Doch während es ihrem Bruder gelungen war, seine Erinnerungen unschädlich zu machen, so hatte sie die ihren nur noch mehr entfacht.

eating as transformative experience of resonance: "Die Welt wird nicht einfach...angeeignet im Sinne eines einfachen Einverleibens, sondern sie wird im Prozess auch transformiert, und in diesem Vorgang der Weltverwandlung reproduziert und verwandelt sich auch das Subjekt"

Sag ihm, entgegnete der Oberst lächelnd, daß man nicht stirbt, wenn man muß, sondern wenn man kann.

Oberst Gerineldo Marquez war der erste, der die Leere des Krieges wahrnahm.

Auf dem Weg zum Friedhof beobachtete Arcadio in dem beharrlichen Nieselregen, daß am Horizont ein strahlender Mittwoch aufging. Die Sehnsucht schwand mit dem Nebel und gab statt dessen einer gewaltigen Neugier Raum.

Er war in der Tat im Tod gewesen, war jedoch zurückgekehrt, weil er die Einsamkeit nicht ertragen konnte. #mood

These contemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind...Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.

[William Morris] regarded the creation of a new society as more important than art-making, his own included..., but he also thought the choice between art and revolution was a false one, because art grew from 'thriving and unanxious life' and so required a great upheaval in the social order if it wasn't to become simply an outgrowth of capitalism, a pretty, pointless excrescence.

The white northern night was ending. Everything was clearly visible, the mountain, the thicket and the ravine, but as if they did not quite believe in themselves and existed only in a fairy tale.

Three years of changes, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins - all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, waste space. The first real event since the long interruption was this vertiginous home-coming by train, in the knowledge that his home was still safe, still existing somewhere, with every smallest stone in it dear to him.

I was exhausted by the perpetual, agonised now of the news. I didn't just want to journey backwards through the centuries. I wanted to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.