Melanie > Recent Status Updates

Mme Mertueil in 1782 = OG gone girl, except it doesn't take a betrayal of a long marriage for her to elaborately ruin your life, just one rude remark at a dinner party

La Marquise de Merteuil = the OG Gone Girl back in 1782

Shoutout to the author of the ITAC chapter, an organization so secret there was no information on it for the researcher to work off of except for this one 2005 slide presentation that they kept on referring to

"...[Alexey] kept writing a memorandum about the new legal procedures, the first of an innumerable number of pointless memoranda he was destined to write about all branches of the administration."
-> I was going to say that Levin was the most relatable character but I am going to have to side with my fellow civil servant bro Alexey now

Andrew: What's your book about?
Laurie, to himself, probably: The Phaedrus is about when you honour and worship the person you love above all things and they fill your soul but you pretend you're just friends, which is, coincidentally, the way I love you. Also did I mention it's about GAY love, that was a thing in ancient Greece, what a weird coincidence--
Laurie, out loud: It's about rhetoric.

"'What were you reading before I interrupted you? Can I see?'
Laurie kept his hand on the book covering the title. In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart."

"Well, you know Robert only allows books with distressed spines in Cecil's library. One shiny new spine could throw the whole look off."

"Seriously," Kitay asked over lunch one day. "What are you learning?"
...
"That none of my beliefs about the world were true," Rin answered dreamily. "That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly's dream."
"Rin?"
"Yes?"
"Your elbow is in my porridge."

- Me, trying to explain Artsci to people

"In 2002, I knew that as a black woman drawn to science fiction and fantasy, I had almost no chance of getting my work published, noticed by reviewers, or accepted by a readership that seemed to want nothing more than endless variations on medieval Europe and American colonization."
What an accurate description of SF/F genres! And thank god we are no longer in 2003 and have big-name sci-fi queens like Jemisin.

"Percy gripped her hand and jolted her back to reality. She couldn't see him in the murky water, but suddenly she didn't want to die."
So sweet I wanted to cry.