Ana > Recent Status Updates

'There is the Thames, as black as molasses. There are the lights of Albert Bridge, the trees of Battersea, the starless sky...'

'She did that, and I became aware of the dimness of the world that was about her—of the wards, the women in them, the matrons, even my own self. We might have been painted, all of us, from the same poor box of watery tints; and here was a single spot of colour, that seemed to have come upon the canvas by mistake.'

'As the action quickly reveals, to stay in this hermetic, self-pleased privacy, warring against affections, fighting desires, is to be effectively entombed.'

'I hadn't intended to ask her anything. I simply wanted to say her name, to have it fall from my lips. It sounded like music. It sounded beautiful. That was the magic of speaking something you love aloud.'

'Behind her dove gray eyes, a fiery inquisitiveness and desire to learn smoldered.'

'"Yes, it is curious," he continued. "We work without making anything, as though we were ordained, like the vestals of old, to keep some sacred fire burning."'

'And she remembered that it was just when her inner feelings were touched upon that Anna drooped her eyelids. "As if she half-shut her eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything," thought Dolly.'

Started and immediately lent it to my mom so it will have to be read later (my friend Marianna Suleymanova is the translator for She-Bear in this book!)

'As with any good story, there is both truth to what they say and there is fiction. And somewhere in between are the pages of my life.'

'Satie does what so few actually did: makes everyday life marvellous again.'

'Calling something "playful" as a way of not taking it seriously. The quality of lightness is too often underappreciated. The superficial playfulness of some practitioners of avant-garde art and music barely hides an intransigent, humourless, rhino-sized ego. Too many artists put a premium on difficulty, impenetrability, doom. No such transcendent value is afforded the light, the dizzy, the caressing.'

quincunx as the visual equivalent of a Satie composition

'[Boethius] possessed one of those long-ago minds which recognize no compartments in the love and pursuit of knowledge.'

Roger Shattuck: 'The twentieth century could not wait fifteen years for a round number; it was born, yelling, in 1885.'

'In the century since it first exploded, a lot of scandalous art has inevitably become defanged, installed as part of a safe new canon.'

'At the height of modernism, Satie is already a few steps on from everyone else. As critic and composer Constant Lambert puts it in 1934: "What distinguishes Satie from the other representatives of post-war Parisian mentality is the fact that while they were catching up with the times he had the no doubt gratifying sensation of seeing the times catch up with him."'

'He gave her a searching glance but she responded with that same defiant look of high spirits or despair, the meaning of which he could not fathom.'

'He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul and treasured it, guarding it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his heart.'

'They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.'

'For Anna and Tom, this lack of plan didn't represent defeat. It was far better for Tempelhof to remain exactly as it was: a reservoir of potential futures.'

'An obsession with real estate – imported by the New Yorkers, together with the bedbugs – dominated conversation.'

'Somehow, value systems that seemed completely incompatible on social feeds could find a middle ground around a table at a café.'

'In the evenings, at the Biergarten on Paul-Lincke-Ufer or in the Russian bistro under the Wasserturm, they would often end up discussing things they had seen online, which was to say somewhere in the world, which usually meant in California or New York.'

'Everyone sought a little beauty'

'The church became so quiet that the drops of wax could be heard falling from the candles.'

'They did not want to see magic done; they only wished to read about it in books.'

'"But my task is more important than fear, I think."'

'[he] watched her storm through snow and mud as if she were a blade through the world'

'Who do you wish to be? he asked the barely woven tapestry within himself.'

'she had slipped into a trance, plunged into some depthless ocean inside herself and drifted so far down that they might as well have been birds soaring over its distant surface'