Elise > Recent Status Updates

Those extra workers Elizabeth had needed so badly were signed over to her husband as easy as kiss my hand. Though happy to receive them, it would only be human for Elizabeth to have felt a little sour about it all.

DAMN STRAIGHT & AMEN, SISTER.

“Although it was easier for Elizabeth to socialise with her women friends now that John was away and not arguing with their husbands…”

🤣
Classic.

Almost a decade later King would write that there was no society where the clashing of duty and interest between the governor and the governed was more violent than in New South Wales, and more particularly so if the governor did his duty.

lol so not much has changed then 2.5 centuries later!

“The difficulty here is, as ever, the practical side of things. A newspaper, a kind of radio. Freedom, the Germans secretly paying him a subsidy.”

Some of the most notorious figures of the occupation were the Frenchmen who led political groups or published newspapers in Paris in return for the high life of the occupied capital and, in many cases, direct subsidies from the German Embassy.

The most hated men in France in 1942: Philippe Henriot and Pierre Laval. The first as the tiger, the second as the hyena: around Henriot you can smell fresh blood, and around Laval the stench of rotting flesh.

If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show but the prosperity that contrasts with it.

“How did she get so powerful?” she asked, trying to be kind. “She had two good parents.”
He didn’t answer this.

… “flavor”?!?!
WHY AMERICAN SPELLING IN AUSTRALIAN-PUBLISHED BOOKS?!

Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: […] It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation.
“I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.”

“Peter was supposed to come into the world this way,” she said. “He is a gift from God, and God gives His gifts in whatever way He chooses.”

The skill I was learning was a crucial one: the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Agnes looks at him and he looks back at her. She wants, more than anything, to stretch this moment, to expand the time before he knows, to shield him from what has happened for as long as she can. Then she gives a swift, single, downward nod.