Catherine > Recent Status Updates

"That's what I dislike most of all in people—cold irony. It's a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. [...] At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities."

the haters were wrong about this book. meditations on incarnation are good, actually.

“I wonder whether others who suddenly commit irrational and criminal acts feel this calm acceptance of an unknown part of themselves.”

“The next day everyone begin to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things.”

WHY DIDNT I WRITE MY DISSERTATION ABOUT THIS

I have literally only read the prologue and already this is my new favorite book of all time. I cannot exaggerate the extent to which I am THE audience for this book. I need to lie down

“So let me hymn Your name forever as I pay my vows day after day.” Ps 61:9

“Put my tears in Your flask. Are they not in Your counting?” Ps 56:9

“Let go, and know that I am God.” Ps 46:11

“O, let my heart hymn You.” Ps 30:13

this translator’s note is so good it makes me want to quit the profession entirely

“I do not want beauty, I want identity. Beauty would be an accretion, and now I shall have to dispense with it. The world does not have the intention of beauty, and that once would have shocked me: in the world no aesthetic plane exists, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness, and that once would have shocked me. The thing is much more than that. The God is greater than goodness with its beauty.”

“Bear with my telling you that God is not pretty. And that because He is neither a result nor a conclusion, and everything we find pretty is sometimes only because it is already concluded.”

“A roach is greater than I because its life is so given over to Him that it comes from the infinite and goes toward the infinite without noticing, it doesn’t miss a beat.”

the first ten pages of this are a better description of traumatic memory than any psychology textbook out there

A PLOT TWIST REVEALED VIA EPIGRAPH WITH NO ATTEMPT WHATSOEVER AT NARRATION ur fav could n e v e r

I was not distraught; I took them to the cemetery as one might take money to the bank. What am I saying? As one might take letters to the post office...

Reader, do not be irritated by this confession. I am well aware that in order to titillate your fancy, I ought to sink into tremendous despair, shed a few tears, and forgo lunch. It would be novelesque, but it would not be biographical. The pure reality is that I lunched, as I had on other days...

“You‘re not worth the sacrifices I make” is the most vicious break-up line in the history of culture

This book’s greatest flaw is you, reader. You are in a hurry to grow old, and the book moves slowly; you love direct, robust narration and a smooth and regular style, and this book and my style are like drunkards, they veer right and left, stop and go, grumble, bellow, cackle, threaten the skies, slip, and fall…

there is a whole chapter of this book that’s just punctuation. your fav could never

“Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. No; he is a thinking erratum, that’s what he is. Each season of life is an edition that corrects the last and that will be corrected in turn until the definitive edition, which the editor delivers to the worms, free of charge.”

“Our leisure rarely feels restorative, or self guided, or even fun. ... I am unclear whether I spend my Saturday mornings on long runs because I like it, or because it’s a ‘productive’ way to discipline my body. do I read fiction because I love to read fiction, or to say that I have read fiction? … It’s hard to recover from days spent laboring when your ‘time off’ feels like work.”

“We are performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve our job. ... At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.”

“‘everything bad is good, everything good is bad’ — a mantra I threw around with my friends during grad school to describe the perverse alchemy of overwork, in which drudgery feels ‘great,’ and actually pleasurable activities become indelibly lined with guilt.”

“The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon – and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the ‘honor‘ of performing it.”

“What you’re doing when practicing your times tables or taking a standardized test or writing an essay isn’t learning, but preparing yourself to work.”