Nat > Recent Status Updates

“When I was a little girl, my father bought me a priceless handcrafted dollhouse. It was a magical miniature world, with beautiful tiny porcelain dolls, furniture, even paintings and chandeliers and rugs all made to scale. But the house was enclosed in a glass case and I was never allowed to touch the family inside…”

“…readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one… manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist… electronic manipulation… credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished… photographs will not seem as real as they once did.”

“It cannot be forgotten that the problem posed by exhaustion — a result of labor — is an inextricable part of any encounter with a sophisticated maze. In order to escape then, we have to remember we cannot ponder all paths but must decode only those necessary to get out. We must be quick and anything but exhaustive.”

“…on one hand I’m laughing at myself, mocking the irrational nature of my anxiety, what I continue in fact to perceive as a complete absurdity… while on the other hand, and at the same time mind you, finding myself absolutely terrified, if not of something in particular - there were no particulars as far as I could see - then of the reaction itself…”

you can tell my reading level by the way i spent all day trying to decipher EXACTLY whatever the fuck Zampanó is actually saying in chapter 5 and i still don’t get it. i just moved on. like i get he wants to talk about the literary themes or whatever the fuck of echoes in the navidson record but genuinely i understand why he’s been compared to tolkien because holy shit WHAT are you saying bro

“if this crush —slash— swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small…”

“Zampanò himself probably would’ve insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.”

“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.”

“For shame, Heathcliff! …It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.”
“No, God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall”

“You got something eating at you, Catharine. Something gnawing at your guts. Something so bitter it simmers in your eyes and grits your teeth together. I know your kind.”

“I was dumped down in a large room cluttered with toys and games and massive dark furniture, and pictures of hell on the walls. I sat in an old wooden rocker half coming apart, and on my lap I held a ghostly, small brother who called me mama. And on, and on we rocked… and below us, around us, above us, the enormous house of countless rooms was waiting to eat us up.”

“So don’t you dare talk to me of forgiving and forgetting, i don’t know how to forgive and forget. All i know how to do is hate — and you don’t know what it’s like to hate as i do.”

“Can the Dark Ages’ doctors be blamed for their methods? The bloodletting, the leaches, the holes in skulls? They were feeling their way blind, grasping at mysteries in a world without science, but the plague was upon them; they had to do something. When our turn came, it was no different. Despite all our technology and enlightenment… it was no different. We were just as blind and just as desperate.”

“It frustrates and fascinates me that we’ll never know for sure, that despite the best effort of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we’ll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.”

“What happened to the world was gradual… A smoldering dread that never really caught fire until there wasn’t much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.”

“Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.”

“It is not enough just to foresee a likely outcome for us to change or prevent that event. We must understand why it is coming, and we must work on the causes within ourselves for the things we do and the ways we react. Free will certainly exists, we just do not know how to use it.”

This is already 5 stars

“You are an animal of nature, fully endowed with hearing, sight, intellect, and dangerous defenses. You are not easy prey, so don’t act like you are.”

this is fucking DENSE jesus christ i feel im reading Tolkien

“‘The pair last year ate everything with their hands like a couple of savages…’

The pair last year were two kids from the Seam who’d never, not one day of their lives, had enough to eat… I hate Effie’s comment so much I make a point of eating the rest of my meal with my fingers. Then I wipe my hands on the tablecloth. This makes her purse her lips tightly together.”

“I know there must be more than they’re telling us, an actual account of what happened during the rebellion. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Whatever the truth is, I don’t see how it will help me get food on the table.”

“Starvation is never the cause of death officially. It’s always the flu, or exposure, or pneumonia. But that fools no one.”

“To the… credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Not even the ones holding betting slips, the ones who are usually beyond caring. Possibly because they know me… or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, who no one can help but loving... I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone”

“Taking kids from our districts… this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion.”

“The Treat of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.”

“His rage seems pointless to me, although I never say so… what good is yelling about the Capitol in the middle of the woods? It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make things fair. It doesn’t fill our stomachs. In fact, it scares off the nearby game.”

“Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest we will ever come to love.”