Madeline > Recent Status Updates

This chapter was absolutely scrumptious.

“Fairies do not make a strong distinction between the animate and the inanimate . . . Perhaps this explains the extraordinary sympathy for madness which fairies exhibit. For example, it used to be well known that when fairies hid themselves from general sight, lunatics were often able to perceive them.”

Gorgeous

“It might not end! There might be no joke, no trapdoor, no banana peel. He had found himself in a highly congenial life that broke no laws.”

“Things might turn out all right. You might be talking to adolescents about couplets for decades to come. An excellent life. I mean that. Really.”

“Loving someone else’s art can give you a ride at least halfway to where you are trying to go. Even if you don’t know where that is yet.”

“Our very act of reading is not simply a private practice, but posits itself within the overarching temporality of cultural transmission, which takes centuries. By reading, we are not just living today: we are living in history, transcending our biographies and entering a much broader chronology.”

“Real hope comes not in tough-minded histrionics but precisely in, with, and under grief.”

“Paint the anguish of all the world. Let people see the pain. But create your own molds and your own forms of play for the pain. We must give a balance to the universe.”

“Asher Lev, you took from your yeshiva only the things that didn’t interfere with your art. You are a freak. They could not give you a case of aesthetic blindness. They would have had to kill you to do that.”

“Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way . . . Or a laugh.”

“Maybe to have [love] in your heart all your life in this world, even when it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.
And so there were times when I knew (I knew beyond any proof) that the faith that carried me through the waterless wastes was not wasted.”

“The visions of the mind have a debt to reality that is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions.”

Brb renaming the family groupchat “Anarchist Stability”

“And they left me sitting here, and if they were well, ‘tis well; if they were not, let them be.”

“…gradually I ceased to imagine all the dreadful things that might happen.”

“But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.”

“We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”

“When the time came for me to do something, I knew what to do, and I did it” okay BARS

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s favorite word was “indefatigable”, and so was his propensity for using it •_•

Actually Arthur Dimmesdale is insufferable

“His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life.”

“…such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard.”

“It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word ‘preacher’ comes from an old French word, prédicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?”

“I’m just trying to find a slightly useful way of saying there are things I don’t understand. I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do.”

“To conclude is not in the nature of the enterprise.”