Alexandra > Recent Status Updates

Most often it came in exactly this form, the arrival, the tea laid out on the lawn, the deadly silence succeeded by that one deadly sentence

"Miscommunication. Russ, we did the miscommunication thing.
You made me a miscommunicator!"

I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my things? They hadn't been born of me -- I had just adopted them. . . .

There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke. . . .

Currently on chapter 13 and it is a chore to keep reading at this point :(

Sonnet CXXXIX
Yet do not so; but since I am near slain,
Kill me outright with looks and rid my pain.

Sonnet CXXXIX
Yet do not so; but since I am near slain,
Kill me outright with looks and rid my pain.

Sonnet CVII

Sonnet XCIX has my favorite illustration so far

O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, Against the wrackful siege of battering days,

Sonnet LVI

Sonnet LIII

Sonnet XXX

O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

"I saw all sorts of men that winter," McCarthy later writes. "I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three...."

MARY: I was your undoing-
LILLIAN: You were nothing more than an irritation-

MARY: It's just too easy to say that the reason women fight with each other is because they're jealous.
LILLIAN: Absolutely. We had plenty of reasons to dislike each other. Good reasons.

LILLIAN: We all wanted to be one of the boys.
MARY: I never wanted to be one of the boys—
LILLIAN: But you wanted to be the only woman at the table, which is practically the same thing.

LILLIAN: When I got older and realized I probably would never make much of a radical, I was nonetheless attracted to them.

LILLIAN: So you were an accidental Trotskyite, just as you were an accidental Mrs.Edmund Wilson. Just out of curiosity, what decisions in your life did you actually make?

SMITH It is much more marvellous to explain a miracle than to work a miracle. What was your explanation, by the way?
CONJURER I shall not tell you
SMITH Indeed? Why not?
CONJURER. Because God and the demons and that Immortal Mystery that you deny has been in this room to-night. Because you know it has been here. Because you have felt it here. Because you know the spirits as well as I do and fear them as much as I do

CONJURER: I am going to ask the God whose enemies I have served if I am still worthy to save a child.

Doctor: [Looking at him.] Do you believe in your own religion?

Smith: [Returning the look equally steadily.] Suppose I don't: I should still be a fool to question it. The child who doubts about Santa Claus has insomnia. The child who believes has a good night's rest.

CONJURER: You have already told me what he did. He destroyed a fairy tale, for he created a fairy tale that he was bound to destroy.

PATRICIA: I wish you were a thief instead.
STRANGER: Have I committed a worse crime than thieving?
PATRICIA: You have committed the cruellest crime, I think, that there is.
STRANGER: And what is the cruellest crime?
PATRICIA: Stealing a child's toy.
STRANGER: And what have I stolen?
PATRICIA: A fairy tale.

"Before she died," she said, "Miss
Brodie thought it was you who betrayed her."
"It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due,"

“Miss Brodie's brown eyes were fixed on the clouds, she looked quite beautiful and frail, and it occurred to Sandy that she had possibly renounced Teddy Lloyd only because she was aware that she could not keep up this beauty; it was a quality in her that came and went.”

“It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd's lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème.”

Chapter 5 page 109
Big wtf moment. I knew there was something off about both of the male teachers. But Lloyd’s behavior definitely took me by surprise. Kiss a 15-year-old girl and then grab her as she tries to run away and tell her “you’re just about the ugliest little thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” With his wife and children downstairs no less
😒 appalling in every way. The Brodie set has my sympathy