Lilly > Recent Status Updates

“ Instead of being the mistress of her imagination, she was now its slave. Slavery is humiliating; and yet the consciousness of being no longer in control of ones own thoughts and actions is a form, inferior no doubt, but effective, of that self transcendence to which all human beings aspire.”

“There are many things which we would like to forget, which we do our best to suppress, but which in fact we go on remembering only too vividly”

“Affections which it was impossible for anyone to feel-and yet she felt them in all their monstrous and perverse enormity”

“like thoughts not quite realized.” More foreshadowingggg this quote arrives just as the reader is starting to get a little bit of ick from Frank

“What is a wedding, Cleo wondered, if not a private dream made public, a fantasy suspended between two worlds like a cat’s cradle?…She worried that she was one of those artists who care more about being an artist than they do about making art.” Could the same be true for love? Foreshadowing.

“ for all his power in the world and of the mind, there is a sadness within him, the source of which I cannot discover.“

“whether of love or war, excess is inevitable.
Yet i have always been bewildered when, in the ease of peace men raise the questions of praise or blame…For those who judge do not judge so much out of a concern for right or wrong as out of a protest against the pitiless demands of necessity, or an approval of them. And necessity is simply what has happened; it is the past.”

“A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels.”

“With those legions, he (Antonius) would be invincible; and the world would lie like an unguarded treasure house before his plundering ambition. We simply faced the death of Rome for which Cesar had given his life.”

“ how do you oppose a foe who is wholly irrational and unpredictable-and yet who out of animal energy, and the accident of circumstance, hesitate to the most frightening power?”

“ it is still possible to lead a decent life in the privacy of one’s own heart and mind”(27). Atia, Augustus’s mother, as she urges him to reflect on the meaning of his father’s death and what it means for his own future.

“ I have conquered the world, and none of it is secure; I have shown liberty to the people, and they flee it as if it were a disease; I despise those whom I can trust, and love those best who would most quickly betray me. And I do not know where we are going, though I lead a nation to its destiny.”

“ from what source does that lie suck its energy, so that it grows strong stronger than the truth? We have seen murder, theft, and pillage in the name of the Republic-and call it the necessary price we pay for freedom”(18).

“ how all the pain in English enjoy merge together, and even the ugly and dead seem beautiful, and even the fear of death and defeat are like the steps of a game!”

“But there is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned”(16).

But now he is Emperor of the world, and I must look beyond that to see him as he was then; and I swear to you that I, whose service to him has been my knowledge of the hearts of both his friends and enemies, could not have foreseen what he was to become(15).

Perhaps we are wiser when we are young, though the philosopher would dispute with me. But I swear to you, we were friends from that moment onward; and that moment of foolish laughter was a bond stronger than anything that came between us later- victories or defeats, loyalties or betrayals, griefs or joys. But the days of youth go, and part of us goes with them, not to re-turn(13).

“Overtime, our sense of who we are can be irrevocably altered by circumstance and accident” (ix).

Through this twilight universe Daisy began…keeping half a dozen dates a day …drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality”

“They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.”