Lorna > Recent Status Updates

“Rain and snow have come to the dry earth since I began to write and there may be a white hillside as a background for the Christmas Eve fire. We shall watch it and the star above it while we wish you joy—joy in many little things through all the year.” — CHRISTMAS 1949

I will stop at this point, and wait for the Summer Challenge to begin with this ad my exception book.

This is my stopping point until the Summer Challenge begins June 1st. I am stopping at 50%.

At the hour of my death I would wish to be “known to God.”

“Like language, art struggles with what is common, to disturb the individual habit of perception and, by disturbing it, to enable men to see what has been lived and seen by others. By upsetting, therefore, it tries to soothe, because it hopes to free each person from the tyranny of solitude.”

“She was not fooled by their superficial absurdity: British people laughed at Hitler and his preposterous acolytes, but as German philosophers long before the Nazis might have argued, abstract evil did not choose the form in which it emerged in the particular.”

“But they said night flight required a special kind of skill, or at least a kind of calm,because the process of reading instruments was not an art, but a form of trust.”

“Remember how the Soviets airbrushed pictures of people who had fallen from grace? We’re putting the pictures back.”

“Maps were more than mere blueprints of the world. They were also stories, prefigurations of success. The old hand-drawn ones reproduced in the books were museums of fine detail, the cartographer’s work as distinct from each other as that of the finest artists.”

“But none of this takes into account the fact that we are here as a result of a crime sponsored by a military regime, a violation of law and human decency so repugnant it is all but unspeakable.”

“Dangerous as it was, they had to march and carry posters with your names and pictures because to go on living they had to refuse to accept your disappearance.” . . . . “It was a form of hope, of love. Neither she nor any of the others can ever tell you how much it cost.”

“Long before you were taken, a group of women began demonstrating in the Plaza de Mayo. They marched every Thursday, rain or shine, in front of the Casa Rosada, demanding an accounting from the government about the whereabouts of their children and grandchildren.”

“So was it all for England, then?” he resumed. “There was a time, of course there was. But who’s England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m European,
Peter. If I had a mission—if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”

“When the truth catches up with you, don’t be a hero, run.”

“We are therefore faced with the ludicrous Shakespearean premise whereby the ghosts of the two victims of a fiendish Circus plot rise up to accuse us in the form of their offspring.”

“Where am I? he wondered. The room breathed with things he had only glimpsed in the years of driving through the villages of northern New Mexico. He felt that if he were to go close to the paintings, he would feel heat on his face from the bleached rocks or hear the sound of rain and the heavy breath of horses.”

”I only know what Cristobal did and on the second night of the storm he began to carve a santo of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“And if by chance, Francisco, anyone should wander into this valley while we’re gone,” and here Hipolito turned to Cristobal, “you are to tell them that this place is ours and that it is named Guadalupe, in honor of Our Lady.”