Andy > Recent Status Updates

"He shook his head as if to clear it. 'smoked opium once. It felt like listening to you, only rather more mundane.'"

"'I am quite determined to be mistress of my own fate, Mrs. Clutterthorpe, but I do sympathize with how strange it must sound to you. It is not your fault that you are entirely devoid of imagination. I blame your education.'"

"I tilted my head and regarded her thoughfully as I considered my reply. In the end, I chose unvarnished truth. 'Mrs. Clutterthorpe, I can hardly think of any fate worse than becoming the mother of six. Unless perhaps it were plague, and even then I am persuaded a few disfiguring buboes and possible death would be preferable to motherhood.'"

"I turned to look behind and saw a figure at the lych-gate, tall and beautifully erect, with the sort of posture a gentleman acquires through either gneerations of aristocratic breeding or enthusiastic beatings at excellent schools."

"It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing."

"This would be the story of a perilous crossing to the harbour of writing, and, in the end, an uplifiting demonstration of the fact that what counts is not the things that happen, but what we do with them. All this belongs to the realm of reassuring beliefs which are fated, as we age, to become more and more deeply ingrained in us, but whose truth is fundamentally impossible to establish."

"Self-narrative, in bringing to light a dominant truth that it seeks in order to ensure a continuity of being, always neglects to consider the following: our failure to understand what we experience, at the moment we experience it; the opacity of the present, whereby every sentence and every assertion ought to be riddled with holes."

"How are we present in the existences of others, their memories, their ways of being, even their acts? There is a staggering imbalance between the influence those two nights with that man have had upon my life, and the nothingness of my presence in his. I do not envy him: I'm the one who is writing."

"And what desire that exceeds the desire to understand fuels the relentless determination to find, among thousands of nouns, verbs and adjectives, those that will provide the certainty (the illusion) of having attained the greatest possible measure of reality? What comples her is the hope of disovering even a drop of likeness between this girl and any other being."

"I wonder what it means for a woman to pore over scenes that happened over fifty years earlier, to which her memory can add nothing new at all. What is the belief that drives her, if not that memory is a form of knowledge?"

"Must I, as of now, move back and forth between one historical vision and another, between 1958 and 2014? I dream of a sentence that would contain them both, seamlessly, by way of a new syntax."

"I wanted physical, tangible proof of their existence, as if to continue writing I needed them to be alive, as if I needed to be writing about what is alive, to be endangered in the way one is when writing about the living and not in the state of tranquility that prevails when people die and are consigned to the immateriality of fictional characters."

"She has no defined self, but 'selves' who pass from one book to another."

"I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame."

These scenes just go on for far too long with so many detours. Can we just finally get to finding the fucking cat??

Wow, this is a lot gorier than I would've ever though! Beheadings, scalpings and everyone tells everything to the 11-year-old, I guess because small town equals she would've heard about it anyway? Still, yikes!!

This is quite fun and the small town vibes are definitely there, but I could really do without all the not very funny jokes of the boys in this book. The jokes from the adults are quite fun for the most part, but the boys just come across as sexist creeps. I hope the majority of the book will be about Tippy and her uncles and not her and her "friends".