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Anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She's trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you.

I'm she was trapped by a form of courtly love, Church imposed, whist her body cried out for wings. He held out a daily offering of feathers and wax, but she couldn't do it, couldn't leap. For she could only see all that she wasn't.

210-212
The exchange between Evelyn, Dotty, and "Margaret Someone". 🤣🤣🤣

The delicious repartee of Evelyn and Dotty, pgs 208-209 🥰😆

Buongiorno, said Cress.
Is it? Said the congress's, hurting to get inside her first-floor apartment.
She seems nice, said Cress.

Exquisitely dry. 🥰🥰🥰

(Art is) about feeling, Ulysses, that's all. People trying to make sense of something they can't make sense of.

It may take a minute to adjust to the Film Noir dialogue!

Ultimately, even love was weak against the desire to avoid pain.

He had used work to accelerate his existence, to soften life's jagged edges into a blur. And he was good at it. It gave his meaning and he had loved it but work -- to the excesses he had done it -- was also a way to life without living. A way to transfer emotions over to something less personal, something g with lower stakes.

There were many deaths in life. A person, it seemed to the Ghost now, died in stages.

The (book) characters are like people but better because you do t have to talk to them.

He read because stories gave him room to grow beyond the world he was given.

In adversity, true feelings are revealed, meaning that in the worst moments you learn who is your friend and who is not. We also say, A crisis is an opportunity riding a dangerous wind.

I may not have known why I felt compelled to go there that day, but I'll always be glad I did. Because that was the day I realized that my father was a monster. And it was never about me at all.

It pains me to say it, but Delly is a dear little girl, with thick black hair in pigtails with red ribbons and an absolute belief in herself that I haven't seen even in grown white men.

There'd been a time when I would have yearned for 100th of this beauty, but one of the many things about old age is that while aspirations of beauty may lie never, they sit well below aspirations of health, comfort, and absence of pain.

They must have moved away from the stairs because I didn't hear any more after that. But I remained where I was for a long time, shame staining my skin like a handprint after a slap.

Peter is instantly up in arms. "We should call the council," he says. Peter loves being up in arms. So do I, truth be told. It's a magnificent feeling. Superior-like.

The first inklings of life's unfairness often come from a small detail whose impact is inversely proportional to its cause.

She had only just turned eleven, but was already showing that mix of aggression and detachment that is such a contrast to the joyful spontaneity of childhood.

Goya's paintings teach us that whatever happens, humanity produces and will produce the monstrous, that it churns out nightmares. It's alarming, but Goya's painting also teaches us to admit it, to be clear sighted about our share of darkness. Even better: once we've learnt this tragic lesson, it teaches us to create our own monsters in order to sublimate them, to stop being scared of them.

That was how he (William Turner) tracked down the sublime, which is more moving than beauty and makes us sense the futility of human beings before the powers of the cosmos.

Maureen and Harold stood beside her in silence, coming to terms once more with how utterly life vanishes.

She kept lists in the kitchen and bedroom. There was so much to do. And yet sometimes, when she looked out of the window, or lay awake listening to the gulls crying like children, she felt that despite her activity there was something about it that was inactive, as if she were missing the point.

We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.

It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

For awhile there was only the silence that carried her words. It struck Harold afresh how life can change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday -- walking your partner's dog, putting on your shoes, and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.

He fell silent, and so did Martina. He felt safe with what he had confided. It had been the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him In years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.

If he had comforted her, he could have let her go. As it was, he knew that in meeting her, and listening, he was carrying another weight in his heart and he was t sure how much more of that he could take.

It had been unbearable to hear those things, and even though she had wept in his arms afterwards, and apologized, they were in the air when he was alone, and there was no unsaying them.