Tatevik > Recent Status Updates

I've seen you being absorbed by this family, and become part of them, and a wonderful thing it's been. But it's dangerous too.
Because they're not your famil, and if you're not very careful, you're in danger of losing your own identity. You're eighteen now. I think it's time to break loose and go your own way.

(So loved was Loveday. By everybody.
Feeling a bit out of it, observing the sort of demonstrative behaviour that she herself had never experienced, Judith found it hard not to feel a small
pang of envy.)

"Julian is like one of those people that'll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest." This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian's personality.

I used to think I would be a writer. I thought then I would write of love (Ha!) but how little we know, we spend our years as a tale that is told I have spent my years so. I never became a writer atall. Instead I have loved, and loved, and loved. I am fair wore out with it.

The letters didn't mean anything.
Not to the dead girl Silvaney, of course-nor to me.
Nor had they ever.
It was the writing of them, that signified.

And Geneva says to tell you some advice, it is, Do not ever go to bed mad. This is good advice and you ought to take it. Geneva may not be very good at marriage, but she is good at men.

Reading this before bed, so 2 lines a day it is. Do I have a chance to finish this in my life?

In fact I think he is me, and I am him, and it will be so forever and ever. What I did, I did it out of awful longing pure and simple. I did it out of love [... ] I had to do it, I had to have him. And even now I can close my eyes and see us laying naked in the flowers on the grassy bald, all tangled up together till you couldn't tell who was who.

Ethel, I guess you would think that when a woman has a lot of children, then each one means a little less. It is not so. Children will swell up your heart.

But I remember losing them and getting them both, I remember everything. I remember the fire and the moon and Oakley's face, and exactly how we made that first little dead baby that very night, what I have come to call in my mind, the night of the long sweetening.
It is like a curse, to remember as good as I do.

We made us a baby that night I believe, a baby which did not come to term and is buried now up on Pilgrim Knob, that was the first one we buried up there. Now I have got two little babies on Pilgrim Knob. I never gave them a name.

For all of a sudden when I saw those lights, I said to myself, Ivy, this is your life, this is your real life, and you are living it. Your life is not going to start later. This is it, it is now. I's funny how a person can be so busy living that they forget this is it. This is my life.

I remember as a child, I thought all the older people around us were grown up. Now I think they were just old.

Daddy says he needs a mountain to rest his eyes aginst.

Today I read 3 Christmas stories by Montgomery and liked them so much. Maybe I can find a Christmas collection of all those stories.

And you know what I think Mama was looking for, that very last time I saw her? I think she was still looking for some clue as to what had become of Joe, searching in the only places she could search, the little familiar nooks and crannies of the life he once had shared with them but then could share no longer.

See what I just wrote? Taking care. Taking care of Andrew, taking care of Sandy. Isn't that interesting? A person reading back through these letters might decide that my life has been largely a function of other people's lives, and that would be true too, or at least it would not be untrue.

There is the thing about a parent's death-especially the second parent's death— suddenly there is no other person standing between you and the great beyond, that dark-ness, the grave. I know I sound morbid, but it has been such an illuminating insight for me that I have to share it with you. Listen: the time is now. We are the next in line.

She has a way with words! Not an extraordinary prose - she describes everything, literally everything, doesn’t let you imagine, if there is something, she describes it.

Grief was not a state of mind, but a physical thing, a void, a deadening blanket of unbearable pain, precluding all solace.

I envy how these people are in comfort zone around one another and way too straight and honest.

A robin redbreast flew on to the windowsill and stood with head aslant, as if to eavesdrop. He had seen a robin yesterday, too, somewhere. It was the time of year for them. Christmas. Yule logs. Holly wreaths. Loneliness.

Memories. Somehow during the winter holidays contain more memories than any other day of the year. Maybe it’s a beautiful period for reflection about your year, but also a time when you want all the warmth you got during your whole life. And winter holidays are those perfect days to crave for more.

I am making a fruitcake this year.

Fannie Flagg is a master of creating small towns with iconic residents. Like Gilmore Girls type of small towns and people in it.

You can't go back in time she said Isn't that the whole point of it Marriage I mean That's why you do it Because you can't go back You can only go forward So you're making a vow you'll go forward together Stay together even though you'll change get sick get old That's the vow

It's funny, she seems like a loser, but she acts like she doesn't know or care she's a loser, which makes you wonder whether she is, in fact, a loser. And for a moment a part of you wishes you could go with her.

She sobbed quietly under the covers. The sound brought him a strange peace, as if she were doing it for both of them. And when at last she slept, he stayed awake for both of them, he could be exhausted for both of them. Beneath the greenish ceiling stars he felt exhausted, bereft, and only that. Not evil, not accused.

But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like — it was - living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.

He remembers how when he was little and got scared he'd go in to Mam and Dad. They seemed so much larger in sleep, bloated out in their bed like great slumbering sea beasts, walruses or whales. You could just tuck yourself in under a fin, and it felt like the world and its monsters had disappeared.

Back when the children were still there Alison somehow never envisaged a time when they would not be. Oh, she knew it would come—but she never considered the implications, tried out the idea of an emptied house, listened for silence. They went gradually, of course, so silence came gradually, and there were returns […]. She has got used to it. You can get used to much-she has known that for a long while.