Andre Landgraf > Recent Status Updates

depois de um longo, cansativo e árido inverno, o sol tinha um impacto particularmente negativo sobre mim. não conseguia dormir de manhã, me levantava de madrugada e me sentia continuamente inquieta. durante todo o inverno era preciso se proteger do vento incessante. agora abria as janelas e portas, escancarando-as para que o ar penetrasse nos aposentos e tirasse de lá minhas ansiedades mofadas

— A senhora não pode exigir tanto — disse.
— Posso! Eu mesma determino minhas exigências — gritei enfurecida.

"é no crepúsculo que os fenômenos mais interessantes acontecem, pois é quando as diferenças simples se apagam. eu poderia viver num crepúsculo eterno"

"well actually, buddy, sit down, you're drunk.
unferth, you've run your mouth about breca, me
and our sea-swagger, but let me drop some truth
into your tangent. i've been better on the water,
deeper in the srink, and stronger in the swin,
than any man alive. breca and i were boys
together. our desires were only dares, one upon
the other, brother to brother, maybe you know this story?"

the best libraries were like the best churches: old and musty, preindustrial

"for a moment she thought he would answer; she could almost hear the words gather in the silence between them"

"what do you think poetry is?" declan demanded. "something decorative? a pretty tapestry of words instead of threads? tales that old stay alive for a reason".

"the exact nature of his extraordinary gifts is nebulous, and most often a matter of poetry rather than record"

"Phelan, completely nonplussed, headed to the masters' refectory to fortify himself against several hours in the library archives, as he tried to find a way to say the same thing everyone else had said, twice a decade for five hundred years, only differently"

The wind moved swift, empty past her. She waited in silence, her mind like a still pool waiting for the ripple of another mind. And presently, without a whisper of its leaving, the Thing had gone.

there is so much work that i just put off in order to keep reading this. it feels like i can't read another thing until i catch up with the series. just loving it

"What do you call life? Would you call me living if I turned in fear away from you, refused to give you something that would save your life? Would you call me Har?"

"Yes." His voice softened. "Corn bears its name in the seed in the ground, in the green stalk, in the yellow dried stalk whose leaves whisper riddles to the wind."

Morgon opened his mouth. Like a small wave receding, something he had once known slipped silently away from him.

Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them. But my dreams are as important as anything I acquired by stealth. More important, because they are the intuitive in its purest state. Without them, facts are no more than a kind of debris, unstrung, like beads.

a distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society

In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration

Do empires ever wake up at 4 a.m.,
worrying they won't be touched again?

she likes to write her name.
MAYA.

a.j. nods out of politeness, but he doesn't believe in random acts. he is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. if a gun appears in act one, that gun better go off by act three.

"if this were a short story, you and i would be done by now. a small ironic turn and out
that's why there's nothing more elegant in the prose universe than a short story"

So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong yo us, who choose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.

Even the same white could as well be one color for Western paper and another for our own. Western paper turns away the light, while our paper seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall. It gives off no sound when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the leaf of a tree.

But it is on occasions like this that I always think of how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techiniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets — would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?

The origins of the word 'anger' were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an 'affliction' as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped

He remembered English phrases rising unbidden to his mind as he watched the revels; phrases from songs and poems that he wasn't quite sure on the meaning of, but which sounded right — and perhaps that was just what poetry was? Meaning through sound? Through spelling?

They were both shaken by the sudden realization
that they did not belong in this place, that despite their affiliation with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe of the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men.

We're tapping trees, boiling sap down for syrup and hard candy. I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depths of you, spill out something sweet.

Eating is gross, isn't it? In the abstract, I mean. When you're used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you've known lies in a great machine's heart, it's hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.