Heidi > Recent Status Updates

Chp 17 (Vernice): “Did she refer you to Spelman?” Mrs. Patty McHenry asked Vernice.
“Her and my aunt that raised me.”
“She and your aunt,” she said, gently tweaking my grammar, “and we raise potatoes while we rear children.”

Chp 14: Annie. Now, do not take this the wrong way. I won’t start calling your mama like some people we know. Lulabelle Simms, you gave me the closest thing to mother love I have ever felt. You didn’t know me from Eve. But you gave me the care that people save for kin.

Chp 2 Annie: I sat at the base of a Sweet Gum tree. Spiky cuckabugs covered the yard. Soon the pecans would drop. When I was little, I hired myself out to neighbors picking up nuts for a couple of quarters. Niecy and I shelled them, too.

Chp 1: Vernice: Annie’s granny acted as though Annie was asking for advice rather than relief. She said, “Irene, nobody knows anything about raising children, each one is different, and you just have to do the best you can…”

Chp 27: I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything. For they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. All my life I have been moving forward. And now I am here.

Chp 25: I leave this place tomorrow. He would not ask where. He would not even wonder. So many years as a child, I spent sipping his bright thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that for my name. But he was a harp with one string. And the note it played was himself.

Chp 20:
Circe: I can’t stand this world.
Trygon: Then make another

Chp 16: They had not seen their parents grow old and begin to fail.They have not seen them die.I fear I’ve robbed them not only of their youth but their age as well.

16: I took them to war before they could do any of those things that steady a man.They were unmarried when they left.They had no children.They had no years of lean harvest when they must scrape the bottoms of their stores and no good years either that they might learn to save.

Chp 16: they have wrinkles, but no wisdom.

Chp 15: When I would pass by the pen, the [newly pigged men] would stare at me with pleading faces, they moaned and squealed and pressed their snouts to the earth, “We are sorry! We are sorry!”
”Sorry you were caught. Sorry you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.”

Cp 15: It was my favorite moment. When they would frown and wonder why I was not afraid. I would savor their confusion, their dawning fear. I would save the leader for last so he could watch. Please spare me spare me!
No.
When it was over, all that was left was to drive them to the pig pen.

Cp 15: Then they would come for him, demanding their money back. “I told them when there is rot in the walls. There’s only one remedy.”
“Tear down,” Circe thought, “tear down and build again.”

Cp 15: “see the cracked beam? See the beetles eating the floor? See how the stone is sinking into the swamp?”
That only made the Lords angrier. “It was fine until you dug it up. We will not pay. Close it up plaster over. It has stood this long it will stand longer.”
So he would seal that fault up and the next season the house would fall down.

Cp15:Daedalus told me a story once about the Lords of Crete, who used to hire him to enlarge their houses. He would arrive with his tools, begin taking down the walls, pulling up the floors, but whenever he found some problem underneath that must first be fixed the Lords would frown and say “that was not in the agreement!”
“Of course not it has been hidden in the foundation, but look there is plain as day!”

Chp 13: “If I had known, I would not have done the rite!”
“You and most others. Perhaps that is why suppliance may not be questioned. How many of us would be granted pardon if our true hearts were known?”

Chp 13: “Refresh yourselves.” I rose and said no more. it is law that guests must be fed before a host’s curiosity.

Chp 13: If I was a priest I would have drugged him so he would not take fright and struggle, marring the ritual. In my hands he went limp as a sleeping child…and all the while he was quiet, as if he knew and agreed.
I set the golden basin on the floor, and took up the great bronze knife. I had no altar, but I did not need one. Anywhere I was became my temple.

It’s my turn with this anticipated book!!! Been on my list forever!!

Pt 2 Cp 32: Here’s what we wonder: how does a man like Brad become a man like Brad? That is, so assured of his authority and viewpoint that he never bothers to interrogate himself.

Maybe it’s a question for the ages. We do what we can to find answers, though. Which, in this case means looking into how Brad spent his early years.

Pt 2 Cp 32:Brad was thinking about what his next steps to scratching his itch might be. There had to be a way for them to take care of it with no one else the wiser. It would be like any other once in a lifetime experience. Something to remember & savor, if only secretly just between them. He loved the idea of being her first, of being the center of the special story that she would treasure forever just for herself.

Inspired to start my own book club!

Chp 24: UC-Davis

Pierre Fayol was a local commander of the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI) in the Haute-Loire region. During the war, he was fiercely chauvinistic, hated taking orders from a woman, and mockingly called Hall "the ginger witch". After the war, however, he felt immense remorse. He spent a decade of his life writing reports, gathering files, and passionately campaigning to get her achievements recognized.

In the secret CIA report of her career, the CIA admitted that her fellow officers "felt she had been sidelined – shunted into backwater accounts because she had so much experience that she overshadowed her male colleagues, who felt threatened by her," and that "her experience and abilities were never properly utilized."

Mozak- saved countless Allied agents and downed airmen trapped in Nazi-occupied France.
Baker Street- the headquarters of Britain's Special Operations Executive).
Despite her massive success, her identity and contributions remained a secret from the general public for a long time due to wartime security.

Chp 5: After the liberation of France, Baker Street finally acknowledged the true extent of Virginia Hall’s contribution to a very great number of escapes, but most of all Mozak, an internal F-section memorandum (21 Nov. 1944), recorded for posterity, “Many of our men owe their liberty and even their lives to Virginia Hall.” But the world outside never knew.

Chp 2: Wearing her beloved trousers was now out of the question, as Vichy blamed them for the female emancipation that had enthralled Virginia in prewar Paris but which equated to dangerous moral turpitude. (1941-42)

In any case, I had to die someday. Even if I’d led a normal life like the women before I would have still found myself at the dawn of the last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying at least they’d known real life. And I was very jealous of them. But they died. Like I’m about to die. And what does having lived mean when you are no longer alive?

I’m about 1/3 of the way through. It is definitely giving Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt