Elle > Recent Status Updates

“All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies….And so we’re overbrave and overfearful—we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals?”

Cal watched his brother triumph over sins he had never committed. He thought sardonically of telling him about his mother, to see how he would handle it, but he withdrew the thought quickly. He didn’t think Aron could handle it at all.

“Quentin felt a wave of concern, followed by a riptide of apathy. In the end, she was going to do whatever she wanted to do.”

“It is those who injure women who get the most kindness from them—they are born timid and tyrants and maltreat those who are humblest before them. So poor Amelia has been getting ready in silent misery for her son’s departure, and has passed many and many a long solitary hour in making preparations for the end. George stood by his mother, watching her arrangements without the least concern.”

“I know few things more affecting than the timid debasement and self-humiliation of a woman. How she owns that it is she and not the man who is guilty; how she takes all the faults on her side; how she judges in a manner punishing for the wrongs which she has not committed and persists in shielding the real culprit!”

This is more than I wanted it to be. Absolutely outstanding.

Okay, random anecdote about a red American singer irrelevant to the preceding and following section. So weird.

“Brigitte Fritschen, then only nine years old, remembered how angry her mother was that the local doctors in Pirna, Saxony, had moved away, leaving the population without adequate medical care.” Yes, but with doctors like those, who needs undertakers?

“Where was the love for voting, citizens’ rights and a pluralistic society meant to come from? What the German public wanted was not an array of parties on a voting slip every four years but food on the table, a restored roof over their heads and a future without war and economic disaster.”

“A middle-aged German in 1949 had seen the whole spectrum of political systems in their lifetime, but none of the offerings had shown a functioning democracy.”

There’s something in this book for everyone to hate: either she’s too fond of the DDR or she’s being too generous to the aristocrats. For my part, I don’t feel particularly sympathetic even to the antifa barons of the old aristocracy. Once Germany became a democracy under any stamp, there was no reason not to disband the old symbols of feudalism. Turn them all into public museums and hotels, I say.

“This is what the conjurors here pride themselves upon doing. They look down with pity upon us miserable sinners who have none. They think themselves generous if they give our children a five-pound note, and us contemptible if we are without one."

"I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year…. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I could pay everybody, if I had but the money.”

Pg. 387/812: I’m convinced Vanity Fair is as relevant today as it was more than a hundred years ago. Please see chapter XXXIII.

“The night before, Mr Clump and Dr Squills had had a consultation (over a bottle of wine at the house of Sir Lapin Warren, whose lady was about to present him with a thirteenth blessing), regarding Miss Crawley and her case.”

“And, as the hatred of vice is always a progress towards virtue, Mrs. Bute Crawley endeavored to instill into her sister-in-law, a proper abhorrence for all Rawdon Crawley’s manifold sins.… If a man has committed wrong in life, I don’t know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations….”

“We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have made them subscribe to our doctrine too. We let their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and yakmaks. But their souls must be seen by only one man, and they obey not unwillingly, and consent to remain at home as our slaves—ministering to us and doing drudgery for us.”

Just four more!

Oh boy. I finally agreed to read this aloud with Gon. Not even having been married for almost twelve years will spare my blushes.

“Daniel Day-Lewis (like any star, or perhaps any creative person) is, in short, not a man but a work of art. His name is a sort of title by which I refer to a valuable body of work—that is to say, the sum of all the characters he has so brilliantly portrayed, all the plots into which he has been inserted…. If he should suddenly be transformed into a flesh-and-blood person, poor him, poor me.”

“There have been times when I was truly alarmed, and feared for the fate of democracy in my country. But more often I thought our worries have been deliberately exaggerated. I’ve never shared the apprehension about the political rise of the Five Star Movement, and find the term “populism” — today applied to all political forces, old and new — to be useless.”

“On principle, I refuse to speak badly of another woman, even if she has offended me intolerably. It’s a position that I feel obliged to take precisely because I’m well aware of the situation of women; it’s mine, I observe it in others, and I know that there is no woman who does not make an enormous, exasperating effort to get to the end of the day.”

“Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women."

"It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it," said Lord Henry.”

I, to my misfortune, am not like him; his ability to push against evil is equal to his capacity to understand it. In me it’s mutated into an extreme political intransigence that won’t let anyone off the hook, and that distresses me, above all.

We need a model of empathy: that word, currently fashionable, and therefore, lackluster, is an elixir against the world’s ferocity, difficult though it may be to find it uncorrupted by fictions. The model is my father, empathic to the highest degree. Our lives, as his children, still amount to a desperate attempt to resemble him, or at least to not do anything[…]to cause him grief.

And wake up to the situation: your wife, with all likelihood, is ready to get into bed with anyone who thinks highly of you, in order to prove that they think even more highly of her, while you’re at mirrors, are ready to go to bed with her in order to feel less humiliated by the greatness they unreasonably attribute to you.

And even if he does, while you’re reading this letter, do you really want to get into it with him? He’d be guilty of the same thing you’ve committed one hundred times, with women who are married, or otherwise taken, even when we were together, and you were supposed to be faithful to me. So shut up and relax.

But I didn’t lift a finger. What do you want to do — Teresa wrote, making fun of me – confront the petty pedagogue, slap him, challenge him to a duel, wait for him in a dark corner so you can slit his throat? Think about it. Is Itrò putting the moves on your wife, groping her against her will? No. It’s the other way around.

We fought, that time, in a way that seem to end it, you couldn’t go back after what we’d slung at each other. And yet, even that time, we patched it up. We clung to each other until dawn, laughing at the girl from Arles, at the pianist and cytology teacher. But now we were scared; we’d risked losing each other.