Jill Williams > Recent Status Updates

“The truth is that abandoned dog following you over sea and land, baying from barren cliff tops, never tiring and never quitting, forever pining after you - and the day will come when that dog is on your porch, scratching insistently at your door, forcing you to claim it once again.”

4.5. Strange and jarring and beautiful and uplifting. I needed this.

This book has no business being this beautiful. “Sentience is nothing but a theater for grief.”

“Our sheer capacity for feeling got to be so unwieldy that we staggered under it, like Atlas with the weight of the world.”

I would read the phone book if Patrick Radden Keefe wrote it.

“I am so ready to be destroyed. Let it come. Let the roof break and the floors shake and the walls tumble down: let all this civilization fall apart around me and leave me standing in the wilderness, smelling the pine sap and the rain.” - pg 475

“But everything worth doing is accompanied by fear.” -pg 235

“I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

“… I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.”

“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

Only this strange, interesting author could make me care so much about a similarly strange little boy and his obsession with Victorian fishing fly’s. Loving this so far.

“From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”

“…our willingness to do the work that awe requires”

Still sobbing. This may be the single most beautiful and heartbreaking novel I’ve ever read.

“…for many people, the appeal of politics is the opportunity to impose cruelty on others.” pg xix

“She opens her eyes.
And looks at me.
I am halved and doubled at once.”

“I stop being a woman, a human, an animal, whatever I was. I am fury dressed in flesh.”

“He’s a monster” “You’re giving him too much credit. He’s just a man….if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men.”

“You must know monsters well, wolf girl.” “I’ve never met one in the wild. They don’t live there.”

“There are languages without words and violence is one of them.”

“If I were you I’d be more worried about the wives and daughters going out to run with the wolves.”

“Do you know, Megan, that the world doesn’t stop turning if you don’t supervise it?”

“Why do we want something? What is our motive? According to Mr. Levy there is only one answer: ‘Our motivation is to remove pain.’”

“I thought I was running my life. But I was wrong. I was still being run by a frightened child. A child who couldn’t tell the difference between the present and the past - and, like an unwitting time traveler, I was forever stumbling between them.”

“The real tragedy is, of course, by always looking outward, by focusing so intently on the other person’s experience, we lose touch with our own. It’s as if we live our entire life pretending to be ourselves, as impostors impersonating ourselves, rather than feeling this is really me, this is who I am.”

I’m already so charmed!