Gregisdead121 > Recent Status Updates

:You know, sir,after years shut up in here, we forget what it’s like in the world
outside. Our world is here, on the inside, along with all kinds of people. I
don’t know exactly when I started feeling indifferent, I don’t remember…
It’s a slow thing, simmering away, until you realise there’s no turning back.
You lose all affection for your fellow man, you don’t even realise that they’re
the same as you. "

He
believed that God had made man in his own image, so God’s justice had to
be served by men, since every human being was the manifestation of God on
Earth.When a man killed another man, he killed the figure of God. In this
way,God’s image was murderer and murdered at the same time. He often fell
into long silences after killing. On the one hand, justice had been done; on
the other,a little bit of God was dead.

"He and the world both changed, but not in time
with each other. Valdênio got older, sick, not much sharper. The world
renewed itself. To be thrown outside the walls would be to serve another
sentence of survival and resistance that he couldn’t stand to repeat. "

"I think about how it’s always easier to offer someone tea rather than to
discuss the things that truly matter, tea is easier than challenging life and
coming to terms with the fact that you’re not as strong as you make yourself
out to be"

I don't know about this one....

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall
never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly,
but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of,
his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from
lightning, or frost from fire.”

“I was only going to say that heaven did not
seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to
earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle
of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.
That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I’ve no more
business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven"

Catching up because my last book club meeting was awkward with me just sitting there as the discussed THREE CHAPTERS I hadn't read but pretended to read as I sparknoted the fuck out of it terribly. Like they asked me what I thought about a character who wasn't mentioned in on the sparks ones and y'all the way i had to come clean to these PHD students...lesson learned

Ok?????
Underwhelming final two short stories....

"Kids who come back " is the best story in this entire collection so far. 5/5 stars for that story

"There were many Jessicas, because most of the missing kids were
teenage girls. They took off with an older guy, or got scared by a pregnancy.
They fled from a drunken father, from a stepfather who raped them, a brother who masturbated onto their backs at night.And the ones who were taken, the kidnapped girls who
disappeared in prostitution rings, to resurface dead, "

Mixed bag so far leaning more on the good side. Dark ambiguous contemporary fairy-tales that dwell on the macabre and quotidian to deliver its thrills. The point of views do tend to feel recycled, the author is great at telling a story (relaying a scene) but less convincing at forming characters that are distinct or narrative voices that don't feel the same which can threaten a story collection like this.

I'm so boooooooooooored .
And frustrated. There really was a great 300 page book in here that Ellmann sacrificed for what feel like an unnecessary vanity project. The prose style though distinct and sharp, cannot sustain a 500 + page novel as the formula is extremely repetitive. At this point my friend & I are starting to see how she approaches a page and its so predictably bland. The lists have no flavor anymore

The God of Small Things is still my book of the year

I will never be the same. Gorgeous book that makes you randomly message your mother"i love you" at 2am - inadvertently making her panic at the sudden thick sentimentality. Parents aren't always the best people. Most of us spend our lives reeling from the childhoods they give us, all the agony of neglect,violence or emotional failings follow closely behind. Rubens outlines that they were once children too. Read asap!!

"He saw them all, and in them all, he saw his own loneliness
and despair. He felt tears behind his eyes, and in that moment, he
understood that his father had left him, that he was alone, that he could cry
only for himself, and those around him. And the tears flooded the blockage,
and he wept like a child bereaved."

‘Bella can’t grow up,’ he said to himself, ‘and I carry it. Esther married out,
and I carry it. My father, God rest his soul,failed, and I carry it. My mother
wouldn’t let go, & finally broke my back. Together, they sucked the life
out of me with ravenous appetite.Who am I, save their receptacle? Who am
I save their ‘happening’? Who am I save my own sad packaging? He looked
up pleadingly. ‘Teach me how to pray.’

'You’re going to pay for it. You bought my guilt, and you can take it
home, and you can live with it for the rest of your life. And together with
your little lot,’ she said bitterly, ‘it’ll make a fine parcel. Take it home,
yours and mine, and I hope it will rot you.’
She hated herself for her glib
and ready cruelty, and when he had gone, she gave way to her grief and
acknowledged her share of the blame.

"Once entangled in this procedure, it was difficult to
withdraw, because although every man’s madness, except one’s own, was a
monstrous repetitive bore, nevertheless, it had to be respected. You didn’t
walk out on someone else’s lunacy. You grinned and bore it, and firmly
believed that they should be put away."

"Once entangled in this procedure, it was difficult to
withdraw, because although every man’s madness, except one’s own, was a
monstrous repetitive bore, nevertheless, it had to be respected. You didn’t
walk out on someone else’s lunacy. You grinned and bore it, and firmly
believed that they should be put away."

"Bella had never associated years with her parents, and she could only make
the wildest guess at her father’s age. Your span of years didn’t seem to
matter until you were dying, when friends could assess whether you’d had a
good run or not, and doctors could safely ascribe natural causes to a
patient’s condition."

"Suddenly, he wanted to be with his father, to go home and to love him. It
was the safest thing any man could do, he thought, just to love and care for
somebody. It wasn’t a happy thing, it wasn’t even a justifiable thing to love,
it was safe, that’s all it was, and he longed to give himself just that kind of
security."

‘When I
die,’ he’d said, ‘it won’t be my death at all. Like my life, it’ll be somethingthat happened to my Mum.’

‘After six years,’ Billy said, ‘people forget you were ever ill. They don’t ask
you any more if you’re getting better. After such a long time, this place isn’t
a hospital. It’s your home.’