Gregisdead121 > Recent Status Updates

"the fact that the soldiers sent to kill the
Romanovs were armed with Colts, Mausers, Nagants and bayonets,
which makes them sound like most American citizens now actually, the
fact that the Romanov children wouldn’t die at first and had to be stabbed
and shot some more, the fact that how can people bring themselves to do
these things, so much blood,"

"the fact that he
always had a good sense of humor, Jake, even as a baby, the fact that
Jake was such a charmer, kicking his little legs and laughing all the time,
the fact that we must all be born happy, then learn to be sadder,"

Wordle 1,600 2/6

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This is so crazy I had to tell goodreads

"the fact that what is with this constant
monologue in my head, the fact that why am I telling myself all this stuff,
since I know it already, the fact that I knew it all before I said it to"

"the fact that I try to bear grudges but in the end
the original reason for it drifts away and I’m left with just a sort of
negative feeling about someone, but no evidence, and I don’t know
whether to carry on the grudge or not"

This book is ass

"My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no
way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while
retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all
that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically."

" To me, on the other hand – pardon me for saying
this, but he is dead, so I cannot hurt his feelings – to me he is nothing.
He is nothing, was nothing, just an irritation, an embarrassment. He
was nothing and his words were nothing. I can see you are cross
because I make him look like a fool. Nevertheless, to me he really was
a fool."

'He is a weak man,' I said. 'A weak man is worse than a bad man. A
weak man does not know where to stop. A weak man is helpless before
his impulses, he follows wherever they lead.'

Bookclub met today and I missed it :"(

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

"Without the truth, no
matter how hard, there can be no healing"

"Here we have a man who, in the
most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only
briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his
living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience.
Because that is what novels are about – isn't it? – intimate experience.
Novels as opposed to poetry or painting. Doesn't that strike you as
odd?"

"White South Africans in those days liked to think of themselves as the Jews of Africa, or at least the Israelis of Africa: cunning, unscrupulous, resilient, running close to the ground, hated and envied by the tribes they ruled over. All false. All nonsense. Those people were not tough, they were not even cunning, or cunning enough. And they were certainly not Jews. "

"Happiness, he tells himself, teaches one nothing. Misery, on the other
hand, steels one for the future. Misery is a school for the soul. From the
waters of misery one emerges on the far bank purified, strong, ready to take
up again the challenges of a life of art.
Yet misery does not feel like a purifying bath. On the contrary, it feels
like a pool of dirty water."

"Normal people find it hard to be bad. Normal people, when they feel
badness flare up within them, drink, swear, commit violence. Badness is to
them like a fever: they want it out of their system, they want to go back to
being normal. But artists have to live with their fever, whatever its nature,
good or bad. The fever is what makes them artists; the fever must be kept
alive. "

"But he knows it is not so. Between black
and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable
dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies an awareness on both sides that
people like Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this
earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts."

""Made forlorn by the ease of her
own ruin, the lioness longed for her own mother, now dead, and knew
she too might die soon, if not from this injury then another.
She limped for some time after."

I'm on my 3rd lioness P.O.V
I like the concept I just don't like how often it is deployed. Perhaps that's my own fault as I expected it to appear like segments marking a change in time or setting or mark the circling of a new idea that is about to take root for the next 100 or so pages but now it reads as a gimmick to make up for when she can't connect one stream of thought with the other. It seems crude

"The fact that I think
people are just trying not to think about their mothers, the fact that I think
that’s all anybody’s doing most of the time, the fact that nobody ever talks
about them, the fact that the
world seems indifferent to mothers, yet when they die it’s so empty, the
fact that Mommy’s illness broke me, broke me"

"the fact that I am completely
falling apart"

"the fact that
of course everybody remembers different things from childhood, the fact
that that’s why you need siblings, to tell you what you forgot, or tell you
what happened from their point of view, but I really seem to remember
the least of any of us, "