Jenny > Recent Status Updates

"God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

the way I’m already crying!!

Ridoc is everything to me

“But this woman did not hold Time. She spent it. She wasted minutes in the sun, threw away seconds on winding sidewalks, offered hours to paintings and ice cream and movement, and let herself be changed.”

This book is wild and I have no idea what is going on! The format is so strange.

Never thought I’d see the day where I’d be nursing a crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne but here we are

I literally can’t believe this twist! This book is wild.

Not going to lie--this is the most fun I've had in a long time!

"One might very well say, music 'appeals to the ear' but it did so only in a qualified sense... But in fact, there existed music that did not reckon at all with ever being heard,"

"A strange thing to say about a sensibly practical, modern town. But it was not modern, it was old, and age is the past as the present, a past only veneered with the present."

"There were no millionaires, for millions fell away like leaves; there were no poor; men were neither wise nor ignorant; they were simply human souls on the sinking raft; the night was black and the waves yeasty with foam and the grave where the Titanic lay was silent under them, and the stars were silent over them!"

"Is that what real acting is, that moment you stop pretending? And if so, can a person ever be sure, even offstage, even in the parlor of his own house, that he isn't simply acting a part? You don't have to be the son of a Shakespearean actor to have such thoughts. Everyone has them."

“Her picture fastened itself on my mind; in my imagination she opened a sanctuary for me, she caused me to pray in a temple.”

"Men want us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds."

“… if you were an original instead of a translation…”

What an insult!

"I never stepped ashore at Piraeus. Yet in my mind I roamed the Acropolis of Athens... These were the monuments of men who could not die, not the stones of the living dead; here the secrets that had endured the passage of time, which I had only dimly begun to understand."

"And I watched the tragedy finally as one might from a theater balcony, moved from time to time, but never sufficiently to jump the railing and join the players on the stage."

"Evil is a point of view... We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we... for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms."

“Wipe your feet.”

!!! If you know, you know.

“... for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”

“For all his old age and his one arm and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered in order to light the gay bridals and other merrymaking of men and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

“Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

“Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctiveness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea, Bonapartes and sharks included.”

“Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.”

“The consolations of learning, the king replies, airily enough, are profound, in and of themselves.”

"Behold how pride and ruin can befall
One who hath set the whole world 'neath her laws
All-conquering, now conquered, because
She is Time's prey and Time consumeth all."
Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome

Now I need a collection of Joachim du Bellay's poetry!

I’m in love with Diggory Venn!

"Truly did he look a hero; for power sat on his brow, and victory seemed to have made itself a home among the smiles of his lips."

“It was to Rome I journied, to see the vestiges of the mistress of the world... I should draw in the sacred air which had vivified the heroes of Rome; their shades would surround me; and the very stones that I should tread were marked by their footsteps.”