Fiona > Recent Status Updates

"Some rise to present danger, not I. My gift is forethought. Threatened closely I grow stupid, and sit on a bag of sand wondering if a man could swim to Orgoreyn."

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

This gives me Kafka vibes.

This took at least 125 pages to get bearable and this dialogue has been so stilted and cheesy for the last 100. Figures it's a celebrity book club pick.

"But nothing could stop the burning shame and sharp sadness. A simple hope of being with someone, of actually being wanted, of being touched, had drawn her in. But these hurried groping hands were only a taking, not a sharing or giving."

"Ma had said women need one another more than they need men, but she never told her how to get inside the pride."

"Because being knocked down was already understood, already a given, it was the skin you wore. To ask What’s good? was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another."

I honestly hate this writing style 98% of the time.
"It’s late in the season—which means the winter roses, in full bloom along the national bank, are suicide notes.

Write that down.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it."

"Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing."

"Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I’ve never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream."

"Because your name is Rose, and you are my mother and the year is 1968—the Year of the Monkey."

"No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted?" I don't get this comparison here. Pleasure is the mother tongue, not that the mother tongue is pleasure. So why compare it to a more literal meaning of mother tongue? Not sure why this passage tripped me up so much but it did.

This book is going to be a slog...
"The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life? [...] What is a country but a life sentence?"

This whole book so far just makes me think it's misery porn like I imagine A Little Life must be like (although A Little Life sounds way worse).

"Jiazhen, on the other hand, was happy. From atop Fengxia’s back she said, 'It’s a good thing it’s not curable. Where would we get the money for medicine if it was?'"

I hope this character gets more bearable. Honestly I wonder if there isn't some quality missing to the translation.

"He was speaking with a country man, and he knew that all country men feel a similar need to approach their business obliquely, to smell around its corners and sides before plunging into the middle of dealing."

Jack's temporal hallucination sense mashup reminds me of the dance scene across time/place in Sinners.

"She had no goddam right! Yes, maybe at first. He had been a lush, he had done terrible things. Breaking Danny’s arm had been a terrible thing. But if a man reforms, doesn’t he deserve to have his reformation credited sooner or later? And if he doesn’t get it, doesn’t he deserve the game to go with the name?"

"When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps’ nest, you hadn’t made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings; from college-educated man to wailing ape in five easy seconds."

"And yet, through it all, he hadn’t felt like a son of a bitch. He hadn’t felt mean. He had always regarded himself as Jack Torrance, a really nice guy who was just going to have to learn how to cope with his temper someday before it got him in trouble."

The bell chiming in this book confuses me because I would've expected 24-hour time.

"And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have."

"This action will have no echo. It means we won’t repeat the same mistakes, that we won’t continue to do harm."

Georgia sounds like such a shitty state because of what seems like a complete lack of policies to protect people.

"In their accounts of vindictive landlords and unrenewed leases, tanked credit scores and ruined rental histories, a picture emerged of the housing caste system that allowed extended-stays like Efficiency to flourish."

"And poor working families who at one time would have qualified for a public housing unit could use their voucher to move into homes owned by private landlords. Everyone would benefit from this new arrangement. So why, Britt wondered, would no one accept her voucher?"

The narrative writing is enjoyable but I really wonder if at any point more data and broader systemic analysis will be covered.

"[The teenager] made a careful distinction between 'friends' and people he called 'associates.' The latter might be willing to listen to what you were going through, but only the former would initiate such conversations, would show a genuine interest in how you were doing. He claimed he had no friends, just lots of associates."

"The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital."

"It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that."