claire > Recent Status Updates

“…as an adult, I was starting to understand that life was a matter of deciding what to keep alive and what to let die. Personal dreams, family ranches, first loves, summer flings — all these things have a lifespan.”

“Sometimes I imagine we are still floating together somewhere along that creek, and I only have to return to it to find you.”

I’m invested.
Hokusai helped.

“Sam said she drove like she was playing Tetris.”

As though silence had taken a seat.

“Family is gravity.”

Wha?!?! 🤯🤯🤯

“ I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.”

Wow.

This is definitely going to be a re-read, after I dig out my copy of Huck Finn and re-read that.

Wow!
What?!
Wow!

Wow!
What?!
Wow!

“In life you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you.”

“It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”

“For Mia...did not consider herself a photographer. Photography, at its heart, was about documentation, and...that for Mia photography was simply a tool, which she used as a painter might use a brush or a knife.”

The King in Yellow
“Her voice had a remembered quality, as if he had heard it before.”

Letter to Charles Morton, 12/12/45:
“Can I do a piece for you entitled ‘The Insignificance of Significance’, in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer’s imagination...”

Ch. 32 “They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.”

Ch 32: “The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.”

Ch 32: “The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.”

“His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through the doorway.”

"He had established bulwarks of skepticism against disappointment. And yet he hungered for the beautiful, and the authentic -- those volumes and experiences impossible to duplicate. How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end."

"The saddest were the ones that she knew best, and she would play at bedtime, so falling asleep was like drifting off in autumn forests filled with golden leaves."

"I'd thought marriage would mean I'd never be lonely. Now I knew: Marriage breeds its own special brand of loneliness, and it's far more cruel. You miss more, because you've known more."

"You need to stop looking for heroes... Only the weak need heroes and heroes need those around them to remain weak. You're not weak."

"I had been no different, only more diligent, perhaps, than others in constructing that ivory tower of my own design -- a foundation laid of books, the bricks formed of the duty drilled into me by parents; dreams may have been the paintings on the walls, but doubts and fears were the bars on my windows."

"He lolled mindlessly, miserably, in the dark place, not wanting to be there, but unable to go anywhere else. He was pressed down by anxiety, weighted in place by an all-encompassing self-loathing, his mind turned into crystallized molasses: sharp, impenetrable, and unbearably painful."

"Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear moral responsibility pulled me back into the operating room."

"A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful."

(pg 7) "...as though straight from the imagination of God in His youngest days, when He still believed that all was good."

"He wanted her to sense the boundless possibilities offered by books. They would always be enough. They would never stop loving their readers. They were a fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable world. In life. In love. In death."

Already hooked!