paolina grosser’s Reviews > The Secret History > Status Update

Oh my god Henry please kill this bitch too he’s pissing me off

„Henry, of course, had done marvelously. He didn’t say so, but he didn’t have to. He, in some senses, was the author of this drama and he had waited in the wings a long while for this moment, when he could step onto the stage and assume the role he’d written for himself: cool but friendly; hesitant; reticent with details; bright, but not as bright as he really was. He’d actually enjoyed talking to them.“

Okay so was Richard and Francis making out just an isolated incident that we aren’t going to mention again…? Like what is happening 😭

„For one horrible instant I thought that Francis was going to laugh aloud but somehow he managed to turn it into a theatrical battery of coughs, hiding his face behind his hand. With barely a glance Henry slapped him, hard, on the back.“
Idk why this is so funny to me 😭

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?”
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
Pls this man is NOT real 😭

„Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.“

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one’s surprise—in an entirely different world.”

“What is unthinkable is undoable.”

“Never once, in any immediate sense, did it occur to me that any of this was anything but a game. An air of unreality suffused even the most workaday details, as if we were plotting not the death of a friend but the itinerary of a fabulous trip that I, for one, never quite believed we’d ever really take.”

“One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude 'amor vincit omnia'. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”