Geral(dine)’s Reviews > Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay > Status Update

📚 Quote Page 206 (Gigliola)
"Do you think I exist? Look at me, in your view do I exist? She hit her full breasts with her open hand, but she did it as if to demonstrate physically that the hand went right through her, that her body, because of Michele, wasn't there. He had taken everything of her, immediately, when she was almost a child."

💬 by the 🌈-by... if Elena is marrying Pietro....I'll take his mother....

📚 Quote Page 174
"Lila proceeded to talk generally about her sexuality. It was a subject completely new for us. The coarse language of the environment we came from was useful for attack or self-defense, but, precisely because it was the language of violence, it hindered, rather than encouraged, intimate confidences."

💬 imagines herself as a knight and the circumstances (c) men (which Lila is fighting) as beasts but I'm in the wrong when I put my rainbow colored glasses on for a second yea yea

📚 Page 172
"I feel like the knight in an ancient romance (...) he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdued and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage."

💬 Enzo feels like the only man you can wholeheartedly trust in this whole series (will I be betrayed yet again?) Pietro seems fine, sweet even, but I've learned my lesson... he hasn't proven himself in a difficult situation yet (the most he ever does is be generous, so I'm staying alert!)

💬 frustrated alongside Lila the whole visit..

📚 Page 143+144
"You professors insist so much on education because that's how you earn a living, but studying is of no use, it doesn't even improve you — in fact it makes you even more wicked."
"Has Elena become more wicked?"
"No, not her."
"Why not?"
Lila stuck the wool cap on her son's head. "We made a pact when we were children: I'm the wicked one."

💬 didn't expect my reading enjoyment to spike so much w/ Lilas return (I never loved Elena less), but it's nice in a way, to understand how for Elena the world is *more* with Lila in it

📚 Page 135
"(...) she was afraid of being fired, she was afraid of losing a salary that, even though it was miserable, allowed her to love Enzo without considering him fundamental to her survival and that of Gennaro."

💬 want more of Lila at the revolutionaries meet-ups!):

📚 Quote Page 123
"She left in a daze, with the impression of having exposed herself too fully to people who, yes, were good-hearted but who, even if they understood it in the abstract, in the concrete couldn't understand a thing. (...) I know what a comfortable life full of good intentions means, you can't even imagine what real misery is."

💬 LILAS BACK! BEWITCH ME!

📚 Quote Page 105
"And yet even when I lived in other cities and we almost never met, and she as usual didn't give me any news and I made an effort not to ask for it, her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest."

📚 Page 107 - Lila & her son
"I love him —Lila reflected— but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question."

💬 NINO WHEN I GET A HOLD OF YOU, MY GUY, YOUR END WILL BE NIGH

📚 Quote Page 86
"Does he take any interest in the baby?"
She laughed in the darkness, she murmured bitterly:
"A male, apart from the mad moments when you love him and he enters you, always remains outside. (...)"

💬 thought Nino was the enemy, but I see now it was Franco all along with his revolutionary cosplay... pretending like her novel isn't rattling the conservative mindset he so itches to go up against 😡

📚 Quote page 78
I said impetuously: "You're the petit bourgeois, by origin, by education, by behavior."