words I liked: Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

He collected these unwanted words and made them beautiful again, like a child gathering pieces of sea glass along the shore.

I usually start these posts with some thoughts about the book, but this quote jumped out as being a lot like the feeling I get from collecting the words from books I have read (with the exception that these words are not at all unwanted).

There were a bunch of sentences used to describe characters that I just enjoyed, and wanted to remember or hold on to:

She hates authority but loves structure.

Avery would like to be all backbone, but she is tender flesh too.

She was a carnival of feelings she never tried to hide.

He had the coloring of a golden retriever and the same seemingly indiscriminate desire to please.

He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.

…he was more at home in his body than in his mind.

His face was beautiful in its contradictions.

Then I loved the creativity of how these capture the way we can be consumed by some type of work or other calling:

Avery used work the way she used to use drugs: to drown out the world.

It can be grueling, lonely, and punishing, but, if it is really your calling, it is not a choice.

She had been a boxer for so long she’d forgotten to become a person.

…but there was also a freedom in having her life narrowed to one singular purpose.

What a beautiful way of capturing the conundrum that something can be strength, stability, and at the same time… weight:

…whose self-assuredness was like an anvil anchoring every conversation they had.

…then this to describe being grounded:

She had found, for the first time in her life, her feet.

Social interactions, not always easy:

She had, she felt, all the social grace of a grizzly bear.

…and conversation may not always flow like water:

…seemed to treat most interactions as negotiations in which she was primarily concerned with getting out alive.

Contrasted with a visceral description of the sensation of a conversation that is magic:

His words popped against her skin like bubbles.

…and that moment right in the middle of a conversation. When you have leapt into bravery, and wait to see how it lands:

The words hung between them, vibrating.

The physical manifestation of that sense of connection, distilled into words:

…they leaned toward each other, like plants for whom the other was the sun.

I never knew that a sense of connection between two people was so botanical:

…they were wedged close to each other like two daffodils in the same pot…

…but then sometimes there’s a reason we combine the words human and nature into a single phrase:

Her inner weather, once calm, had become stormy again.

She was beautiful the way nature is beautiful, eternally.

I just loved the way that this sentence evoked the memory of how we have all felt at least once while soaking in the sun:

The sun glowed golden through the skin of her eyelids.

Speaking of glow, these two captured the essence of one who brings warmth to the world:

She gave beautiful Christmas presents that somehow captured both who the recipient was, and who they wanted to be.

…and another who just seems to bask in existing:

For Peachy, life was a door in which he was always on the list.

The irony (the message?) of typing this sentence out in the wee hours of the morning is not lost on me:

Chiti had always slept the deep sleep of the innocent, sliding from wakefulness to slumber as easily as slipping her body from a dock into a lake.

May have highlighted this line of dialogue for the personal reminder:

“Negativity isn’t some higher version of reality. It’s just being judgmental.”

This passage of dialogue explained addiction to me in a way that I had never understood before:

“You know what I think really makes me an addict?” she asked. “It’s not how many drugs I took or how much I drank. It’s not even the lying.”

“What?”

She inhaled so deeply that her lungs burned.

“I find what gives me pleasure and I do it until it gives me pain,” she said. “Every time.”

An interesting take on living with the events of your past:

“Things happen and we have to learn to live with them ... If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them. The meaning is an afterthought, an anesthesia. Happens is the only word in that statement that’s empirical. The rest is whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Let’s just put these passages under the category of feelings:

She was being a coward and she knew it. She was making Chiti voice Avery’s feelings as well as her own, a cruel ventriloquy.

The shame wave that followed this thought was so violent, she involuntarily brought her hands to her mouth to stop herself from crying out as it washed over her.

She’d heard once that guilt was for something you’d done - you could feel guilty for a certain behavior or action but still fundamentally know you were a good person - but shame was deeper, shame was for who you were.

“I think they’re trying to fall in love with life again…”

…but it felt like maintenance as opposed to lust.

It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was the time in between what was so hard.

She wanted to find a trapdoor in her mind and disappear down it, to the place where memories couldn’t reach her anymore…

I think this might be how many feel about a Taylor Swift concert (it was about a Spice Girls concert, an earlier era):

The concert was three hours of heaven, all of them scream-singing the words to every song along with thousands of other girls, lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth.

If you just choose to be kind, the impact will occasionally be monumental:

Lucky had not expected that, this kindness in the face of her badness. She didn’t deserve it, yet her it was, simple as the offer of morning coffee. It was so surprising, it didn’t even occur to her to make up a plausible lie.

That feeling of a passionate moment, distilled onto the page:

He tried to say her name again, but she stopped his mouth with her.

…and:

He kissed her and it felt like trying to stand still in a great, billowing wave as it crashed over her head.

Finally two great sentiments to remember in life, and end this post:

…you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.

…and:

As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.

words I liked: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This was just an engaging story from start to finish, and I loved the author’s use of language.

A couple of broad quotes on life:

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy.

You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing.

And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same.

…whenever people asked him how his poems were going, he’d answer that he was just “living the poems he wasn’t writing.”

Expendable may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good.

That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.

That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.

My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside-down up until that moment…

“I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.”

She paused for a moment.

“It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

Living life passionately, searching for moments of beauty:

…his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.

Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.

…there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

But we still don’t really know what we’re doing in life most of the time:

He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

This one was on somebody trying to overcome addiction:

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well”

There was so much on thought and language that I loved:

Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying - briefly - what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom.

…including the idea that language is a tool that gives shape to thoughts:

It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity.

…that there can be a speed to language and thought, and how it works when they are running at different speeds:

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good a listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

There was also a lot of beautiful words around the concept of moments. This one describing moments as having a current, like water:

Something in her seemed to have relaxed a little, conceded to the moment’s current.

…and that moments can have texture:

…trying to be better about noticing these moments, about feeling grateful for the texture and specificity they lent his life.

…similarly silence having a texture that can be measured:

They sat there for a few seconds, then a full minute, each quietly measuring the texture of the silence, the history between them.

…and looping back towards how silence relates to moments.

The silence was a mercy for which each felt grateful as their hearts calibrated to the moment, to the day’s wild and vertiginous revelations.

There was also much that related to being present in a moment that exists:

Whatever pretensions and high purpose he’d once held for his future gave way to the delicious primacy of the present.

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”

“I had a friend too, a novelist,” she said. “And one time I asked her about whether she plots out her books in advance and just fills in the details, or if she moves through the story as she writes it.

She looked at me and without skipping a second, she answered like an oracle: ‘Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?”

Clever use of language is not always clear though:

“And I feel so inadequate. Like, just the writing of it, trying to put it into language. It feels so damned.”

The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.

I thought there were some great uses of language to describe, to invoke an image of something. This to describe a physically large, but not particularly intelligent person:

…waddling around inside our house inside his muscles, inside a body grown two sizes too large for his brain.

…and invoking particular occupations to give shape to the image of a person’s physical features:

Zee’s thumbs were like miniatures of Zee himself, compact but muscular, sturdy and strong. They could have belonged to a masseuse or a sculptor, a seamstress or a carpenter.

This use of analogy to help the reader envision an emotion:

Shame flooded him immediately, like seawater filling a lung.

This was just a powerful description:

…it was a hate that made nothing happen.

It was something I’d come to love about her, in time. It wasn’t narcissism, the way she was always looking at herself. I recognized later there was a kind of wonder in it, running her fingers over her smile lines, the skin of her forehead, as if to say, “Where did you come from? This skin, what a strange envelope!”

A description of what it’s like when sharing a substantial story about the past with a new person goes well:

Orkideh had held that conversation so carefully.

Related to nothing else, the last few quotes are just words that I enjoyed and wanted to be able to refer to later:

Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.

…they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

…the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you…

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

words I liked: Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill

This was an interesting book with a fascinating individual profiled by somebody who was close to him without necessarily being intimate.

I read it because a book by Stephen King on writing listed it as an example of interesting wordcraft.

So much of the book is about the stories that were told, and the own memories of Sinatra. But how much can we rely on memory, or stories told, as an accurate representation?

“Sometimes I think I know what it was all about, and how everything happened,” he said one rainy night in New York. “But then I shake my head and wonder. Am I remembering what really happened or what other people think happened? Who the hell knows, after a certain point?”

Time can also soften both the image of a person, and that person’s care to control the entirety of their story:

Or perhaps, by the time I knew him, he had just grown out of his angers, exhausted them, and settled for what he was and the way he was regarded.

There were lots of interesting anecdotes about people and life other than just Sinatra in the book.

I picked this one out it evokes a certain imagery about the life and mind of somebody who lived a large part of their life in the night:

…insomniacs without wives can always be reached…

Just a really interesting way to describe what people are like when seeking to establish their identity:

…must have felt like characters in search of an author.

A good description of how to live in the moment:

She never looked back very much. She was alive today and looked forward to tomorrow.

…and grounding yourself, and making yourself, in reality:

…she was more concerned with living in the world as it was. And prospering in it.

One way to deal with a future that is looking dark:

Perhaps the apocalypse was here, the songs declared; if so, let’s dance.

…and there are both ups and downs in life.

…had come to realize that life was not one long string of triumphs.

Talking about the solitude that can be involved in being an only child, and how this can lead to performing or seeking an audience of some kind:

That is, he must go beyond the older people in his life, and find an audience. And he (or she) must find ways to deal with the deepest loneliness: the hours after the audience is gone and the boy closes the door to his room.

“There’s nothing worse when you are a kid than lying there in the dark,” he said to me once. “You got a million things in your head and nobody to tell them to.”

There is a lot in the book about Sinatra’s loneliness:

Across a lifetime he would make many attempts to relive loneliness, submerging it in marriages and love affairs, hard-drinking camaraderie, bursts of movement and action and anger, but the only thing that ever permanently worked was the music.

This is an amazing compliment from one singer to another:

“Every time Bing sang, it was a duet, and you were the other singer.”

I thought this paragraph about Bing Crosby was an interesting insight into how technological developments change the way that performers reach their audience. In this case the microphone and camera for a singer.

He knew he didn’t have to hit the second balcony with the belting style forced upon Broadway singers. The microphone permitted a more intimate connection with the audience. He didn’t have to italicize his acting in movies, the way theater-trained actors did; the close-up allowed him to be natural.

words I liked: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book had so much beautiful writing to capture. The story itself is touching. There so many themes of love, friendship, life and achievement.

A really interesting way to capture the way and the reasons that we might segment the loves in our lives:

Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind … Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often forgiving lens.

I just love this turn of phrase - she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes:

…she slammed the door, and then once she was alone, she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes.

Loving doesn’t have to mean fixing the problem, always a useful reminder:

Freda simply nodded and took Sadie in her arms. “Oh, my love, this must be a very great loss.” She … canceled her afternoon, and she took Sadie to lunch at her favourite restaurant”

Attention is a form of love:

No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did.

Sometimes all you need to do, is choose to stay:

He was about to leave, but then he didn’t.

… and a reminder of how easy it can be, to be meaningful:

…he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so.

There are all kinds of friendship:

They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it.

Don’t forget to check for whether careful handling is required:

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

…and sometimes flexibility is strength:

Somehow, Sam was able to bend to her criticism in a way that he had never been able to before.

When we are young, we are brave by default. We don’t know any different:

The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.

…but maybe we can choose that same bravery, even once we have learned a little:

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

After all, why stop playing?

“You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.”

“That’s a good philosophy.”

I can’t quite put the words to what these ones capture, but they belong together:

He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

“How do you get over a failure?”

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.”

While Sadie experience this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

This one does need a bit of an understanding of the story itself to appreciate. The beauty is that in the same sentence it captures the harrowing absence, yet enduring presence, of a love:

Sadie’s instinct had been to tell Sam, but they weren’t speaking at the time.

A reminder to embrace the doing and the creating:

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

If you have read the story, it’s hard not to love Marx, and Marx knows love:

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

…and:

“I rather like to be consumed.”

…capturing a certain kind of love:

Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.

There is beauty to be found in the world:

It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

When you look for it, it’s everywhere:

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favourite fruit, or had they just now become his favourite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?

To embrace the beauty in life, fill your infinite days with something!

“I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

writing skills: David Copperfield

I usually title these posts “words I liked” which I am reluctant to use in this case because what I liked about the words I have picked out of David Copperfield was how they invoked a feeling towards a character - feelings of dislike.

The skill or the sentiment was actually captured very well by Owen King, speaking about his father Stephen King and his ability to add “… a touch of sneer to an abrasive character.”

With that in mind I give you these gems, crafted to inspire your disdain for Uriah:

…replied Uriah, with a writhe

…his damp cold hand felt so like a frog in mine…

…and a snaky undulation pervading his frame from his chin to his boots…

He sat, with that carved grin on his face…

…he gasped rather than smiled at me, he writhed and undulated about, in his deferential servility…

…that crawling impersonation of meanness…

Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his shadowless eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.

…he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishey fingers…

…with a writhe of his ungainly person…

His eyes, as he looked at me, seemed to take every shade of color that could make eyes ugly.

…he reminded me of an ugly and rebellious genie watching a good spirit.

I now saw him with his mask off. The suddenness with which he dropped it, when he perceived that it was useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed; the leer with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he had done…

He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly. It’s his only compensation for the outward restraints he puts upon himself. Always creeping along the ground to some small end or other, he will always magnify every object in the way; and consequently will hate and suspect every body that comes in, in the most innocent manner, between him and it. So, the crooked courses will become crookeder, at any moment, for the last reason, or for none.

words I liked: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

I really enjoyed reading this, the author posted on Instagram a really good explanation of how she feels and thinks about the romcom genre:

It’s not about a formula, any more than any other genre, though that’s how romances often get oversimplified in discussion. Some people scoff at the concept of a genre with a guaranteed “happy ending,” but the truth is, we all know the characters’ lives go on after the book ends. They’ll suffer other hurts. They’ll struggle. We’re with them for just a moment. But in that moment, there is so much hope.

That’s why this kind of story is so important to me. Sometimes our world is shitty. It’s unpredictable and terrifying and cruel and we constantly have to find ways to hold joy in our hearts even when we’re tired, grieving, or angry. We hang onto and believe in that hope: that no matter how bad things get, there is a force on earth that makes life brilliant, beautiful, and worth living.

Love is what holds us together when everything falls apart. It’s not about one singular happy ending we’re aiming for. It’s about weighing all those moments of sheer joy throughout our lives as heavily as they deserve.

On to the book itself, this about two sisters’ love was nice:

I didn’t know it was possible to miss a person this much while she was sitting right next to you, so badly everything in you aches.

As a slow reader I liked this turn of phrase:

Libby’s not a startlingly fast reader. She absorbs books like they’re bubble baths…

An expression of a more urban, densely populated life:

…the feeling of being one person among millions, as if you’re all nerve endings in one vast organism.

Love and passion in cooking terms!

I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.

This resonates:

…that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems…

…and this!

“You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

…and more:

Some books you don’t read so much as live, and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. Like if I surface too fast I might get the bends.

Being brought tangibly in touch with your past:

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

Did I mention that I love words?

I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.

…and:

Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.

Lastly:

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.

Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

words I liked: Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

There was a technique in this book where an ancient and a current timeline were somehow connected. I never quite grasped how it came together, but I did like a lot of the writing.

These ones may be viewed as pessimistic, or as appreciating that the impermanence of things makes appreciating them in their time more important:

Everything crumbles in time, but that which is conceived as a ruin is forever perfect in its ruination.

…and:

…even the mountain would erode, slowly but completely, and someday cease to be.

Related, and an example of how language can aid connections:

‘You know, in Chinese, the word “forget” is wang ji. And how we say the word “remember” is ji de. So the two are linked by a common root, ji. But in English it doesn’t make sense. Forget. Remember. There’s nothing telling you that these to words are related. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?’

Again on language and memory:

‘…If only there was an authority on the English language! I would write to them and request that they fix “remember” and “forget”. Because to me, the natural opposite of “remember” is “dismember”.’

‘But that’s already a word.’

Yuan sighs. ‘En, I know. That’s what I mean. It’s too messy, the English language! But when a memory eludes me, like the edges of a dream, where no matter what I try I can’t remember the details - only it was important and now I have lost it maybe forever - then I am dismembered. I have lost a part of myself. Violently so. That is actually how I feel. A dismemberment.’

It this about books, or about people?

‘Why didn’t you just buy it from a bookstore?’ I ask.

‘I like library books. They have more personality. They never quite belong to you and must leave you eventually. So you race through them to make sure you don’t have to return them unfinished, and savour every minute you have together.’

This one definitely people:

Each day we part, and the next day it is as though we have become strangers all over again and must find some way to know each other once more, to dust off the rusty rhythms, fall back into step.

From the ancient timeline part of the story:

Once, staring into the Moonlit Pagoda, He had come very close to asking for help, though for what exactly He was not quite sure.

How we carry our past:

…for now that he had placed his aches, he could no longer misplace them.

Capturing the magic moment when we are in the throes of drink and good company:

…we spend the next few minutes with arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting at the bottle, scrutinising it, its secrets ever more clear to us with every subsequent swig. We take turns telling each other extremely funny jokes. We feel our brains enlarging by the second, approaching a perfect understanding of everything. Somehow, in the babbling stream, we have rediscovered our vestigial tongues.

Now, nothing is beyond us.

…followed by a succinct capture of the state that may result after that magic moment:

I am not yet properly calibrated to the day.

These two on speaking, and words:

‘Then don’t you see? To profess is to tell the world, but you are a confessor, in this and all things.’

…and:

It is hard to know, anymore, if we are still playing with words, or if we are saying real things.

I felt a little disappointed at the end of this book, but revisiting all the beautiful phrasing has made me appreciate reading it much more.

The grass grows tall and tangles everything into stillness

I just loved this sentence from writer TheBigCat over here.

on being small in the world

Two bits that I’ve always liked, speaking about being small in the world.

I Like Giants, a song by Kimya Dawson:

Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone

Say you are huge look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun

Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky

Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

An extract from On The Vanity of Existence, an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer:

...if we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria; or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another in so tiny a space! And whether here, or in the little span of human life this terrible activity produces a comedic effect.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.

guilty

Read and liked this extract from The Vanity of Existence by Arthur Schopenhauer:

We are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim; they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!

words I liked: In Pieces by Sally Field

This book was written by Sally Field about her life. Without giving it away, there was a lot of trauma.

Even if it’s not necessarily nice to read about, there were still some beautiful phrases:’

all of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding

A wonderful way to describe a place that’s missing that sense of being home:

a place to stop but not to live

Describing someone in her life:

He had an intuitive sense of anyone’s despair and like a hound dog on the trail of fugitive feelings, he’d root them out, lock his focus on the injury, then comfort and soothe.

On a relationship between two people, but growing as individuals:

how do two people grow up together, build strength in their own legs, when they’re always leaning on each other?

The challenge of sharing:

stuffed to the brim with words that pleaded to be spoken but unable to get the first word out

On assumptions in relationships and conversations:

I pushed away from her, filling in the blanks with my own answers as clearly as if I’d heard the words

Lastly, our past is not our fate:

We’re all locked into the drumbeat of our history, but eventually you have to drown out that tune with your own voice.

beautiful sentences: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Just some sentences that I thought were a beautiful arrangement of words. It’s fair to say I loved reading this book.

There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.

There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a … form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

…thought has seared your head with its lines, and passion branded your lips with fires

Time if jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses

“Ah this morning! You have lived since then.”

Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.”

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

…eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose.

The sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. The panes glowed like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a faded rose.

The moment was lost in vulgar details.

“…if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration”

He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern.

dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

“When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.”

It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin.

departures

Will you be OK?

I’m a tree. I’ve done this a thousand times before.

Done what?

Goodbyes.

Really?

Think about it. Leaves.

From Still Life by Sarah Winman, page 117 on the paperback copy I have.

This book was given to me as part of a workplace secret santa! Never has there been a more perfect secret santa gift.