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.