Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 2

The Women Could Fly By Megan Giddings

~She believed that most of what people believed was magic was actually just a way to wash out the accomplishments of women, make their hard work small.~

~I know this is weird, but sometimes when you are older, the worst place in the world might be your own brain.~

~If I die young, don’t let anyone make a podcast about me.~

~”It’s a sort of sculpture set up to attract aliens.”
“How do people know what kind of art aliens like?”~

~He had been a good as a husband could be. Really, truly. But was it possible to ever love someone under duress? How could you ever be certain what you loved was having the most amount of freedom you could have as a woman?~

~The more I heard the more I understood that writing spells was like any other human skill: creativity plus research plus a willingness to make mistakes.~

~I prefer a heightened not-knowing. I don’t like pretending life is manageable. I like all this because it tells the truth about being alive. People are always trying to make the universe smooth through repetitions and routines.~

http://www.megangiddings.com/

Small Miracles by Anne Booth

~’I know this is petty, Lord,’ Margaret prayed, ‘and I am not proud of this, but I need to talk to you about Sister Celia’s false teeth. It’s the way they whistle when she prays, Lord. I feel like I cannot stand one more hour of it.’~

~There was so much wrong with people’s attitudes to girls getting pregnant in the past, here and in Ireland.~

~’Are we religious Sisters just dinosaurs?’ Margaret suddenly prayed in anguish. ‘Do you need nuns any more? Is there a place in the Ark for us? But you killed off the dinosaurs,’ she thought bleakly, if a little confusedly.~

~Don’t you think it’s terrible to pay for a saint?~

~You said, maybe it wasn’t death that was the unheard melody, but eternal life, breaking into ordinary life?~

https://www.annebooth.co.uk/

The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell

~There is a whole word contained inside this small bag of bones.~

~You find that with children who’ve shared a childhood trauma: it’s like a fine wire that runs between you; you can feel the tug on it from time to time.~

~She nodded, submitting to his adoration, even as she felt it diminishing her somehow, making her less.~

~Why did Dad choose us such lame names?~

https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/lisa-jewell-books

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

~Gwendolen was so touched that she wept, but quietly, for her mother would have been monstrously jealous of such emotions. She had claimed grief for her own long ago.~

~You’ve made frame sound very pedestrian, Chief Inspector. It’s a word that seems to demand a sparkle.~

~’I’m not entirely sure what happened, but Pierrots were involved.’

‘Pierrots?’ Frobisher echoed. Dear God, was there no end to the dratted creatures?~

~What on earth did people see in books? They were so boring, although not, the Greek myths, she was willing to make an exception for them. If only books were edible, how much more use they would be!~

~The worst thing was that he laughed all the time, as if it was the greatest joke in the world to try and choke a girl to death.~

https://www.kateatkinson.co.uk/

That Atlas Paradox by Olive Blake

~There is doom to be found everywhere if doom is what you seek.~

~Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless.~

~As with any chronic condition, his survival was a matter of becoming more comfortable, not some elusive unreality of being wholly pain-free. The trick was managing it until it no longer bit so angrily or stung.~

~[C]hildhood is very fragile, and you can’t technically outgrow the fractures.”

~I’m not a zealot. I’m-” A pause to consider. “Inspired.”
“A lovely word for madness.”~

~Destiny was a choice.
Time to torch this outcome and let the fucker burn.~

https://www.olivieblake.com/

Belladonna by Adalyn Grace

~Death was a buzz upon her skin, alerting the fine hairs on her neck.~

~Because death is only a reprieve for the dead., Mr. Thorly. It cares little for those it leaves behind.~

~Those who play a defensive game of checkers will always lose.~

~You dance as though you were made of wires and gears.~

~There is no such thing as true goodness, there is only perception.~

https://adalyngraceauthor.com/

Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

~To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back – I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can.

~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.~

~Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while – better than perfectly, actually – with a set of problems that were not my own.~

~Winning is accepting that there are some races a person cannot win.~

~Disturbingly, for the first time in his life, games proved neither distraction nor comfort. The pain seemed to occupy spaces in his mind that had heretofore been untouched or reserved exclusively for imaginary endeavours.~

~What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”~

https://gabriellezevin.com/

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

~”I came to Yaxaktun because nobody can find you here,” Ramona said with a shrug. “But it’s not the same for others. Others want to be found.”~

~Everywhere Montgomery had been he’d spied the same misery under a different guise. In England it was in the factories, in Latin America it was in the fields. There was always someone with a little more money, a little more power, and he owned you.~

~He called her Carlota because it meant “freedom,” and he thought it would sit her. Yet in the end she still shared her name with an empress…[who]had gone made after they’d executed her husband…~

~Montgomery suspected the doctor was pleased that he drank. How could he have ever imagined the man might object, he didn’t know. It was a way to control him, similar to how he controlled the hybrids, with his sermons and his mystique.~

~If you don’t know the soil, then you can understand how to grow new things…~

https://silviamoreno-garcia.com/

Notes On Falling by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

~When she got to Esther, there was the old pain, lying like a slender steel instrument accidentally left behind after surgery, somewhere between her throat and her belly.~

~Thalia knew right away that the Swedish girl would be like a deep breath in before a dive underwater, the last of which you expelled seconds before you surfaced.

~The house was silent, except for the faint buzz of electrical things. She felt like she was living with appliances now, instead of people.~

~She had realised then that if she stay in that room, if she looked any longer, she would not make photographs.~

~[S]he’d wondered whether it was normal to make excuses for one’s parent.~

~He dropped loose coins from his pockets, as though he needed a trail to find his way back to his room.~

~Falling is a mix of knowing and not knowing.~

@bronwynlv

God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu

~He sat on that bench and talked, speaking Hausa, and Auwal was surprised and flattered in spite of himself, he’d not expected Hausa to be, for this man, a language of tenderness, he’d expected it to be a language for business, a language to be used and discarded and reused.~

~It seemed she had folded her dream and tucked it at the bottom of her box, together with her certificates and medals and old photographs.~

~Every day he lived he felt less like himself. Growth, people called it; he thought of it as estrangement.~

~She could sense his discomfort, slight and well preserved – he was a man with his edges tucked in – but there nonetheless.~

~You wanted to stop, to apologize – but your heart burned, like you had hot charcoal on it, and your tongue was bitter.~

~Tonight, his words dis not come back to him in echoes, but as the responses of passersby, Saint Rita’s parishioners on their way home from Mass, neighbours out in the street, drinking or making their hair.~

~Years later, when his songs would set the continent on fire, when I would stand by my window and look out into Lagos, wondering if leaving him was the biggest mistake of my life, it would be these sounds that I would hear in my memory, of a young man throwing up in my bathroom and a beautiful song playing in the background.~

https://arinzeifeakandu.com/