Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 5

Portrait Of A Thief by Grace D. Li

~In the end, every child of immigrants had the same story. “At first, it felt like running away.”

~Loss was the hesitation in his voice when he spoke his mother tongue, the myths he did no know, a childhood that felt so vast and alien from his parents’ that he did not know how to cross it.~

~Lily had never known how to love a place and not leave it behind.~

~Grief was another foreign country, and David was alone.~

~We’re children of the diaspora…All we’ve ever known is loss.~

~All parents leave their own scars. We’re the ones who have to heal from them.~

https://www.gracedli.com/

Our Lady Of The Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga

~The laborer approached the table. Gakere pushed the few notes and coins owed toward him, the laborer pressed an ink-blackened finger next to his name, and Gakere muttered a few words to him as he marked the list with a cross. So for an entire day, Gakere was again the chief he had once been.~

~There were only two Rwandans on the entire teaching staff of the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile: Sister Lydwine, and the Kinyarwanda teacher, naturally. Sister Lydwine taught History and Geography, but she made a clear distinction between the two subjects: History meant Europe, and Geography, Africa.~

~Mother Superior bombarded the ministry with desperate letters. The French teacher’s shamefully long hair was a threat to every moral, both civic and Christian, and imperiled the future of Rwanda’s female elite.~

~I went to a Queen’s funeral once, a very long time ago. We weren’t supposed to say the Queen was dead. We said: ‘She’s drunk the mead.’~

~Sure, it’s not like the other Marys. It’s black. The whites put black makeup on her. Probably to please us Rwandans, but her son in the chapel, well, he remained white.~

https://scholastiquemukasonga.net/en/

The Tea Ladies Of St. Jude’s Hospital by Joanna Nell

~’Until you’ve been to Giza and seen what those ancient Egyptians built with their bare hands, you can’t possibly understand.’ Hilary stood back and admired the arrangement.
She and her husband had ‘travelled’. Money bought stories, and in this case, guaranteed the final word on fruit buns.~

~Nancy was right: sending money wasn’t the same as giving up precious time.~

~It wasn’t that joy was trying to look younger anymore. Past a certain age, really, who cared?…What she feared, more than her fading youth, was becoming irrelevant. She wasn’t ready for invisibility. The bright colours saved her from being overlooked.~

~’This is a hospital,’ Joy replied in a low voice. ‘People are allowed to act a bit strangely.’~

~’My mother waited her whole life to use this tea service. She’d always kept it for special occasion.’…
‘Did your mother ever get to use it?’ Joy enquired.
“Only at her funeral.’~

~’Are you sure you want to hear my shit?’…
‘Are you kidding? Your shit is the reason I get up every day.’~

https://www.joannanell.com/

My Mess Is A Bit Of A Life by Georgia Pritchett

~I used to worry about the monsters under my bed a lot. Were they comfy enough? How could they sleep on hard floor surrounded by crumbs and dust? Sometimes I slept under the bed so that they could have a turn on top.~

~I used to worry that if I went inside, the cupboard might actually be a Time Machine and it would take me back in time. From what I’d gathered, history had nothing to recommend it. Dinosaurs, wars and, worst of all, terrible loos.~

~Every afternoon, he would go out shopping. i always felt he was shopping for characters rather than groceries. We talked about writing. I thought that if you started writing one minute earlier or one minute later, the story would turn out completely differently (for the budgie) whereas he felt the story was there, waiting for you to excavate it.~

~One way of knowing you have crossed from girlhood to womanhood is that men stop furtively masturbating at you from bushes and start shouting things at you from cars. It’s a beautiful moment. There should be some kind of ceremony.~

~The first one I wrote for was The Real McCoy, described as a ‘black sketch show.’I am not black, but I was told being a woman was close enough.~

~The dizzying cycle of hope and despair creates an uncomfortable dichotomy. You are empty of baby but pregnant with longing.~

~The producers were not always thrilled to have me on the team, but I enjoyed the challenge of trying to win them round. I remember the pride I felt when one said, “This isn’t actually the worst thing I’ve ever read.”~

@georgiapudding

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The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

~Unbeknownst to almost everyone who unfolds one and trusts it to take them to where they want to go, there’s a long-standing practice among cartographers of hiding intentional errors-phantom settlements-in their works.~

~How could a burglar break in to a building without actually breaking in to a building?~

~You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist.~

~Could a perfect map only be developed for a perfect world? Or would the perfect map make the world within it perfect?~

~Nothing else matters about a map unless you know its purpose.

http://pengshepherd.com/

The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz

~Listen you tight-fisted pea-brained grouse-shooting tweedy twat…~

~Thankfully I was taking a breather in my hotel room when I received this bombshell, which meant I could let out a semi-hysterical “WHAT THE ACTUAL BUGGERING FUCK?” without attracting an audience.~

~Self-realization. Self-actualization. Language straight out of those crappy self-help books I used to semi-read. But it turns out they were right: figuring out – no, confronting – who you really are, what you’re capable of and not capable of is a game changer.~

~Marriages typically symbolize the ending of the story. The happily ever after. There’s a reason why no one wants to see Cinderella 2: The Divorce. Or Beauty and the Beast: The Battle for Custody of the Candlestick or whatever the fuck that thing was.~

~SO DISAPPOINTED WITH THE ENDING!! What was the writer thinking???~ (Yes, that’s a quote, and it made me laugh.)

https://www.sarahlotz.com/

Nobody Knows What To Say Anymore…

End of April’s newsletter is out. I will confess, this month there are no book highlights. To use another book’s title, this entire pandemic has been One Damn Thing After Another. April was particularly brutal, and my ability to focus on reading a tale has taken a temporary knock.

Nonetheless, if you would like to join the monthly book chat and news, please do, by clicking here. (Please then check your spam folder for the confirmation email, as that seems to be where they go.)

Thank you!

Wild And Wicked Things by Francesca May

~People said the witches who had first discovered the island lived on in the bodies of the crows that flocked on every street corner and bare-branched tree.~

~The true witching hour was the morning after a party, any time after the last straggler passed out in the fountain and before eight o’clock.~

~I need you to love me.~

~Death does not answer the call of this magic. It waits hungrily for the witch who does not heed its warning.~

~I bought these chairs before I understood that people really do want glamour, not comfort.~

@franwritesstuff

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The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths

~’It’s a locked room mystery,’ says Tony. ‘Like in the books.’
‘Nothing,’ says Nelson, ‘is like it is in the books.’~

~’It’s hardly the bubonic plague,’ she says.
‘I expect that’s what they thought about the bubonic plague once, says Tony~

~’I knew they’d be friends,’ says Kate, putting her arms round the dog.
‘They’ve destroyed my Votes For Women Cushions,’ says Ruth, looking at the shreds…
‘That’s because they’re male chauvinists.’~

~Fightback sounds as if the battleground is even, instead of the virus having all the weapons.~

~But people still get cancer in a pandemic.~

https://ellygriffiths.co.uk/

In The Company Of Men by Véronique Tadjo

~We are the trees. Our roots run all the way down to the heart of the earth, and we can feel the beat of her pulse. We inhale her breath. We taste her flesh. We live and die in the exact same spot, never moving from the land we occupy. Both prisoners and conquerors of time, we stand riveted to the ground yet soaring upward, reaching for the clouds…We are the link between Man and his past, his present, and his unpredictable future.~

~Pity is a death sentence.~

~Yes, by the time they’re dying they’re no longer children.~

~It’s no use our knowing that all paths lead to death, that life is but a stage, that eternity’s the road to nowhere, that Man must die in order to ripen in the memory of his descendants; the evidence is nonetheless irrefutable: Death is not pretty.~

~But being admitted to a hospital is like entering some kind of underworld. Everything goes dark. You become disorientated. There’s nothing left except inside and outside. Time’s your master, its power is absolute, and you must submit. You must wait for your organism to recover its balance and regain the place it lost.~

~It’s time for people to realise something: they aren’t good, they’ve never been good…Everything rots. Everything disintegrates. Everything merges with the the ground.~

https://veroniquetadjo.com/