My Favorite Terrible Thing

by Madeleine Henry

erotic respect

her mind was aroused.

I believe that if a man can arouse a woman's mind, her body will naturally follow.

intellectually excited. Fluttery. Sharp.

from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, from the penultimate chapter. I can almost see it on the page, carrying a whole novel’s worth of anticipation: “I am half agony, half hope. Tell me that I am not too late.”

birds

teacup bodies following on stick legs.

I love the imagery this evokes.

SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE,

“Fifteen years old in this life, and I’ve spent all of them looking for him.”

In every lifetime, I'll look for you, STH

“He felt as familiar as my own hands.”

cerebral people to go mindless.

love that she ran off to—if it’s like the one she wrote about, it could survive every death, disease, and war. It could grow even during the most brutal periods in history, through famines and massacres. It made her feel so intensely, she spent her adulthood writing about it and then traded everything for it.

I have a tight band of options. There’s only so much I can afford.

She had license to be one of a kind. She worked on her own dreams

“There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean . . . and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’”

It’s a heart-wrenching book. About the pain we ignore.

That’s when I fell in love with her depth, her empathy.

“Your first manuscript, it took everything I ever felt and made it all sound important.

Writers are sensitive people.

“In his eyes, I see every person he’s ever been. I see the one who’s been through everything with me, everything this short, wild life has to offer.”

Does living in so many characters erode your sense of self? And,

Jane Austen’s “You pierce my soul”

Emily Brontë’s “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”