Status Updates From Stop-Time

finished: 20) Unambiguous Events

The escaped siblings returning home

Page 278
"Nothing had changed except myself."
Pages 281+282
"But she re-entered reality a different person from the one who had left."

finished: 18) Elsinore, 1953 (Pages 250-272)
finished: 19) The Lock on the Metro Door

Page 262 - Mother's Letters
"Thousands of miles away from her, I discovered she unconsciously accepted her limitations, confining her written statements to a level of almost childish simplicity. She stated facts, nothing more. Her letters were peculiarly dead - dead with all the outward signs of life, like stillborn infants."

finished: 17) Going to Sea

Page 248 - trying to speak French & coming to a debatable conclusion >:)

"They laughed and didn't look up again. I moved away, filled with mysterious shame. But I'd found out what I wanted to know. French, which I'd failed three times in high school, was in fact a real language, spoken by real people. Europe existed."

finished: 16) Losing my Cherry

Page 230

"I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another(...) It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. "I'm a novelist" he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say."

finished: 15) Hanging On

Sly fox :DD

finished: 14) License to Drive

finished: 13) Death by Itself

Page 200
"On the street, out of nowhere, desire swept me away. I wanted to live. I wanted to see something beautiful. Or to die. Anything definite, anything clear, visible and tangible, like dying, or saving someone's life, or being kissed by Jean Simmons."

finished: 12) Nights Away from Home

Page 186 - for the baby
"(...) Jessica was the only complete and uncomplicated love in my life, (....) that it was love and not lack of courage, forcing me to capitulate. Thus works the mind of a child, always a bit behind the world, swamped with emotion, and innocent of its own cunning."

finished: 11) Blindman's Buff

Page 170 - last ditch effort
"Within me a sadness had given way to hopelessness, when faith has evaporated and the imagination is dead, when life seems to have come finally and irrevocably to a standstill. (.....)"

Quotes - About Jean (the born yapper :D)

Page 167
"For an oral maniac the chance to pour word-magic into fresh and captive ears satisfies a need as deep as sex. His delight in himself was reborn."
(...)
He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world --- his image of himself."

Quotes - About his Baby Sister

Page 154
"When she came home her utter helplessness shocked me into loving her. She seemed the quintessence of mortality."

Page 155
"Jessica simply existed, and no matter how hard I looked, that was all I ever knew. There seemed to be no point to her except the fact that she lived."

finished: 10) The Coldness of Public Places

Page 143
"I could not resist the clarity of the world of books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end."

finished: 9) Falling

THIS IS WHY THESE "do you know where your kids are" COMMERCIALS WERE MADE

Page 134
"But after being robbed a couple of times I gave up crossing the park. Luckily I wasn't beaten up. I always seemed able to talk my way out of it. In those days the police ignored children and I saw bad beatings administered a stone's throw from the precinct house. The park was dangerous for a kid on his own."

finished: 8) a Yo-Yo Going Down, a Mad Squirrel Coming Up

Page 121 - about growing up skinny/not working out

"Success wouldve made me another person, or an actor hiding the past. And I wouldn't succeed, I would fail. Failure was dangerous, threatening my only reliable source of strength, my pride. I was proud, and God knows why. I had no reason to be. I'd picked it up somewhere, and it held me together. Better simply to live in my absurd body and not think about it."

finished: 7) Shit

Escaping to the dogs & into his head

100
"For weeks I'd been slipping away, not into the woods as they thought, but down on my hands and knees into Flossie's warren, a wooden box six by three by three."

101
"I am aware of beauty flooding me like a balm, illuminating my insides, making me clean."

105
"The discovery that the dogs, like humans, could not be taken for granted was hard for me."

Page 98
"Jean's and Dagmar's arguing voices - tireless (in a sense it was as if only their voices argued; they became their voices)"

"My defense was to retreat. I became vague around the house. I didn't see things. I didn't hear things. In a way I suppose I went to sleep."

Page 99
"She was such a blissfully stupid dog (...) some inbred genetic catastrophe, (...) making her not so much a dog as like a dog,"

finished: 6) Please Don't Take My Sunshine Away

oh yikes ):

finished: 5) Hate, and a Kind of Music

Page 75
"(...), but in the knowledge that they gave each other nothing, for all the time they had. Can they have understood, as each approached a lonely old age, that they had denied each other's reality? Puppets holding puppet strings, each puppet a puppetmaster, in deliberate ignorance, as if life were no more than a cycle of their separate fantasies, as if (...)

finished: 4) White Days and Red Nights

Page 55
"The smell was overpowering. It was useless to breathe carefully as I'd done outside; here the smell was so pungent and thick it seemed to have taken the place of air - a hot substitute filling my lungs, seeping into my blood, and making me its own creature. With the first deep breath I was no longer an air breather. I'd changed into another species."

Page 47 - Jean and Frank

"He knew of course that it wasn't lions and tigers I was afraid of - by using that image he was attempting to simplify my fear into the realm of childishness (which he could then ignore in good conscience) as well as to shame me out of it."

finished: 3) Going North

P.40
"My mind halts. I'm too young to know what I'm watching. Two women, one old, one young, keeping up appearances."

P.42-44 About Jean
"Jean wanted more than a sign of recognition (...) he wanted you to become him, to discard immediately all ideas of your own(...)"
"He had a certain good-natured stoicism in those days."
"He saw all forms of beauty dimly, but most particularly his own."

finished: 2) Space and a Dead Mule

Page 23 (about his 15 year old sister)
"Her independence was no more than a courageous bluff. But it was all she had. In her loneliness she saw the world vaguely - thus her tendency to color life with ready-made tints."

started reading this Memoir a bit ago but couldn't log it cause it was on its way to Michael as a Christmas present :D 🌲

Finished: 1) Savages
people trying their hardest to recreate "Lord of the Flies" in social experiments needn't look any further than a boarding school full of prepubescent boys - brimming with hormones and self righteousness 😩 brrrr!