Lisa > Recent Status Updates

"if you didn't want to get in the explosive upsurge despite your view which you couldn't help having, you had to have manners and exercise politeness to overcome, or at any rate balance out, the violence, the hatred and the blaming--for how to live otherwise? This was not schizophrenia. This was living otherwise. This was underneath the trauma and the darkness a normality trying to happen."

p. 28 ". . . it would be hard to fathom fingers not getting pointed and words not being added, also being judged in these turbulent times, resulting too, not in having your feelings hurt upon discovering others were talking about you, as in having individuals in balaclavas and Halloween masks, guns at the ready, turning up in the middle of the night at your door."

"if there were passages less palatable to some, was it not the duty of literature to portray life, warts and all?"

"He [the priest in the confessional] reminded me then that there could be no salvation, fishing out, unless my atonement was utter and I resolved henceforth to avoid the sin that in the hierarchy of sins was the most damnable of all." [two unmarried people having sexual intercourse]

Seriously dude, more damnable than murder? or beating your wife?

Finished reading; RTC.

"Back in the convent I studied constantly, not wanting to fail my final examination, as it would mean incarceration for another year. The world with all it sins and guile and blandishments was beckoning. "

"Someday I'd like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said.,"

"Sometimes when I find out what's on other people's minds I honestly wonder if we all live on totally separate planets."

"Could I have this dance for the rest of my life? What a cataclysmic question, when you stopped to think about it. I wondered how it was that anyone on earth ever found the courage to marry."

"Anger feels so much better than sadness. Cleaner, somehow, and more definite. But then when anger fades, the sadness comes right back again the same as ever."

"It was borne in on me at that very young age that I came from fierce people and that the wounds of History were as raw and vivid as the pictures on the packs of cards that had been flung down."

Finished reading; RTC.

"Few of us have the necessary unselfishness to hear with gladness the talents of others extolled or to listen with patience to the success of those whom we despise--Vivian hated it more than most people."

"But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die."

"In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known."

p. 11"As Orly got older, he would explore as we walked, touching and smelling and picking, and as he learned to talk he spoke the names of the plants we saw, and then the seeds we were there to visit, and I began to see, through his eyes, that in fact this job was important. I started imagining the use of these seeds, I imagined the world that would require them."

p. 11 "And with every danger that came upon Shearwater, every struggle, I would think, at least we're not back there, dealing with fires and floods and food scarcity and all the rest of it. At least we were here, in a place that seems hostile until you look more closely. Until you begin to see its beauty and its tenderness. Until you see the hidden abundance of it."

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.