Nicholas > Recent Status Updates

This appears to be a very intense part of the book. Jean Louise is struggling between two very different worlds and attempting to defend the one she's been in for years (New York).

"Blind, that's what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people's hearts."

She was right in more ways than one. It's hardly any different then what people are doing today. It's just more accelerated.

“You are fascinated with yourself. You will say anything
that occurs to you, but what I can't understand are the things that do occur to you. I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth.”

Talk about intense.

…something's wrong with me, it's something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.

Why doesn't their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I'm not. I'm something else and I don't know what.

“A woman’s life was a house of closed doors: she could not be an apprentice, she could not study at the university, she could not be a priest or a physician, or shoot a bow or fight with a sword, and she could not marry without submitting herself to the tyranny of her husband.”

“Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.”

It's pretty interesting to learn how they actually char some of the barrels in and even have a scale for the AMOUNT of charring in order to make the perfect bottle. I'm not a connoisseur by any means, but it's captivating the detail they put into it.

"...but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans - trash."

I've never related so much to how I feel about certain people than this sentence.

"With the same suddenness that a barbarous boy yanks the larva of an ant lion from its hole to leave it struggling in the sun..."