Madi > Recent Status Updates

Excerpt from Author's Note: "Something else I want you to know: how glad I am, Constant Reader, that we're both still here. Cool, isn't it?"

"People don't change," Nina said bitterly. "They just get more punctilious about hiding their true selves."

"It's like opening up the back of the machine to see the crude workings grinding away inside. There's a disappointment in the banality of what makes people tick, but at the same time, there's a kind of fascination at seeing the inner coils and cogs."

"Five-year-olds can be incredibly cruel. They say things that no adult ever would - cutting comments about your looks, your family, the way you speak and smell, the clothes you wear. If someone spoke to you that way in an office they'd get the sack for workplace bullying, but at school it's just the natural order of things."

"Driving is like karaoke - your own is epic, other people's is just embarrassing or alarming." This character quote is just perfect, haha.

"The dark grey waves stretched out like a desert - mile upon mile, stretching to the horizon, no sign of land of any kind, nor even a ship."

"The girl in the cabin had been vividly good-looking, but not that delicate, classical loveliness, like a Renaissance painting." lovely description of beauty

"I stood, holding on to the cold painted iron of the railing, and leaned out, looking down, past the glass-walled balconies of the cabins aft, down at the creaming waves at the ship's wake, and the great dark expanse farther out, unimaginably deep and cold." Ahhh how this excerpt makes me long to be on a cruise ship again.

"There's a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part - they're not safe to be let out in public."

"This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass."

"Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self."

"All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse."

"10.18 a.m. Aargh. Mini-cab is suddenly on Marylebone Road - inexplicably deciding on scenic tour of London
instead of route to Victoria. Fight instinct to attack, kill and eat mini-cab driver."

Ahhhh, how I love Bridget

"7.06 p.m. Yes, you see love is not something that happens to you but something you do. So what didn't I do?"

"You've done exactly what it says in Women Who Love Too Much. You've done nothing. Just detached. We
cannot solve their problems for them. We simply detach."
"Right, right," I said, nodding earnestly.
"We don't wish them ill. We don't wish them well. We do not call them. We do not see them. We simply detach."

"What is it about mothers and the phone which, immediately you say you have to go, makes them think of nineteen completely irrelevant things they have to tell you that minute?"

"No sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll - God knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll."

"I thought: 'Now I am like Dante. I walk through hell, but I am not burning.' "

"It requires far more strength to experience emotion than to suppress it" ..I disagree.

"It requires far more strength to experience emotion than to suppress it" ..I disagree.

Only chapter 7 and I've already had enough of this book. Not very deserving of it's "Best book of the year 2016" nomination in my opinion.

"Spanish accountants used to register pieces of eight like this: a P next to an 8. That got to be a burden, so they shortened it like this." He drew an 8 and a P together, rubbed out a few lines, and was left with: $

!!!!!

Wow. Just wow. I'm confused and delighted and have no idea what's going on. In a good way.

“You know what this is really like? Pompeii. By the time it’s over, we’re going to be covered in dust fifty feet thick.”

"Children down in the Cartel States grew up and died thinking that the Colorado River was as much a myth as the chupacabra that Angel’s old abuela had told him about. "

No wonder Hindus worshipped rivers, Angel thought.

"It's the opposite of following your bliss. Brandy tells me, 'Do the things that scare you the most."

Just starting Part 2, and I'm still not too sure how to feel about this book..