Sara > Recent Status Updates

"She esteemed her husband, although she did not love him; she was persuaded that a woman owed everything to her duties; but sooner or later the most reasonable woman will fall into folly; and I was the stumbling-block which Heaven, that laughs at the vain resolutions of men, had placed in the path of her romantic notions of virtue."

"Finally, with the authorization of the husband, I kissed the wife, because, according to him, it was better to yield than to have your hair disarranged."

“I think what most people - especially educated, pampered, middle-class white people - consider ‘life problems’ are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.”

“The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.”

“They reserve their fucks for what true my matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. Burritos.”

“‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluessness of it?’ Verity asked. ‘The knowing, for decades, and then managing to do almost nothing to stop it?’”

“‘What’s wrong with where he’s living?’
‘Too near relatives of his,’ Wilf said.
She tried to imagine his future London with completely boring problems, realizing she expected all future problems to be inherently interesting.”

“it never occurred to Edmee that the feminine appetite for possession tends to emasculate every living conquest, and can reduce a magnificent but inferior male to the status of courtesan.”

“The whole lot, simply stomach. Love itself! If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would had to admit there are two kinds of love -
well-fed and ill-fed.”

“Is it possible your so vain? You seem to think you’re unique because you find the post-war world insipid. Don’t flatter yourself to that extent!”

“‘You see, Valerie, how foolish a man can look when reminded of a love which no longer exists? Silly boy, it doesn’t upset me in the least to think about it. I love my past. I love my present.”

"The Hospital had put her back in her proper place, that is to say, among males, among men just young enough, just tamed enough by suffering, for her to live serenely in their midst, and forget her frustrated femininity."

"Telephoning to a discarded mistress is riskier far than holding out your hand in the street to a nervous enemy who tries to catch your eye."

"but he knew that the desire behind this gesture of tenderness and delicate possession was to bring a blush of envy and irritation to the cheek of a young dark-haired nurse who was gazing at Cheri with the candour of a cannibal."

“Black women’s history in its truest sense serves as a historical road map of the failures of mainstream approaches to democracy and an incisive tutorial on how to correct it.”

“An unaccountable weariness followed her every attempt to get back into the bustling life of people with nothing to do.”

“They lacked other friends; and, in their later days, they had become mistrustful, self-indulgent, and cut off from the world, as woman are who have lived only for love.”

“

“Never once had her young lover caught her untidily dressed, or with her blouse undone, or in her bedroom slippers during the day. ‘Naked, if need be,’ she would say, ‘but squalid, never!’”

“we’re not programmed for solitude, but to give and receive.”

“There had been few other. More than loves, they had bee flashes of emotion. Yet he liked to think of them, and magnify their importance, if only to ward of my unbearable memories. The only woman who counted was Roser.”

Marriage suits men, although not women.”

“It takes heroic willpower just to keep everything in place. Those are a refugee’s forebodings, said Roser. No, they’re the forebodings of someone in love, Victor corrected her.”

“Going around in a sulk will get your nowhere. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.”

“Every government has forgotten the poor. That creates violence, and sooner or later the country will pay for that oversight.”

“Nothing can grow in the shade of secrets, she would say, love needs light and space to flourish.”

“Her refusal to hand over the keys to the empty rooms in the family home had given rise to the only argument they had had in more than twenty years, but they loved each other too much to allow that to force them apart.”

“‘Poetry is what stays in your head and isn’t forgotten.’
‘Of course, and music is what you can whistle, isn’t it?’”

“I was thinking, as all people who are honest with themselves know they do, after an intimate revelation of this kind, of myself. Of how this reflected on me.”

“Mostly it’s harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you’ve grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn’t do because they will, these things hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people.”