Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

The pain just leaps right off the page and straight into my heart!

"My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”

"There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them."

"there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now."

"our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and meaning only under the eyes of love."

"The day is stark and stiff as a linen shroud. But it will soften; it will warm. At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps... Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow...all are mine.”

"With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses."

“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”

"to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war."

"Some things we choose to disregard: the cruelty of newspapers
the casual chat of holidays the world and how it now appears."

"Whatever language the trees speak in the temple of the forest:
the knot of dark eyes signalling in the goat willow's eastern skin
or the spiny caterpillar making letters on the branches
it is as familiar to me as sunset must be to nightfall.
Not to be read but be understood says the trickle of the river"

"I go down into the dark mines where my name clings like a horseshoe
and deeper until the stream of my blood runs as black as the coal.
In Kimberley diamonds have grown into the walls for thousands of years.
The mines dug out by hand have left countless thousands dead having not
chosen the underground if they could help it. And so bright diamonds
is what I think of diamonds grown without a thimbleful of light"

"What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?"

“to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul."

"Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms."

“it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.”

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

“Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look... He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. World's had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow...”

"I had a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. I grew afraid and turned to quit the room. It was not conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape."

Didn't manage to finish all the books I sad I would, in February, but this is my first March priority.

Took myself to a coffee shop to binge through the last half of this 🖤 Happy self-care Saturday!

"Books cannot fight for themselves."

Fantastical school settings will never not intrigue me!

"When you steal a book you steal from the world."

"Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?

"Death and danger do not come with trapping. They can come to you in the sweet breath of your beloved."

"I think it's easy to take understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you."

He a hefty boy, compared to the rest of his series!

"Our enemies had to pay. Those heartless, faceless others who had stolen so much. It was a fire consuming the dark. Fanning us with its flames. Searing a brand right across our hearts."