Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"Ghost stories like to hide from us, dress themselves in a dozen veils... I always try to explain this by comparing them to a labyrinth. Each one is full of traps and surprises, full of characters that hide between the hedges and love to jump at the poor writer who is trying to find his way through. There are whispers. A story likes to keep its secrets, but it also likes to be chased, found out, hunted and tamed. "

"Now I realize that everyone has imagination, but being brave and comfortable enough to risk expressing it is the hard thing. "

"I wouldn’t keep my stories safely hidden away. I would send them off to be judged, and expose my fragile, iridescent bubble-dreams to the jagged edges of the real world."

"A story is a whole thing in itself, like a melody, to which it is related. It must make sense in relation to itself. It is a wonderful pattern snatched out of the chaos. I try not to take it apart like a pocket watch fearing that I may not be able to reassemble it."

“It was a river reflecting light, but it was also a breast heaving with emotion. She tried to explain this to the tree.”

“One should never look at what one loves too early in the morning - the things we love are too fragile so early in the day”

“Time was a necklace; each bead a gleam on her grave.”

“life and death were two maniacs locked in a well-matched struggle.”

That's my audio listening sorted for my next few mornings runs and puppy walks :)

This is far too tense to be reading so close to midnight!!

And just when I thought this book couldn't get any more fucked up...

Someone tell me why I put this book down for a few weeks, because now I've picked it back up I think I'm unable to put it down until it's complete!

"Did death die tired from having killed?"

"Man lives between earth and air, is made of water, and lives imprisoned"

"Another summer ended. It was as though all the dead autumns were the same, with their relentless insistence on returning. Autumn was here again."

"how we perished, each alone."

“Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt."

"Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness...The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, brings the wave lapping blue to the shore."

"from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, peurile, and inhumane than love, yet it is also beautiful and necessary."

"We must all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for."

"life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”

“It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

"Books, she thought, grew of themselves."

My shelves can relate.

"distant views seem to outlast by a million years the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest."

I want to read everything and nothing, today. I can always count on Virginia, though.

"even though I was afraid of night, I liked it more than daytime because you could see things too clearly in the light, and the utter hopeless ugliness of some things became too enormous."

"Souls have no mouths, so they spoke to us through the voice of the wind."

"The sun-dappled light was different now that spring had arrived, reborn after living beneath the earth and within branches."

your art
is not about how many people
like your work
your art
is about
if your heart likes your work
if your soul likes your work

loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself