Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"I do not find isolation frightening when experienced alone, but isolation shared, being cut off together, seeing your own solitude reflected in another, feeling another's loneliness like a pang in you, like a dread third force - these are shivering things."

"There is a crystalline brilliance in the moonless darkness. It is a night for shooting stars, for planets suspended like portents, for strange lights"

As much as I was loving this last night I also got distracted by Temple Run 2. Oops! It's a dreary Saturday with no plans apart from to spend the day writing but now it's time for a tea break so I can continue with this :)

"Perhaps this is not a story about seafarers and ships, and Finland, and ice, and the dreams of worlds that are gone and others still forming, and nightmares of worlds melting, and the wilderness of an obscure and frozen sea, though it will surely be about those too. Perhaps it is really a story about gulfs inside, about inner uproar contained in silence, about the breakable and about that which cannot be broken."

Exciting library find after reading and adoring The Light in the Dark and after hearing Clare speak at Hay Festival and immediately wanting to devour everything he has ever penned!

Still loving this one, even though it is nothing like what I thought it would be, but it is making for such slow-paced reading so I'm going to switch up my reading for the rest of the evening :)

This book might be incredibly slow paced, quite complex, and with no discernible story-line emerging yet but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day and am super excited to dive back in!

Let's tackle this beast!

Morning coffee and morning reading 😊

"The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club."

So far, I am entirely hooked to everything about this! It feels like a grown up, academic Mean Girls.

"They always end up alone in the stories - witches, I mean - living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and men are mostly cowards."

"People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers."

"It's funny how quickly you descend from civilised young lady to madwoman; it was as if this beastly, boundaryless creature had been living just beneath my skin for years, lashing her tail.

But there are places built for holding beastly women."

"He fell asleep worrying vaguely that he'd developed some sort of murmur in his heart.

The following morning he recognized it as something much more serious: the discovery of his life's purpose."

"A 17th century woman with sewn-shut eyes and mouth walks its streets... enters its homes... watches its people while they sleep."

Love me some nightmares 🙃🙃🙃

"God, Elisabeth, I’ve been doomed since the moment I watched you smack a fiend off my carriage with a crowbar."
...
...
...
#justgirlythings

"It was always wise to be polite to books, whether or not they could hear you."

"She’s giving me a chance to prove that I’m worth training as a warden, she thought. If I fail , I will die. Then at least I’ll have a use. They can bury me in the garden to feed the radishes."

Oddly specific but okay.

4.30am and starting another read because apparently we love having a messed up sleep schedule 😚✌

And then there were four...

NO FREAKING WAY!!!

"Seeing the quotidian masculinity of his interests, laid out across the computer screen like tiles in a mosaic, she felt a kind of despair. This was a man who never liked anything he hadn’t been told to like. A man built by and for advertising."

"Carrying firewood and military-style duffel bags in their twiggy arms, holding hands and jumping into the ocean. Bearing bold smiles of uneven teeth and no-nonsense braids and ponytails, these were girl pirates, girl spaceship captains, warrior princesses – the thrilling, independent societies of children that had existed only in Siobhan’s books."

Okay, so I am utterly enamoured with this book. It is perfection! Haunting, disturbing, morbid, and bleak perfection!

"This is the one night a year that women are allowed to congregate without men. You'd think it would be our opportunity to talk, share, let it all out. Instead, we stand isolated and petty, sizing each other up, jealous for what the other one has, consumed by hollow desires. And who benefits from all this one-uppery? The men...

Sometimes I wonder if that's the real magic trick."

Happy 24in48 readathon to all those taking part. I'm starting my morning with coffee and this read.

"Your heart is a lyre, Robert; but the lot of your life has not been a minstrel to sweep it, and it is often silent."

"I'm feeling it, the purpose and point of our political writings, our struggles. It's not to change the world that can't or won't be changed. It's to leave traces of ourselves for others to hold on to, a lifeline of solidarity that spans time, that passes on strength like a baton from person to person, generation to generation."