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'Will was interested in Vanya's career. But his *brain* wasn't--at least the part that needed to surpass a threshold of ego-relevance before it converted words into meaning.'

Hilarious, awful.

*Care*, from the Teutonic *caru*: trouble, grief. Derived from *karo*, to scream; from Old Norse *kqr*, sickbed. In Modern English: charge, oversight, protection, concern, anxiety. Yes, she would take care: of business. She fell back, pinned under every English word.

'He was the kind of hypocrite who dismissed novels because they were "made up," even though he still watched movies.'

How could people be moral when morality obliged you to know *everything*?

More Henrik:

'It was probably better now that he had a medical excuse to keep his mouth shut, because all he had to talk about was himself. He wanted to talk, but not as much as he didn't.'

RELATABLE.

Henrik:

'He was shy but could do eye contact. People seemed to like him when he drank, so he drank.'

'if you could be manic and depressive, you could probably also be fat and emaciated. He would get better if it killed him.'

'It wasn't that he was falling through the cracks but that he *was* a crack, not crazy but *crazing* like a hunk of schist, full of faults and microvoids, tenuously intact.'

I love him.

'he'd bitten his tongue in his sleep. (A nerve-rich sense organ right between the sharpest, hardest bones powered by the strongest muscles: There was your antiteleological argument. Or evidence of Stupid Design.)'

Amen.

'Against the general current of his insecurity ran a riptide of vanity, insisting in its mirthless way that he *totally* deserved Vanya; that if anything, everyone was unworthy of *him*, they just didn't know it.'

I'm already in love with Tulathimutte for his percipience, his humor, and best of all, his understated compassion for his bratty fucked-up lovable characters.

'Do you want us to turn into one of those conjoined-twin couples who do everything together?'
Not much Will could say to that--because that was *exactly* what he wanted, but admitting it would look needy.

'Her generation's failure was not one of comprehension but of compassion, of splitting the indifference; its juvenile taste for making a mess; its indignant reluctance to clean it up; its limitless capacity for giving itself a break; its tendency to understand its privilege as vindication. And they weren't even happy.'

Interesting to hear it from the lips (er, pen) of a fellow millennial. Suits boomers equally well.

'They'd tuned her out, because political engagement somehow made you a boring caricature of the earnest liberal. She knew she risked coming off as a judgy proselytizing nag, but if she didn't bother them like this, they wouldn't be aware at all.'

Oh, bless.

...Ugh, but there was her problem, *accomplishments*. She wasn't totally convinced that her current experience jihad was useful for her writing, and she *wanted* to be convinced. Of course, eventually *party* had to deflate from verb to noun, but there was no renouncing indulgences you hadn't exhausted.

Auden had his bennies, Milton his opium, Huxley acid, Baudelaire weed, Freud coke, Balzac fifty coffees a day--and Linda did *all* these, plus Xanax. Even hangovers were good, sipping Bloody Marys alone in a dive bar, the slow crawl back to sentience feeling almost like an accomplishment...(cont.).

Okay, spoilers below. You've been warned.
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Mieko and Yasuko orchestrated the rape of Ibuki, who had "no conscious part in it all." Beyond that, Harume's unnamed mental handicap (paired with Mieko's outright prompting) make an unwitting victim of her too. It's rape. Both were raped.

Interesting that both Mikame and Ibuki unconsciously imbue a close mother/daughter relationship with lesbianism. Envying Mieko's closeness with Yasuko, they can't help but sexualize it, thereby translating the closeness to mirror their own desires.

'When a man and a woman have a physical relationship, it never ends there, does it?...I think both people are forever changed.'

Striking. Right or wrong, certain living ghosts certainly make themselves known to me on occasion. Like now.

'Mieko's face blurred into an ever more indistinct white. It seemed a face untouched by either sorrow or regret. The sight of that indestructible face had the effect of setting off in Yasuko a release of her deepest self-destructive urges. A violence shook her, as of ocean waves crashing against a huge, immovable rock.'

Modern Ryo no onna, the mountain to her Masugami daughter-in-law.

'[The power women exert over men by sheer existence] is a stream of blood flowing on and on, unbroken, from generation to generation.'

'Blood' as creation, as the power beyond the grasp and control of men.

...but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others--and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit.

whereas Fujitsubo and Murasaki are women who dissolve their whole beings in the anguish of forgiving men, and thereby create an image of eternal love and beauty in the hearts of the men they love, the Rokujo lady is instead a Ryo no onna: one who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man...

Anyone have a lead on Motoori Norinaga's "The Armpillow"?

'That the beginning of Genji's romance with the Rokujo lady alone should be missing [an encounter aligning her with a particular flower] seems odd indeed, and leads one to suspect that it may have been lost. Motoori Norinaga found the omission so disturbing that he himself wrote a chapter entitled "The Armpillow," based on deductions from later chapters.'

Translation here for anyone who doesn't feel like spending $50 on amazon.

The secrets inside her head are like flowers in a garden at nighttime, filling the darkness with perfume.

She has a peculiar power to move events in whatever direction she pleases, while she stays motionless. She's like a quiet mountain lake whose waters are rushing beneath the surface toward a waterfall. She's like the face on a Noh mask, wrapped in her own secrets.

'Mama: Lord have mercy, where is my plant? (She flies to get it amid the bustling of the family, who are deliberately trying to ignore the nobility of the past moment.)'

No you're crying.

Every time Lindner says "you people," the urge to punch his teeth in grows.

'Beneatha (teasingly, from across the room): Everybody talking 'bout heaven ain't going there!'

Truth.

'Walter: Why you always trying to give me something to eat?
Ruth (standing and looking at him helplessly): What else can I give you, Walter Lee Younger?'

God, my heart. No one deserves the goodness of Ruth.

'Ruth: Oh Walter...(Softly.) Honey, why can't you stop fighting me?
Walter (without thinking): Who's fighting you? Who even cares about you?'

Jesus.

Asagai: For a woman it should be enough.
Beneatha; I know - because that's what it says in all the novels that men write. But it isn't.