Celena > Recent Status Updates

I've come to believe that the toughest creature on earth is the teenage girl

Some things are better kept in other people's memories.

The purpose of the trip was to put out fires. Not so that I could hand you a brand new box of matches.

Death rarely changes how we feel about someone. Heightens it, more often than not.

Or is it the small defeats that we can't get over? ...The big early defeats change the course of our lives. The small ones don't change us, but they stay with us and torment us, little thorns in our side.

Paintings halt the march of time. I had you painted back then so you would stay young and I with you. Gundlach

You had a steady life. Mine feels like a vase that fell to the floor and shattered into pieces. (Hardening back to earlier description of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase as 'a cubist figure, breaking up in the moment of descent') pg 85

A woman's third stupid role, after the trophy and the muse, is the damsel in distress who must be rescued by the prince.

As if I would still be the same person I was back then, when we sat on a bench together. Is that how it is with things that don't quite come to an end?

Now, even the simple act of reading awoke a yearning for a different life, in a different world.

Two men have got into a mess and want to sort it out, and whether they succeed depends on the woman.

The opposite of good is not evil, but good intentions.

...people who find novels more colourful than history are not taxing their imagination...Tragedies and comedies, good and bad luck, love and hate, joy and grief - history offers it all. Novels can't offer more.

Paintings don't come to rest, and neither do people,

To find everything in a woman, to find it all again; the mother you lost, the sisters you missed out on, the daughter you dream of...We're all those things when we are truly loved.

When you're young you have the feeling that everything can still turn out for the best - everything's that's wrong, everything you've missed out on, everything that you've broken. Once you lose that feeling, once things are beyond repair, you're old.

This newfangled marriage of business and science that would birth technology was precisely what Edison himself had created. It was his greatest invention.

From here we can only build incrementally. Improvements. Not revolutions. No new colours, only new hues.

We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.

Our age of invention, explained Edison. These days of handcrafted miracles...they won't last much longer. ...it seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyes, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing the Kay could not possibly exist.

You wanted to win, said Agnes.
Yes. And I did. It was the same as losing. Edison gets the audience. Westinghouse gets the excellence. Tesla gets the ideas.

Then there's Tesla. ...Tesla cared only for the ideas themselves. Their promulgation did not matter. Tesla was his own audience, and his ideas were his product, for consumption for him alone. Once he knew he'd solved a problem, he moved on.