Julia > Recent Status Updates

If Digby had anyone at home to write to, he might catalog these morning sights, describe the small-framed, handsome Tamils with their sharp Roman features, bright glittering eyes, and ready smiles. Next to them he feels pale, blotchy, and much too vulnerable to the sun.

What’s fur ye won’t go by ye

Until he got onto the Bart’s wards, he wasn’t aware that he had an accent, or that it made others assume that he was provincial and stupid. It was a rude awakening.

He’s a puppet who hands over our taxes to the British. The British ‘protect’ him from what? Isn’t the enemy already inside the walls?

The Nairs are a warrior casts, employed by generations of Travancore maharajahs to defend against invaders

Molay, the sweetness of life is sure in only two things: love and sugar. If you don’t get enough of the first, have more of the second!

If there’s a fire in my house and I must choose between my husband and my clay pot… well, all I can say is he’s lived a good life. The curries I will make in my pot will ease my widowhood!

Next, a leafy bush seems to grow into the room through the upper half of the door. A huge snake could around the bush. She can neither move nor scream, even though she knows something terrible is about to happen to her in this mysterious, landlocked house… but would death smell like jasmine?
A swatch of uprooted jasmine hover above her, held by the trunk of an elephant

A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cards to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can read family apart

…when her granddaughter — her namesake — begs for a story about their ancestors. … „Child, the past is past, and furthermore it‘s different every time I remember out. I‘ll tell you about the future, the one _you_ will make“

Strangely, it never occurred to Western cooks to dry roast and grind together peppercorn, fennel seed, cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, then throw that spice mix into oil along with mustard seed, garlic, and onions to make a masala, the foundation of an curry

The spice rate swept over Europe like syphilis or the plague and by the same means: sailors and ships

You see, Porky, you have not touched the heart of another. So there can be no grief. You have passed through life without meaning.0

His face vary still watching not the day give way to night but some inward night come upon him

Bolivars says, pain is a dog that follows you no matter where you go.
He shakes himself, wipes his eyes with his wrist.
We are like a pair of old women, he says. We need to stop this blubbering. It uses up moisture.

Listen, I don’t know how to answer your questions. Each day now I’m watching a part of me that is not a part of me. This is the part that is here. All the other parts of me are not here. They are back there. I do not know how to explain this. There is a part of me playing football right now. Another part of me is with Lucrezia.

Each bead of water that passes his lips, that fills the cups, that is filling the bucket, is a drop of time and life distilled

By the author of the Prophet Song

I don’t know what exactly it is (foreword by Verghese? Combination of literature and neuroscience as interests in pursuit to find the meaning of life? Language, subtle humour and humility?) but this book already feels like the perfect book and a home and a long-lost friend

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. (All above is from the foreword by A.Verghese)

.. not just that I disappeared into my own world of deadlines and responsibilities

moral dimension of his job

He said during medical school he’d assumed that he would become a psychiatrist, only to fall in love with neurosurgery. It was much more than a falling in love with the intricacies of the brain, much more than the satisfaction of training his hands to accomplish amazing feats - it was a love and empathy for those who suffered, for what they endured and what he might bring to bear.

[Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet’s beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me.] In my memory, the picture has a Vermeer-like quality, a camera obscure sharpness.

Women’s prize, unique voice of the boy in the first chapter, LR recommendation. But 550p and looks like it is going to be a depressive read… Will see

(Some graph) The country that represents a gold standard of human rights: Norway

Really need some sort of a happy end for this one not to throw me off Irish authors, it’s been a hard run. A happy end will though make it all false, it sure does lead to a disaster…

she searches under the duvet for her mother's hand and Eilish grasps the hand knowing she is false before the children, false with nothing to offer, no comfort nor succour, only lies, distraction and evasion