Lucía’s Reviews > Winter Journal > Status Update

The ghoulish trigonometry of fate.

Subject, not object, and therefore no delusions permitted. No deceptions possible. Intelligence is the one human quality that can't be faked.

You invented them. You used them as fictive embodiments of your own desires, ignoring their problems and personal histories, failing to grasp who they were outside of your own imagination, and yet the more they eluded you, the more passionately you longed for them.

Joubert: One must die loveable (if one can). How difficult it is to be loveable, especially for someone who is old, who is sinking into decrepitude and must be cared for by others. If one can. There is probably no greater human achievement than to be loveable at the end, whether that end is bitter or not. (...) to what degree a person can remain human hanging on in a state of helplessness and degradation.

Every moment in history is fraught with its own problems, its own injustices, and every period manufactures its own legends and pieties.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

she could have developed an interest in music or art or books, in anything really, just so long as it was some kind of passionate, sustaining interest, but she had never formed the habit of nurturing inner pursuits of that kind, and therefore, she continued to flail around, never quite sure what to do with herself when she woke up in the morning.

such is the price you pay for leaving home, and as long as you continue to travel, the nowhere that lies between the here of home and the there of somewhere else will continue to be one of the places where you live.

Such was lofe in France. People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.

Such was lofe in France. People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.