Lucía’s Reviews > Elizabeth Finch > Status Update

that this is what happens when we look at anyone’s life: how they are seen by their parents, friends, lovers, enemies, children; by passing strangers who suddenly notice a truth about them, or by long-term friends who hardly understand them at all. And then they look at us, in a manner different from how we look at ourselves. Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

specific legacies: of words and phrases, of ideas which I couldn’t necessarily understand or reconcile, but which would follow me down the years.

I’m not sure she believed that happiness was the natural or even the desirable consequence of love. I think she believed that love was more about truth than happiness. I remember she once said, “Now that love is all in my past, I understand it better, both the clarity and the delirium.”

Love is always a mixture of the visceral and the theoretical. Of course, we do not recognise the theoretical as much —it is far too rooted in history and kinship. But this is why love is essentially artificial. I use that word in the best sense, of course. And what we call romantic love is the most artificial of all. And therefore the highest form, and also the most destructive.

a life, much as we would like it to be, does not amount to a narrative —or not a narrative such as we understand and expect.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Milton

“Our minds are, as it were, sparks sent out by the sun, which is the mind of the universe, and that when they are kindled into flame they become aware of the future. Hence the Sibyls often say that their hearts burn within them and that a great flame is consuming them.”
Ammianus Marcellinus

It is by reason that one must convince and instruct men, not by blows, insults and torture.
Julian the Apostate

All religions (well, almost all) hate the apostate much more than the ignorant misguided, idol-worshiping peasant who can usually, with little stern persuasion, be hauled blinking to the light. (…) But as well as hating apostates, such systems also need them: as negative exemplars, as warnings.

There can be a complacency to failure as much as a complacency to success.