February 2012
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“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes...”
– D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
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“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why....”
– Stephen Fry (via presidents)
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Me (to a good friend): You look like the love child of Tony Blair and Stephen Fry.
Him: I'm sure I'm meant to be offended, but I'm too busy picturing Stephen Fry fucking Tony Blair.
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“I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and...”
– Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
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I’m sitting here wearing a thermal vest, a t-shirt, a hoodie, thick pyjama bottoms, house socks and a robe. I am hugging a hot water bottle and curling my body around it as much as possible and I have a blanket draped over my knees.
Contrary to any images that may conjure, I am not an eighty year old woman. I am a very, very cold student in a flat that has no heating. I went to see my real...
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“We can never cease to be ourselves.”
– Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
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A guy sitting behind me in the library to his friend: See, I told you I couldn't study in the library.
His friend: Why on earth not?
Guy: I glance up at some point and I fall in love temporarily with the girl sitting opposite me. Sometimes it happens more than once.
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“It was as if Fate had thrust that clue into his hands. And after the manner of...”
– Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
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I simultaneously want all my stuff to be in one place (I tire of wanting to watch a movie I’ve left in Bahrain, or read a book that’s in London, or paint when all my paints are at home), but I also want to be constantly moving, living somewhere new every year for a few years, experiencing different things and new places and people. I want the impossible: that all my friends could be...
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“Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by...”
– Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
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Just got back from a chilly Barcelona to a freezing London. I don’t even want to imagine what awaits me in Scotland.
January 2012
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It’s incredibly strange to have to see my youngest brother grow up, have his secrets, his fights, his new friendships, and have to step back from it. It’s not that he wasn’t his own person before university, but I knew his friends since they were all little, I even knew their families. He’d talk to them on the phone in front of me, we’d all go out occasionally, etc....
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“Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make...”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you...”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“It’s a visitor’s privilege to be foolish.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“But the rags and ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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“Fiction needs its specifics, its anchors. It needs also to pass beyond them. It...”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the Introduction
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“I really don’t see the point of reading in straight lines. We don’t...”
– Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the Introduction
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“Tears transformed his face, the fall was almost limitless. My father would walk...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes
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“Above all, I wouldn’t want people to think that I want to prove anything....”
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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Last Night:
Him: You're holding me hostage! I need to go home!
Me: I am not holding you hostage! Go, flee.
Him: Damn you and your combination of good conversation and brownies.
Me: Next time, I'll let you starve.
Him: Don't you dare.
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“But that had been grief and this was joy. But that grief and this joy were...”
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
Taking a leaf out of Vonnegut’s book, and trying to appreciate the moments when they’re there. I had a mostly shit day (study-related, nothing else) where I felt like the biggest idiot known to mankind because there was something I wasn’t quite grasping, and because I was convinced (in the manic manner of exams) that if I didn’t understand this one point I couldn’t...