not now, we're chasing history

sometimes when i get bored in my 3 hour online class i write out joni lyrics from memory then correct them according to the official versions on her website

"That's quite a litany," said Father Andrew, maintaining an even tone. He'd always had his suspicions about Father Hayworth's sexuality, they all did. "But it's not lost on me that you prefaced this visit with your penchant for untruths." "You're right. I just made all that up to get a rise out of you." "Why?" "I don't know." "You're a precocious girl." "If I had to guess, gun to my head..." "No one is holding a gun to your--" "Gun to my head, I'd say, I'm incredibly, painfully, mythically bored."

"Probably, in the annals of criminal jurisprudence, there never was seen a more striking instance of equal and exact justice, than was afforded by the trial, conviction, and execution of John W. Webster," Thompson later wrote. "Money, influential friends, able counsel, prayers, petitions, the prestige of a scientific reputation failed to save him from that fate which he merited as well as if he had been the most obscure individual in existence."

Sometimes, when Chapuys has finished digging up Walter's bones and making his own life unfamiliar to him, he feels almost impelled to speak in defense of his father, his childhood. But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gaps you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

When I think of James now, I think of that man waving. He is not a villain. He is a man with his own wounds. He is my children's father, the source of many years of love and happiness. He is someone who made decisions about his own life, his own future. He is someone I can survive without. He is someone I don't know. He is someone who doesn't know me.

Did Clemi not book the event because she is feeling kind of inept and frankly jealous that Raina has managed to sell a novel to a prestigious literary press and is being sent on a cross-country book tour, whereas Clemi is only halfway through her own manuscript and slowly losing confidence and also terrified of her own, somewhat autobiographical material? Is she morally required to answer this question?

If Blue were a scholar--and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be--she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.

A strange sense of abyss opens up when I think about the life I have now, and how easily it might have gone another way, as it did for Hava, to whose story I return in the epilogue. The divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable, a fact that I find both haunting and promising. It's startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.

I will never fucking forgive you if you get lung cancer and die. Ilya watched another cloud of smoke disappear into the night sky. I know, sweetheart, he replied silently. I know. He imagined Shane would be similarly unforgiving if Ilya took his own life. Not that Ilya ever would. Unless he couldn't help it. I'm trying to get better.