#hangsaman

how it feels to read a shirley jackson novel that makes you so devastatingly anguished you genuinely feel like you have mere hours to live

[...] such delicious sense of possession.

No point in speaking, no reasonable thing to say. It had all been debated endlessly in the second between her mother's drawn-in breath and Natalie's involuntary movement that checked it. Her mother had almost said, "Natalie, are you happy?" and Natalie had almost said, "No"; her mother had almost said, "Everything seems somehow to go badly," and Natalie had almost said, "I know it and I can't help it"; her mother had almost said, "Let me help you," and Natalie had almost said, "What can you do?" and that had been the nervous movement of her head that her mother had recognized and which had silenced her before she ever spoke.

"All I need," said Tony, "is a desire so strong that the world, all of the world, has got to bend itself and forget itself and break out of its circles and rock itself crazy, all to do what I want, and there's got to be a great crash when the ground under me crashes itself wide open and the fire inside is forced to crawl away from my feet and the sky too turns back so that there is nothing above me and nothing below me and nothing in all time except me and what I want."