“Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed—mysterious, uninviting.”
Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit
An ongoing digital archive of 1,374 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.
Category is
Book
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“All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.”
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“Kiki’s never sure if she’ll perform, until she does. Sometimes she’s not in the mood, says she’s too drunk. It’s different now that people come here to watch her, now that she stands in front instead of among them. They clang their cutlery and chant her name until she takes her place in the light and starts her slow-motion dance, no distance to lend her mystery, no stage to make her majestic, everyone sharing the same heat and smelling the same sweat.”
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“Let’s see, what else? Don’t go into debt over clothes. Hug your dogs while you have them. Know that you can skip most anything. You will fall in love eventually. Remember that. Also, the things you like aren’t weird. Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.”
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“I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”
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“There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn’t a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”
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“I want no weeping. We must look death in the face. Silence! Be quiet, I said! Tears, when you’re alone. We will all drown ourselves in a sea of mourning. The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba has died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence! Silence, I said! Silence!”
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“The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
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“Evelyn Nesbit’s life, in the end, was little different from the lives of millions of others, a story of perseverance and determination, of achievement and independence, that nothing could finally diminish.”
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“In Shubert Alley that night, I had unwittingly reached the threshold of an entire landscape of alleys that would lead to a world of theaters, each a house packed with strangers both generous and mean, shabby and grand. It was to be a life full of the transitory moments, double-edged with ecstasy and loss, that I had already come to think of as the theater.”
