Alexandria1448

A sentence a day.

[alexandria1448]

I am no longer posting here. Please follow me on Bluesky:

@BookKnife.bsky.social

[alexandria1448]

Follow me on Twitter: @BookKnife

[alexandria1448]

19th-century Yelp review

“Hotels and boarding houses provided food, and were patronized by the more affluent, but Jane Carlyle for one had many complaints about their poor service ... saying, ‘I had to make tea from an urn, the water of which was certainly not as hot as one can drink it; and the cream was blue milk, the butter tasted of straw, and the cold fowl was a lukewarm one, and as tough as leather.’“

From Victorian Women, by Joan Perkin (1993).

[alexandria1448]

Untitled

“i had forgotten how hideous it is starting a new job when nobody knows you, so your entire character becomes defined by every chance remark or slightly peculiar thing you say; and you can’t even so much as go to put some makeup on without asking where the ladies’ is.”

From Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding (1996).

[alexandria1448]

“His very humour provides a kind of camouflage”

“‘An innate shyness, or perhaps timidity, restrains him from coming out in the open.”

Malcolm Muggeridge’s description of P. G. Wodehouse; quoted in Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (2004).

[alexandria1448]

P. G. Wodehouse writes a novel in a World War II interment camp

“The novel was written, he explained ... ‘in a room with fifty other men playing darts and ping-pong’, or with German guards looking over his shoulder.”

From Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (2004).

[alexandria1448]

Jeeves and Wooster after World War I

“In this gloomy, neurotic atmosphere, Wodehouse’s light-hearted country-house comedies were both a tonic for bereaved and depressed survivors, and a kind of lunatic elegy for a lost world.”

From Wodehouse:  A Life, by Robert McCrum (2004).

[alexandria1448]

“We became a self-cuddling people”

“Softness has become one of the American antidotes to fear, environmental crises, and the terror of the world outside our door.”

From Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present, by Hank Stuever (2009).

[alexandria1448]

Impostor syndrome

“She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.”

From The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson (2007); translated by Reg Keeland, 2009. 

[alexandria1448]

Superiority complex

“In her own expressed estimation she was exceptionally good-looking, clever, hard-working, accomplished at everything she turned her hand to, and possessed of a charming personality.”

From The Water’s Lovely, by Ruth Rendell (2006).

[alexandria1448]

Irene Litton

“She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colors - garnet-red, sapphire, deep green, or amethyst - mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high.”

From The Water’s Lovely, by Ruth Rendell (2006).

[alexandria1448]

The bell jar

“Depression is a disease of loneliness, and anyone who has suffered it acutely knows that it imposes a dread isolation, even for people surrounded by love ...”

From The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (2001).

[alexandria1448]

Paradox

“We have made but small advances in our understanding of depression at the same time that we have made enormous advances in our treatment of depression.”

From The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (2001).

[alexandria1448]

Untitled

“I used to think he was an intelligent man but I’ve had to revise my opinion.”

From The Birthday Present, by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) (2008).

[alexandria1448]

Frenemies

“We call people our friends without thinking how we really feel about them, that actually we fear them or envy them.”

From The Birthday Present, by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) (2008).

[alexandria1448]

Alternate universe

“She wondered whether some different set of circumstances might not have resulted in her meeting some different man; and she tried to picture those imaginary circumstances, the life they would have brought her, the unknown other husband.”

From Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1857); translated by Francis Steegmuller, 1957.

[alexandria1448]

Untitled

“Keith was a good builder in that when he told a householder he would be with her early in the week he meant Tuesday and not Thursday afternoon and when he said he’d be back tomorrow he really did go back, if only for ten minutes.”

From The Rottweiler, by Ruth Rendell (2003).