The Memory Is Sometimes So Retentive, So Serviceable, So Obedient - At Others, So Bewildered And So Weak-

The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak- and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

‘He’s just the kind of rapper white folk get excited about.’ ‘Oh, shut up.  That’s so pathetic.’ Levi shrugged.  ‘It’s true.  He don’t do no wilding out, he got no crunk, no hyphy, no East Coast vibe to test what be happening on the West Coast,’ he said, thus happily rendering himself incomprehensible both to his siblings and 99.9 per cent of the world’s population.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)

I was quiet, but I was not blind.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (via wholesomeobsessive)

Vee hugged herself and plaintively pulled her lower lip under her large front teeth, the way beautiful girls sometimes pull goofy faces, without any fear that the effects will be permanent.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)

And Toby, he decides, is looking forward to a one-to-one with the Chief. But alas, on entering Crispin’s grand office, he feels only a sense of anticlimax, reminiscent of the anticlimactic feelings he experienced that evening three years ago, when the shadowy ogre who had haunted him in Brussels and Prague marched into Quinn’s Private Office with Miss Maisie hanging from his arm and revealed himself as the same blankly handsome, forty-something television version of the officer-class business executive who was this minute rising from his chair with an orchestrated display of pleasurable surprise, naughty-boy chagrin and mannish good fellowship.

A Delicate Truth by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)

He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presenting hunting through Howard’s expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don’t walk in front of cars take care and be good and don’t hurt or be hurt and don’t live in a way that makes you feel dead and don’t betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don’t and please remember and make sure

On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)