On Beauty - Tumblr Posts
‘That’s college, right? That’s what you paying all that money for - just so you get to talk to other people about that shit. That’s all you’re paying for.’ He nodded his head authoritatively. ‘That’s it.’ ‘I guess.’ ‘It’s nothing more than that,’ Carl insisted.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
Zora nodded politely. ‘Right, you understand me,’ said Carl vigorously, as if with this nod Zora had signed her name to a declaration of undisclosed principles of Carl’s choosing.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
‘The war continues, the President’s an ass, our poets are failing to legislate, the world’s going to hell and I want to move to New Zealand - you know? And I’ve got a class in five. The usual!’
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
This was the first of seven meetings that she had taken it upon herself to schedule for the initial week of the semester. Zora was extremely fond of scheduling meetings about her future with important people for whom her future was not really a top priority.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
‘Art is the Western myth,’ announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman’s magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki’s knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies - it seeped in with every draught into the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
Finally, when you again persisted with your talk of deadlines and morning starts and made it out the front door, you closed it with the new and gratifying impression that not only did Howard Belsey not hate you - as you had previously assumed - but, in fact, the man had long harboured a boundless admiration of you which only his natural English reserve had prevented him from expressing before this night.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
He sounded almost tearful, anxious not to be told the truth. It was wrong, Kiki knew, to be antagonized by this, but she was. These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn’t in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they’re children again.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
Jack French clutched the sides of his chair and leaned back into it. This was not the way things went in his office. In a semicircle on the wall behind him portraits of great men hung, men who were careful with their words, who weighed them cautiously and considered their consequences, men whom Jack French admired and had learned from: Joseph Addison, Bertrand Russell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Carlyle and Henry Watson Fowler, the author of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, on whom French had written a colossal, almost painfully detailed biography. But nothing in French’s armoury of baroque sentences seemed sufficient for dealing with a girl who used language like an automatic weapon.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
Kiki felt herself a whetstone that Zora was sharpening herself against.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
He’s one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is ‘noble’. Howard didn’t much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
He found that his accent caused a delayed reaction in certain Americans. It was sometimes the next day before they realized how rude he had been to them.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
‘Could we not do this right now?’ asked Howard. When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (via wholesomeobsessive)
maybe life is all about waking up every day and trying to learn how to appreciate the beauty of the world without allowing the ugliness of everything that has happened to me in the past to interfere with it
IN A WORLD WHERE BEAUTY AND ATTRACTIVENESS HAVE BECOME SO COMMONPLACE AND MUNDANE THE EXCEPTIONAL UGLINESS HAS BECOME DIVINE
Baie | she/they | unlabled | 18
– currently listening to: 'david melrose theme' by hauschka, smokey eyes by lincoln, along with elias hix, hozier, noah kahan, gang of youths – currently reading: all the light we cannot see by anthony doerr and phosphorecence by julia baird
welcome
hello :> it's general chaos around here. possibly some web weaving of my own floating about. but there's not much else to it
about me: australian!! 2006. lover of love and life. infj 4w5. very in love ᰔᩚ chaotic good! rediscovering and building my faith :) lqbtqia+
academia: graduated '23!! starting my double degree in ‘24! slowly self-teaching japanese ᰔᩚ. chaotic academia by blood
the goal: bachelor criminology and criminal justice + psychological science (and maybe cybercrime in the future?)
master list
(links are broken atm, but the tags are correct)
#poems and quotes
#ineptias loqour (my posts)
#study log
#media
#artwork
#music
#musings (a fav of mine)
#meme
#not a meme but that same category of posts
#on christianity
#letters to myself
#that one type of green
#web weaving
#anderson don’t talk out loud. you lower the iqueue of the whole street. (queue tag)
added this section with the tags i use most often so i can find posts later, everything else is just #on *thing* and frankly i can't be bothered with that.
will possibly add links to fandoms and reads... not sure yet. it would be good to have an active list of all the books i read and enjoyed enough to keep a list of…. here’s a short list of fandomesque things tho: sherlock, rwby, bts/kpop, d20, sk8 the infinity, good omens, epic the musical, lore olympus webtoon, loki series, fnaf,
books would include: archives of despair by caleb finn, hamlet, good omens, throne of glass series, embassy row series, the song of achilles by madeline miller, they both die at the end duology, the inheritance games series, shadow and bone+six of crows, everything by alice oseman
music as well perhaps? hozier, bts, ericdoa, noah kahan, glaive, cage the elephant, lizzy mcalpine, cave town, mccafferty, chase atlantic, brakence, eden, the front bottoms, (it’s all over the place… just not much country music tbh)
here’s the old intro post, haven't decided what to do with it yet
⊹˚₊ ૮꒰•༝ •。꒱ა
ik this is a new account, but i’ve been here since july 2020 <3
for what i have done and failed to do i am sorry.