I guessed that I was being led to the throne room, where I would kneel and pour out my gratitude. But the servant stopped suddenly at a side door. King Peleus was absent, he told me, i so I would present myself before his son instead. I was unnerved. This was not what I had prepared myself for, the dutiful words I’d practiced on donkeyback.
Sayfa 20 - Harper Collins PublishersKitabı okudu
As daughters of narcissistic mothers, many of us learn that love means what someone can do for you or what you can do for them. Many women unconsciously choose their romantic partners based on this distorted meaning, which sets them up for dependent or codependent relationship —or no relationship at all. The dependent cares about what he can do for you and the codependent cares about what you can do for him. Having no relationship is a kind of giving up, or choosing to not enter the dance at all.
I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear.
Sayfa 25Kitabı okudu
Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, incontinent of sentiment and need, that piles and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
Sayfa 695 - 14 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
On 19 July, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. The French garrison was withdrawn from Rome on 4 August, leaving the Pope defenceless. Within a month, Napoleon’s empire had come to an end, and King Victor Emmanuel had invaded the Papal States. On 19 September Pio Nono locked himself into the Vatican, instructing his soldiers to put up a token resistance to the royal troops, to make clear that he had not surrendered the city. The next day Rome fell, and within a year it would be declared the capital of a united Italy. A millennium and a half of papal rule in Rome was at an end.
There’s not even a hint of worry in Bash’s voice. We’re several stories up, alone in the dark, I lured him here under false pretenses, and it still hasn’t occurred to him to be the least bit concerned about my intentions. If anything, he seems amused by this whole thing. He doesn’t see me as any kind of threat.
