(no subject)

[breathedout]

He was in love with himself and France joined in. It was a romance. Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. He became an Emperor. He called the Pope from the Holy City to crown him but at the last second he took the crown in his own hands and placed it on his own head. He divorced the only person who understood him, the only person he ever really loved, because she couldn’t give him a child. That was the only part of the romance he couldn’t manage by himself.


He is repulsive and fascinating by turns.


What would you do if you were an Emperor? Would soldiers become numbers? Would battles become diagrams? Would intellectuals become a threat? Would you end your days on an island where the food is salty and the company bland?


He was the most powerful man in the world and he couldn’t beat Joséphine at billiards.


I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

–Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

I'm working on archiving my old reading posts from Tumblr. Most of them will be marked "Don't display on reading page" so as not to clog up people's dashes, but I may include the first post from each work/author as an advertisement/walk down memory lane. Head over to my main page for more Winterson (or whatever author I'm currently archiving). Beyond tagging with the year read, I'm not making any effort to replicate original dates of these Tumblr posts; that is just too much work, and I have dated reading records offline. All I really care about is maintaining my commonplace book of quotes & commentary.

Comments

[teaforlupin]

God I love Winterson... I should revisit her work, it's been ages

[breathedout]

Yes, reposting this made me hungry for more of her work. I have Gut Symmetries on my TBR; maybe I should read it over the winter break!

[teaforlupin]

If that's the one I'm thinking of--it's been a while--it's absolutely stunning (but really, all of her work is)

[eccentric_hat]

I read this directly after the Seamus Heaney quote about looking through keyholes, and it took me almost the entire quote to realize it was a literal description of Napoleon and not a figurative description of someone's experience traveling in France.

Also, hello and thanks for the follow back! I know on Tumblr people follow each other without comment a lot of the time, but I picked up my Internet etiquette on sites like this and it still feels polite to say hi when adding someone. I've been lurking in Tumblr fandom spaces for years--I have an account there but it's connected to my real name rather than my fannish pseud, don't ask why--so I'm kind of excited to see people moving to Dreamwidth, where I generally feel more at liberty to participate in fandom stuff.

[breathedout]

Hello! Thanks for introducing yourself, especially since I don't feel more comfortable on DW (never having really used an LJ-esque format before), so it's especially nice that people are being welcoming. So far I'm enjoying the more interactive style of this platform. I like actually having conversations with people, which Tumblr was never really great for to begin with.