Best Of Katie Roiphe's "Still She Haunts Me"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell by Katie Roiphe
I read this on my e-reader so these quotes have locations only, not page numbers :)
But this happened to girls; Mrs. Liddell remembered it happening to Lorina, one day when stick-thinness became grace.
[...] to feel the suspension of all desire, never to be acted upon, diffused; to remain forever in a state of anticipation, the emotion purified and clarified and refined by pain, by the long hours spent observing it and not inhabiting it. How strange and miraculous and unnerving it is to stumble accidentally on your capacity to open yourself so completely to someone else. To know that you will always feel this way and that time can have no possible effect. To watch it, like a natural wonder, like Niagara Falls, the eternal feeling rising up inside of you, flowing with deafening force, glittering in the sun, even though it is of no practical use.
There was something to be said for the sepia that washed through photographs, the distinctive brown, with the faintest trace of green, that faded into rich cream. This was a color that soothed and softened, slowed down and made melancholy the world around it.
He thinks he is not accountable for anything he says cleverly. But as far as she was concerned he was more accountable for the things he said cleverly.
The paradox: how do you lose something you never had? The answer: There was another way to have. A transparent stretch of space between you. To love from a distance, through that space, more deeply, more colorfully, so it can be seen from faraway like a flag. Eventually the space itself fills you. The air entering your body and replacing your blood, running through you. The half-pleasant feeling of not being there.
