Loner lunch break shenanigans

 book: Soul Pancake

yep, I could have went with a better analogy than a highway or a tree. Come to think of it my analogies were all over the place and don’t really add up.

Books that I Have Enjoyed Recently

I suck at book reviews so don’t expect fancy reviews here. Though, please go to Amazon to read actual real reviews if anything sparked your interest, that’s what I usually do.

 

2011, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I loved this book and how the writing really make the characters come to life. Definitely a book where you could still hear the characters’ voice visit you in your head months later or even years. Captivating story about Hemingway and his first marriage. About love, careers, France, Spain, babies. Highly recommend!!!!

2015, Circling the Sun: A Novel by Paula McLain

Just as colorful, Paula Mccain never fails to deliver memorable characters that will live with you for years. Our heroine is simple fierce and unstoppable just like the African tigers and horses.

2015, The Improbability of Love by  Hannah Rothschild

If you like over the top wittiness, then this book is for you. Simply amusing and irresistible book that will teach you a lot about the Art world.

1999, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding

This book is funny and describes perfectly what it’s like to be a woman caught in the world of dating and self help books and zero size supermodels magazines. A must read if you enjoy chick flicks.

 

6 Before 26

Ok so I turn 26 on July 29th, so I feel like I am super late into this challenge. But 

Okaaaay Here I go:

1. Go to the gym 7 consecutive days.
2. Clean and reinvent my room to look minimal (by removing stuff from it and not buying more).
3. Downsize my closet, at least by 3o pieces.
4. Create a photo album.
5. Read 1 book in a day (not audio book).
6. Pray and read the bible for 7 consecutive days.

 

Alright here’s my “simple” list. If I do finish it before my birthday, I’ll come up with a new one and hopefully I could reach 26 before 26.

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Day 8: (Five) Passions I Have

Passion: strong and barely controllable emotion.

. Animals

 

. Having good company & good time

 

. Knowledge & Solitude

 

. Art & History

 

 

.

 

 

Thoughtful Thursday: The Great Gatsby Quotes-Picture Book Pt. 2

Dear Wonderful Reader,

I couldn’t help but share with you  some more of my favorite quotes that gave me many insights about life. I am totally addicted to “The Great Gatsby”; I love the novel and the movie too much. They just transport me to another realm, that is surreal and whimsical (even if the ending is sad!).

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.”

“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”

(*Selfie Alert!)

“As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed — that voice was a deathless song.”

“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

“So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

Thoughtful Thursday: ‘The Great Gatsby’ Quote-Picture Book

Dear Wonderful Reader,

I Present to you, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Words fail to describe how in love I am with Fitzgerald’s surreal writing style and his extraordinary ability to powerfully build every nuance in Gatsby’s characters to create, The Great Gatsby. I can vividly imagine from reading those quotes just how fantastical, and bigger-than-life Gatsby is, as equally as I can feel just how hollow and lonely he is; books like this make me  grateful that books ever existed. It’s no wonder that this is considered the greatest American novel.  The film too is so beautiful, artistic, and really captures the quaint and grand ambiance of the book. And DiCaprio is like the physical incarnation of Jay Gatsby. Well done!

Favorite Quotes

“His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’–it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“ It had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one.”

“He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was ….”

“Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

“The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

P.S. Don’t forget that you can ALWAYS reinvent yourself, if you need to!

A Happy Monologue About Unrequited Love

“I love you. And I know that you don’t love me back. And that’s okay because I can’t make you love me. But, I am here with you and there is nobody or nowhere else I’d rather be. I may look back at this and feel stupid, but If I didn’t say what I am saying then I’ll live wondering what could’ve been… You were my first kiss, and I want you to be my last kiss. Your presence changes the molecules in my body in this weird way, that I have never felt with anyone before. It’s been five years since our first kiss and I have dated and kissed many boys; they made me happy and they made me sad… But then, I forget them. But you… You stay with me, even when you’re not present. You make all the sappy poetry and all those stupid love songs make sense. I can never imagine myself saying those ridiculous things to anyone but you. In fact, I want to say them to you. I want to stare deeply into your eyes and just lay there next to you forever. You make me go tinder; you were my sweetest kiss. I know this sounds really scary to you, but don’t worry, I’ll never pressure you or force myself into your life. I just wanted to say those things out loud to you and see what It feels like. It will probably hurt tomorrow and it may hurt for a while. But, I won’t regret it because you made me taste what love is and what’s it’s like to completely lose yourself in someone, and act like an idiot, and say idiotic things and it’s sweet and beautiful and dangerous and scary but, it makes me feel happy and free. And one day, I know I’ll share that with someone who will love me back and it will be sweet and beautiful too. So Whatever happens tomorrow, we’ve had today… Life is too short and I don’t wanna waste any passing moment without kissing you if I could. So come here and kiss me…”

– Unknown

“I’ll put your poison in my veins
They say the best love is insane”