Breaking
my own
heart because of
expecting too much but
shouldn’t.
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Category: Just About Anything
Quote of the Week
To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.
~Deepak Chopra
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
An annual lottery takes place in a town of 300 people. They initially gather cheerfully though hesitant excitement and nervousness is apparent as the event progresses more notably on parents strangely fearing for their children. The locals believe that to ensure healthy crops for the good of everyone, the lottery must be held though rumor has it that the other towns had ceased doing it.
This is a work wonderfully crafted by Shirley Jackson. The ending was foreshadowed very early but that didn’t spoil the story until the truth was totally revealed.
Readers has a lot to take from this short story and the atrocity of blind conformity is undeniable. It’s one example of a story that we can consider timeless in that it can be re-invented time and time again, from one generation to another.
Truly a captivating and thought-provoking read.
Quotable Quotes:
“There’s always been a lottery.”
“It’s not the way it used to be… people ain’t the way they used to be.”
Rating: 4/5 stars
A Six-Word Story
I’ll never be that me…
again.
I Wonder
Still
I wonder
is that the
way we’re supposed to
end?
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
This is a first-person tale told in Mary Katherine’s (Merricat) perspective as she lives with her sister, Constance Blackwood and their Uncle Julian in their huge, old family house in a nameless village. Everyone else in their family died of arsenic poisoning some years earlier. The three of them live a normal life although hated and feared by their neighbors until their cousin Charles came.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson’s final work. She has alluring writing style that you wouldn’t want to put down the book until you finish it.
Isolation and death are recurring themes in the story. Add to that paranoid thinking as shown by Merricat several times which makes it more intriguing for me while reading. Such a thrill what she is going to do next.
This is an easy read and you can finish it in a day. It leaves you with several interpretations while trying to make sense of it all.
Quotable Quotes:
“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”
“I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”
“I always thought about rot when I came toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village.”
“Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.”
“All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.”
Rating: 4/5 stars
