Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

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“Oh, I know,” said Sallie. And Lotto beamed with pleasure, preening, eyes darting around to see which kind soul in the room could have sent along the champagne, the force of his delight such that wherever his eyes landed, the recipients of the gaze would look up out of their food and conversation, and a startled expression would come over their face, a flush, and nearly everyone began grinning back, so that, on this spangled early evening with the sun shining through the windows in gold streams and the treetops rustling in the wind and the streets full of congregating relieved people, Lotto sparked upwellings of inexplicable glee in dozens of chests, lightening the already buoyant mood of the room in one swift wave. Animal magnetism is real; it spreads through bodily convection. Even Ariel smiled back. The stunned grins stayed on the faces of some of the people, an expression of speculation growing, hoping he would look at them again or wondering who he was, because on this day and in this world, he was Someone.

—p.304 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

“Hold my hand,” he said. She considered the hand but did not. He moved his head toward her. The flesh slid on the jaw.

She waited. She smiled at him. Buildings were sun-shocked in the corners of her eyes.

“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She won’t be forced.”

“Correct,” she said. But she thought, Oh, you murderous girl, hello. I haven’t seen you for so long.

“Please,” he said. “Mathilde. Take the cold hand of a dying man.”

And then she took his hand and pressed it to her chest with both of hers and held it there. What didn’t need to be said stayed unspoken. He fell asleep and the nurse came out on angry tiptoes. Mathilde went into the apartment, sterile and tasteful, and didn’t linger at the pictures she once knew too well for the ferocity with which she stared at them, counting the minutes until she could leave. Later, she walked through the cold shadows and blaze of concentrated afternoon light that poured between the buildings, and she couldn’t stop; she could barely breathe; it felt too good to be on those coltish terrified legs once more, not to know, once more, where she was going.

</3. similar feeling to goon squad

—p.308 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

“She’s the only one in the world,” he said sadly, “who hates me.”

What was this mania for universal adoration? Mathilde knew herself unworthy of the love of a single soul, and he wanted the love of everyone. She stifled a sigh. “Write another play, and she’ll come around,” she said, as she always did. And he wrote another one, as he always did.

lol

—p.337 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

Just a lunch to celebrate Chollie and Danica’s upgrade in the Hamptons. Ten thousand square feet, live-in housekeeper, chef, and gardener. Stupid, Mathilde thought, their friends were idiots. With Antoinette gone, Lotto and she could buy this place many times over. Except that later, in the car, Lotto and she would laugh at their friends for this kind of idiotic waste, the kind he was raised within before his father kicked the bucket, the kind they both knew meant nothing but loud pride. Mathilde still cleaned both the country house and the apartment, she took out the garbage, she fixed the toilet, she squeegeed the windows, she paid the bills. She still cooked and washed up from the cooking and ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

These women around her were phantom people. Skin taut on their faces. Taking three nibbles of the chef’s fine food and declaring themselves full. Jangling with platinum and diamonds. Abscesses of self.

<3

—p.340 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

“He is. Great American Artistitis,” Phoebe Delmar said. “Ever bigger. Ever louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country? Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that get the prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.”

She looked at Mathilde’s face and took a step back, and said, “Whoa.”

—p.342 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

Down at the end of the table, Phoebe Delmar was listening wordlessly to some man whose voice was so loud, bits of his conversation were audible all the way to Mathilde. “Problem with Broadway these days is that it’s for tourists . . . only great playwright America has produced is August Wilson . . . don’t go to theater. It’s only for snobs or people from Boise, Idaho.” Phoebe caught her eye, and Mathilde laughed at her salmon steak. God, she wished she didn’t like the woman. It would make things so much easier.

cute

—p.343 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

When she clipped back into the house, Lotto was in the doorway, his head in his hands. He looked up at her, pale and distraught. “My mother’s dead,” he said. He wouldn’t be able to cry for another hour or so.

“Oh, no,” Mathilde said. She hadn’t thought death possible when it came to Antoinette. [So immense, what was between them, immortal.] She walked over to her husband, and he put his face against her sweaty side, and she held his head there in her hands. And then her own grief rose, a surprising sharp bolt in the temples. Now who did she have to fight? This was not the way it was supposed to go.

—p.353 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

But she held the phone to her ear. She looked around. Lotto wasn’t in this house, not on his side of the bed, not in his study in the attic. Not in the clothes in the closets. Not in their first little underground apartment, where, a few weeks ago, she’d found herself looking through the casement windows, seeing only a stranger’s purple couch and a pug dog leaping at the doorknob. Her husband wasn’t about to pull up the drive, though she was always on alert, listening. There were no children; his face wouldn’t shine up out of a smaller one. There was no heaven, no hell; she wouldn’t find him on a cloud or in a pit of fire or in a meadow of asphodel after her body quit her. The only place that Lotto could be seen anymore was in his work. A miracle, the ability to take a soul and implant it, whole, in another person for even a few hours at a time. All those plays were fragments of Lotto that, together, formed a kind of whole.

—p.359 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual highwire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]

—p.368 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago

In early October, they spent a Saturday on the beach. Their father had begun trusting her again, or trusting Chollie to keep her in line, and had flown off to Sacramento to be with their mother for the weekend. Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over and it was sunset and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was. He said, “Spiral jetty.” She said, “In sand?” He smiled and said, “That’s its beauty.” A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hadn’t seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth. A sweetness. A sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.

—p.370 by Lauren Groff 5 days, 10 hours ago