#SatantangoTogether What made it possible for people like them — people who had finally managed to emerge from years of apparently terminal hopelessness to breathe the dizzying air of freedom — to rush around in senseless despair, like prisoners in a cage so that even their vision had clouded over?

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. (III.1.92-97)

#SatantangoTogether "It was dawn, the most miserable of hours:"

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. (II.2.597-598) The play's the thing... (II.2.608)

#Hamlet_2026 Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. (II.2.401-405)

#SatantangoTogether "We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks."

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: In the secret parts of Fortune? Oh, most true. She is a strumpet. (II.2.246-247)

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: Words, words, words (II.1.205) Maybe my favourite line in my favourite play.

#SatantangoTogether “We are taking up the demanding, indeed hopeless, cause of human dignity . . .” He raised his famous forefinger and warned Petrina, “Listen, jackass! This is our moment!”

#Hamlet_2026 Polonius: Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad. (II.2.95-97) [My favourite version of Hamlet is the 2009 film version with David Tennant as Hamlet and Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius.]

#SatantangoTogether nothingchangedoutside itwasneithermorningnoreveningitjust carriedondawnortwilightwhichever . . .

#Hamlet_2026 Polonius: This is the very ecstasy of love, Whose violent property fordoes itself And leads the will to desperate undertakings As oft as any passion under heaven (II.1.111-114) [Critically panned, but I liked the Ethan Hawke 2000 film production.]

#SatantangoTogether "After half a mile or so the rain started to come down more heavily and they went on their way grumbling as the bare acacias on either side of the road thinned out: it was as if their life support was slowly vanishing."

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: But come, Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on), That you, at such times seeing me, never shall... ...to note That you know aught of me (I.5.185-197)

#SatantangoTogether "...they trusted the new would not only replace the old but utterly erase it."

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life in a pin’s fee, And for my soul—what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal as itself? (I.4.70-73)

#Hamlet_2026 Polonius: Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. (I.3.66-69)

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules. Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes, She married. O most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! (I.2.155-160)

#Hamlet_2026 Hamlet: But I have that within which passeth show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I.2.88-89)

#SatantangoTogether "I could be referring to our friend Futaki here, with his endless, depressing talk of flaking plaster, stripped roofs, crumbling walls and corroded bricks, the sour taste of defeat haunting everything he says.... Why not talk, instead, of the failure of imagination..."

#Hamlet_2026 Horatio: In what particular thought to work I know not, But in the gross and scope of mine opinion This bodes some strange eruption to our state. (I.1.76-78)

#SatantangoTogether "Let us take stock, piece by piece, each one of us in turn . . . ... since who can we trust but ourselves — no one else can lay bare the story of this momentous night and morning . . ."

#SatantangoTogether "But Mrs. Halics snatched the book from his hands. “No! Not the Creation, you idiot!” she cried and, with one well-practiced movement, went straight to the Book of Revelations."

#SatantangoTogether "Close up, his sagging skin reminded her of those horrible slaughterhouses, of slabs of meat and ham folding in on each other; his cataract-gray eyes of water covered in frog-spawn in the courtyard wells of long-abandoned houses..."

#AllsWell_2026 First Lord: How mightily sometimes we make us comforts of our losses! Second Lord: And how mightily some other times we drown our gain in tears! (IV.3.61-64)

#AllsWell_2026 Diana: My mother told me just how he would woo, As if she sat in 's heart; she says all men Have the like oaths (IV.2.81-83)

#SatantangoTogether ...and, as for his coat, it had lost whatever resistance to water it once had nor could it protect him from the roaring cataract of fate, or, as he tended to say, “the rain of death in the heart,”

#AllsWell_2026 Second Lord: He must think us some band of strangers i' the adversary's entertainment. Now he hath a smack of all neighbouring languages; therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy, not to know what we speak one to another; (IV.1.12-16)

#SatantangoTogether "In the east, the horizon was slowly brightening. The doctor watched the light’s ruthless progress across the field, his spirit broken but still nursing some vague hope. The light gave him hope but he was afraid of it too."

#NYRBWomen26 ‘Of course. Mrs Arbuthnot has been at the Claremont for years.’ ‘It has entered her soul.’ ‘But we aren’t allowed to die here.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘But isn’t that sad?’ she asked doubtfully. 1/2

#AllsWell_2026 First Lord: O, for the love of laughter, let him fetch his drum; he says he has a stratagem for't: when your lordship sees the bottom of his success in't, and to what metal this counterfeit lump of ore will be melted,

"For minutes on end he could not tell whether he was really hearing howls of pain, or whether it was simply that his years of long, exhausting work had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between the general noise and ancient prehistoric screams that were somehow preserved in time."

#NYRBWomen26 (Typo) 😬

#AllsWell_2026 Helena: In argument of praise, or to the worth Of the great count himself, she is too mean To have her name repeated: all her deserving Is a reserved honesty, and that I have not heard examined. (III.5.72-76)

#NYRBWome26 ‘No, of course not,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said quietly, with her eyes on Mrs Palfrey once more. They were such very pale blue eyes as to make Mrs Palfrey uneasy. She thought that blue eyes get paler and madder as the years go by. But brown eyes remain steady, she decided, with a little pride.

#NYRBWomen26 "Mrs Arbuthnot, perhaps because of her arthritis, found it in her nature to be disparaging." "None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food: but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had."

#AllsWell_2026 Countess: Which of them both Is dearest to me, I have no skill in sense To make distinction. (III.4.41-43)

#AllsWell_2026 Countess: I prithee, lady, have a better cheer; If thou engrossest all the griefs are thine, Thou robb'st me of a moiety: he was my son; But I do wash his name out of my blood, And thou art all my child. (III.2.66-70)

#NYRBWomen26 "At nine o’clock, she noticed that people were on the move. Knitting-needles were jabbed into balls of wool (she would get some knitting for herself tomorrow, she decided), books were closed thankfully, as if they had been only intermission things..."

#SundaySarton "I wonder whether it is possible at nearly sixty to change oneself radically." "...clutching is the surest way to murder love..." "It is comforting to know there are lighthouse keepers on rocky islands along the coast." "Perhaps it is that prose is earned and poetry given."

#SundaySarton "Perhaps because the poem is primarily a dialogue with the self and the novel a dialogue with others. They come from entirely different modes of being. I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.'

#SatantangoTogether "On either side of the highway there are gloomy patches of woodland as far as the eye can see, mud covering everything and, since the fading light blurs all clear outlines, consuming all traces of color..." 1/2

#NYRBWomen26 "...he came forward and kissed her lightly on her cheek. At the same time, he registered the strange, tired petal-softness of her skin, stored that away for future usefulness. And the old smell, which was too complex to describe yet."

#SatantangoTogether The atmosphere/environment is the protagonist. Action feels like an afterthought.

"Old women are sitting at their windows gazing at the dusk through net curtains, their hearts contracting at the sight of faces fleeing beneath the eaves outside, their faces full of such wrongs and sorrows that not even the steaming cookies baked in hot ceramic stoves can banish them."

#SatantangoTogether “It smells marshy here,” Petrina declares. The sergeant looks at them, beckons them closer and whispers: “Everything is rotting in this place . . .

#NYRBWomen26 "The Claremont was rather like a reduced and desiccated world of school. Of course, the food was better; but, for grown-ups, would have been uneatable if it had not been.

#NYRBWomen26 "... Mrs. Post went for her, and nearly always brought back the wrong book: she got Elizabeth Bowen muddled with Marjorie Bowen, and could never remember that there were two Mannings and two Durrells and a couple of Flemings."

#SatantangoTogether “Bough of a tree to the rain . . .” he turns the phrase over in his mouth as if it were fine wine, trying to guess its vintage, realizing somewhat indifferently that it is beyond him.