From The Mallen Lot

   I try to make the best of things. Best thing about being without electricity due to the WIND the past couple of days is I quit drinking as it was turning me into Mummy. Second best thing is that I finished Catherine Cookson's Mallen series. It was so good. I've got a lot of quotes to share from The Mallen Lot. Catherine did not drink as her mother was an alcoholic. Funny that I'm finishing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte' and Brooke Shields's There Was a Little Girl too as they are both about alcoholics. 

"Ruthie had a saying that God was good and the devil wasn't bad to his own. Well the devil she knew and the devil he knew must be running two different establishments because the gentleman over there had been less than kind" 

"How was it that no mistress, and not even the prospect of a wife, a beloved wife, could fill the void in a man who had craved mother love all his life?'

"The world had been created by a madman; God was a madman; no reasonable thing or power would create torture for no purpose. The experiences of the past months, the chaos in which the world was drowning was not, to his mind, the result of either a country's greed, or the ambition of nations; politicians of their own volition could not, he reasoned now, create such havoc, for the human mind could and would think, dissect, reason and then act in the end to preserve its own survival. No, there was a malevolent power, a mad God playing with the universe, and he was so powerful, so indiscriminate he directed his attention equally to families as to nations; he inflicted special torture..." 

"And from then, daily, without let up, she had prayed that something would happen to that sperm of hell, because that's all she was, that's all she had ever been, she had come from a hell raiser, and a line of hell raisers, and she had been a she-devil ever since."

"no one actually pitied Lawrence, for you couuldn't pity someone, no matter how mentally crippled, who continually emanated happiness; in fact the wise among them envied him his state." 

"Love is a terrible thing, Dan. No one should ever say that love is beautiful, it's a crucifixion."

"There was something building up inside her that was frightening her. It had been growing with the years, but since Christmas it had become like a great live thing gnawing at the inside of both her body and mind, and she was afraid of it, afraid that something would happen to cause it to break out."

"Well, he's dead, and as I see it there's nothing so dead as death; it's final, it's finished. And I'm as much against those who spend the rest of their lives weeping over the dead as I'm against those who make saints out of sinners once they are dead." 

"She was born to create trouble; as sure as the sparks fly upwards. Some people are made like that. Barbara was poison to everyone she touched." 

  I also have two more musical satires like Fanging with Claude in mind: DOC (Doc Holliday) and IKE (Eisenhower). I might've found my niche. Both will likely begin with cover portraits, we'll see... TTYL... ✨

Quotes from Bronte and Cookson

   Binge reading, trying to catch up with the ones I've been reading the longest. Spring cleaning is also coming early this year, so the doll soaps are iffy; they make a huge mess. Frankie doesn't make that any easier. These are from Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Catherine Cookson's The Mallen Lot, finally getting close to finishing that trilogy that is so good. I was disappointed not to find any of her books at the library sale. 

  "Keep both heart and hand in your possession, till you see good reason to part with them; and if such an occasion should never present itself, comfort your mind with this reflection: that, though in single life your joys may not be many, your sorrows, at least will not be more than you can bear." Anne Bronte

  "The conception of children is not dependent on love...." Catherine Cookson

From Battlefield:

 "The thing I sensed was that people had been here before, en masse. At times, I have noted a comparable intimation after a public auction, when the last item of furniture has been carted off and the last pickup truck has driven away. The grass is patterned with tire tracks and footprints. The buzz of the crowd, the auctioneer's warble still echo in my ears. A whiff of humanity lingers, a subtle indefinable something, but it is not an olfactory sensation. It, too, is an echo, a reverberation of the auction-goers who were convened an hour earlier. A similar presence lingered in these pastures a hundred and twenty-three years after the battle. After that length of time, I would not have thought it possible to stand at the heart of a battlefield and pick up its living pulse." Peter Svenson

From The Green Man

 "I'll teach you peace of mind." 

Now there was an offer. I turned my back on the rector and stared out the window, biting my lips furiously. I imagined myself not noticing myself for the rest of my life, losing myself, not vainly struggling to lose myself, in poetry and sculpture and my job and other people, not womanizing, not drinking. Then I thought of the Tyler girl and the Ditchfield girl and Amy and whoever might be next: deprived of the green man, Underhill would surely devise some other way of harming the young and the helpless. It was convincing, it was my clear duty; but I have often wondered since whether what made up my mind for me was not the unacceptability of the offer as such, whether we are not all so firmly attached, in all senses, to what we are that any radical change, however unarguably for the better, is bound to seem a kind of self-destruction. I shook my head.  Kingsley Amis

Mark Twain's Life Lessons to Learn in Youth and Avoid Regrets in Old Age

From The Green Man

 "No, any such terror could be faced, or could be fled from; must always be less terrible than a portable, infinitely adaptable demon living and acting in the mind." 

Kingsley Amis