"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those…we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure: the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter, all those things with which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance, on the contrary they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist."
— On Reading, Marcel Proust
12:00 pm • 18 December 2009
“And I don’t really think it’s fair for me to be on a jury because I’m a hologram…”
9:34 am • 18 December 2009
the boys are back
One week of swimming, snorkelling, sailing, sea-kayaking. These ain’t your grandmomma’s tanlines. I’m baked red raw and the sea still thunders in my ears: sand and salt in every pore, bone-chill still wrapping daggers around the heart.
4:42 pm • 17 December 2009
So long suckers, I’m finally getting out of Melbourne and going to the beach! Back in a week.
7:21 am • 9 December 2009
Today I bought some cheap nail polish and painted my nails ‘Hollywood Blue’. Guess who’s having an exciting summer.
6:39 pm • 8 December 2009
"There are times when you walk into that dressing room and you think, ‘I can’t do this. I cannot do this.’ And it’s a curious thing: When you sit down in front of that mirror and you pick up that first piece of makeup and you start to apply it - you see how I immediately go under the eyes? First thing! - and suddenly, you transform yourself into that person who is capable of going on stage and delivering that performance. And you do it, and yes, you can. Yes, I can! Yes, I can!"
—
Angela Lansbury
What a legend: professional, down-to-earth and perpetually classy. She puts performers half her age to shame.
5:15 pm • 7 December 2009
