Name: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
ISBN: 9780007375882

Elizabeth Smart

Elizabeth Smart’s passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker, described by Angela Carter as ‘Like MADAME BOVARY blasted by lightning ... A masterpiece’.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Helen 

But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention. My mind may reason that the tenseness only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. 

I am possessed by love and have no options. 

When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door. More single-purposed than the new bird, all mouth with his one want, I close my eyes ana tremble, anticipating the heaven of actual touch.

Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return. 

Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury And if then she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no one has me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness. 

ayoni

Parents’ imaginations build frameworks out of their own hopes and regrets into which children seldom grow, but instead, contrary as trees, lean sideways out of the architecture, blown by a fatal wind their parents never envisaged.

I never was in love with death before, nor felt grateful because the rocks below could promise certain death. But now the idea of dying violently becomes an act wrapped in attractive melancholy, and displayed with every blandishment. For there is no beauty in denying love, except perhaps by death, and towards love what way is there?

But if you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me.

What I would give to be able to write like this.

Lily Cooper

‘Threateners of life are horrible enough, and she whom I have injured, and whose agony it is my penalty to watch, lies gasping, but still living, on the land. Shuddering like a coward, I dare not grasp either life or death from the ghoulish palm that offers them.’

i would’ve wept at the grand central too if i had to love a man

Saffy

Smart has ripped out my heart and torn it to shreds. She is poetic and profound and her account of love is devastating. How terrifying it must be to be able to detail your love in such depth, and to also be the love that another feels to such depths.

elizabeth smart you are smart and amazing, the writing is one of the most beautiful i've ever read in my entire life. every word is meticulously placed to build a masterpiece of a paragraph. she feels love on a whole different level of depth, where you as the reader yourself are creeped throughout the body with her pain, wrath and loneliness of her love. though i admit, i do not tolerate some of her actions. no man ever deserves that kind of devotion.