- Author: [[Henry James]] - Full Title: What Maisie Knew - Tags:: books [[inbox]] -  - ### Highlights first synced by [[Readwise]] [[2020-09-03]] - What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0084AOXO2&location=58)) - Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her safeguard against the other. She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute, the present alone was vivid. ([Location 148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0084AOXO2&location=148))