meghan > meghan's Quotes

“There was a cliché about teaching: Once a teacher, always a teacher. But there was truth to it. Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. You wonder about the different paths they might have taken. You wonder if you failed them.”
― Michelle Kuo

“To know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because the feel of this newer self; because he hopes you can make this change last.”
― Michelle Kuo

“The cliché, that I'd gotten out of it more than I'd given, was true. What I had now was a metric for judging what a meaningful day might look like. The metric was this: Could you form a live, difficult connection with a person from entirely different circumstances? A connection so genuine that you forgot that you were even attempting to make one? So urgent that you wanted to show up the next day and that person believed you would?”
― Michelle Kuo

“You could record a performance, as they were going to do in Rome at the end of the tour, but you could never reproduce the currency of the moment in which a performance pulsed and breathed. This was divine, the closest Alma had come, beyond even sex, which was more an emptying out than a pouring in, a draining of self rather than a merging.”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“It’s the creative life force in the moment that makes the work endure.” She pursed her lips. “All this thinking about posterity—it’s so typically male, don’t you think?—this preoccupation with end product, with legacy? What is history anyway but a bunch of penises on parade?”
― Katherine Min, The Fetishist

“And how she regretted, watching his face locked in grief even as he slept, his lip trembling, that she’d frittered hours away reading about socialists and unions and progressives and politics and corporations, fighting about a meaningless flag that said “I’m proud to be an American,” when it should have said “I’m happy to be alive,” and what the difference was, and how one’s tribe cannot be better than another tribe because they were all one tribe. An extraordinary wisdom came upon her, one she had not imagined possible, and she wanted to share it with him in those first—or perhaps last—moments of her consciousness. But after seeing his lovely face, she felt yet again an enormous”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“The gorgeous cacophony of humanity in wheelchairs, some wearing special eyeglasses, others in hearing aids, signing and gesturing, the winks and chortles and grunts of pleasure, the grimaces and shaking of heads and excited howling of those without 'normal' ability. It’s impossible to describe. But it all boils down to the same thing. Love.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought. Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children. As it was, they moved like turtles toward Chona’s room as Moshe’s howl rang out. They were in no hurry. The journey ahead was long. There was no promise ahead. There was no need to rush now.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store