Alyssa Manansala > Recent Status Updates

“pigmentally blessed” is CRAZY

“Who wants to believe life is exactly as it seems?”

“…if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon.”

“…if you didn’t believe in God, you also didn’t believe in heaven or hell, and she very much wanted to believe in hell because she very much wanted to believe that Mr. Sloane was going there.” 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

“She as in banshee.”

SIX-THIRTY YOU COMEDIAN

“‘When a woman gets pregnant outside of marriage, does the man who made her pregnant get fired, too?’”

TELL HIM GIRL TELL HIM

reading the past two chapters at work was a bad idea…holding in tears

chapter 5 is goooddddd

oh god this book hurts

“The cowboy boots arrived in one of these packages after my parents had vacationed in Mexico. When I slipped them on I discovered they’d already been broken in.”

“So, when I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.”

“Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”

YOOOO WAITTTT this shit is getting crazy

“He can talk about a fish he’s thought up in the way that a great musician might rhapsodize about a composition.”

i don’t like jules bruh, jules biting the curb 4k

“Unicursal. One beginning, one end. Or, depending on how you look at it, no beginning and no end - just a journey.”

“It’s so strange, how no place on earth feels like home to me like this house shrinking in the distance, and yet, every time I’m there, I can’t help but feel it’s too tight around me…”

“…bringing something intangible into the world that can live on without you. Something bigger than the person who made it. And even then, the goal is secondary to the process. The process is for us. It changes us in ways that can’t be measured.”

“Instead we wind up standing chest to chest, the dark humming around us, like we’re two tuning forks vibrating in resonance.”

“‘The machine can try to compress you into something two dimensional, digestible, but that’s not you. And we’re not here to service the machine.’”

“…capturing the feeling of energy and possibility that emanates from all around: the beach, the water, the sky.”

“The best stories are born when the words slip effortlessly from a subject’s lips, rather than being painfully cranked out of them bit by bit.”

*evil villain laugh* finally 😈

“When you lose someone, it seeps out of everything you do, it bleeds into everything you say, it becomes so ever-present, that eventually it becomes ordinary to hear, no matter how extraordinary it is to feel.”

“It feels so good to flirt. No one ever talks about that. But in that moment, I felt like flirting was the very thing that made the world go around.”

“You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress. You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty… it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain.”

“I just wanted to stand, high up on the earth, unnumbered by the safety of walls, floors, ceilings. I wanted to stand high enough that if I fell, it’d kill me. This is not the same thing as wanting to die.”

“I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I’d come to realize that extraordinary is everywhere.”

so my dog ate my book. i can’t lie about this. it literally happened. i’ll update when i get the book again.