Madi > Recent Status Updates

this note is attached to a plant
i’ve been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self

As you read, feel free to speak the words aloud. In the mists and fog of life find your way to the rainbow by the sound of your own voice.

- from the author's introduction

“for colored girls was and is for colored girls” - from the author's introduction

No matter how perfect things were, a small, nagging part of my psyche was constantly whispering, He’s too good to be true. Rock stars aren’t faithful. He’s going to break your heart. Don’t get too attached.

Interesting name for a store, ain’t it? Answered Prayers. Makes you wonder what’s for sale inside.

Why, with a name like that it could be anything.

Anything at all.

Alan felt his belly try to fold in on itself, but he didn’t move. Instead, prompted by some instinct he made no effort to understand, he put his hands together in front of the station wagon’s left headlight. He crossed them, made a bird-shape, and began to bend his wrists rapidly back and forth.

The sparrows are flying again, Mr. Gaunt, he thought.

In fact, everyone in the WORLD belongs here, because everyone loves a bargain. Everyone loves something for nothing … even if it costs everything.

“Don smelled like a pack of skunks which had been first run through a vat of sulphur, then sprayed with fresh cowshit, and finally let loose to rant and racket their panicky way through a closed room. The smell preceded him; the smell followed him; but mostly the smell hung around him in a pestilential cloud.”

what a beautiful description.

Nettie had never called her back to let her know one way or another. This hadn’t surprised Polly much; the surface of Nettie’s mind was slippery, and things had a way of sliding right off.

But I believe In satisfied customers, Mr. Keeton, and only satisfied customers. I have been in business for many years, and I have built my reputation on satisfied customers.

Eddie Warburton, a broom in his hand and a Chesterfield in his mouth (the solid-gold Saint Christopher’s medal he had purchased at Needful Things the day before was safely hidden under his blue chambray shirt), had watched him trudge up the stairs to the second floor.

And maybe a man named Thad Beaumont was an unindicted co-conspirator in the deaths of his wife and son, but Alan could not find blame in his heart for Thad, either.

There are quite a few references to The Dark Half throughout this story, so I'm glad I read it just before this.

In fact, he believed the only three valid purposes microwaves served were re-heating coffee, making popcorn, and putting a buzz under take-out from places like CluckCluck Tonite.

At twenty to ten, Henry Beaufort, bartender and owner of The Mellow Tiger, had invited Hugh to put an egg in his shoe and beat it, to make like a tree and leave, to imitate an amoeba and split—in other words, to get the fuck out.

I think that’s what love is all about; when you realize that someone cares about you and you are worthy of their love, then you start to take care of yourself a little better.

[...] I feel lucky that if all I had was myself, that would be enough.

My mother stopped doing cocaine a couple of years ago, although she still gets high. She’s been off alcohol for thirty-seven days. I used to worry about her, but I don’t anymore because I can’t. It’ll kill me if I worry as much as it takes.

Of course at this age everyone is talking about how important it is to be pretty and thin, but I’ve always thought, How can you not like someone because they don’t look good? I find that once I start to like someone, they automatically become beautiful to me. It is completely dependent on the person. There are a lot of conventionally beautiful people out there who have extremely repellent behavior.

[...] I don’t know why everyone always be looking at black girls getting pregnant and going on welfare, because it’s not just black girls. Everybody makes bad choices and everybody falls into bad situations.

I’m not sayin’ it’s all about skin color either. It’s just that being black is about our ability to express ourselves and the way we express ourselves and then our history in America.

What matters is what’s inside, or rather, how you feel about yourself inside. Because you can have a lot of good inside you, but if you don’t feel good about it, then it is lost.

If you only spend time with people who are like you, how can you ever learn anything?

The reason I have chosen a genre of writing that is not exclusively my own voice is because I love words and do not presume to harbor the best ones in my mind and life alone.

Sugar in the Raw is a nonfiction profile of young black girls in America between the ages of eleven and twenty years old. I traveled to approximately twelve different cities nationwide—a few of them twice—and interviewed over fifty girls. I made a sincere effort to include as wide a variety as possible in terms of class representation and regional location.

He can’t. He needs me.

Yeah, but he’s crazy. Crazy people are not always hip to their own best interests.

[...] Alan said, “It’s incredible, all right. You know it, I know it, and they know it, too. But Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say at least one thing that still holds true in crime detection: when you eliminate all the impossible explanations, whatever is left is your answer . . . no matter how improbable it may be."

George Stark is, in fact, not a very nice guy. Just like they said.
I forgot just how gruesome this story is at times.

And there was something else: he was a writer, an imaginer. He had never met one—including himself—who had more than the vaguest idea of why he or she did anything. He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds…never in their hearts.