Quinn > Recent Status Updates

“… air travel these days, the long the lines, the security checks, the magical three-point-four ounces under which all liquids are deemed harmless, the boarding by zones, ours always the last one to be called, by which time all the overhead bins are full, and we have to cede our carry-one to baggage loaders who board the cabin and lug them out like bouncers at a bar.”

“When the white elite take an interest in the food poor people eat, the price goes up. The result is a cost that prohibits poor families from eating the very food they’ve been condemned for eating….. The status of food rose but the status of people didn’t. They just had less to eat.”

“”A city should be a place to live” the truth was, I was trying not to die.”

The piece by Sandra Cisneros has been my favorite thus far. Beautifully written. I am confused because I read House On Mango Street and didn’t love it but this I absolutely loved.

“I was all of twenty-two when on a car trip through Carolina’s Blue Ridge, I saw a country house with a swing dangling from a thick branch and a careless bike abandoned on the fenceless lawn. And though, kids grow up like this? I never knew.”

“In the neighborhoods we knew, booze was easier to find than books. On every block, liquor stores or taverns to mute the pain of dreams deferred. Few and far and rare, libraries to ignite aspirations.”

“It was not until our parents reached maturity that Jews were permitted to reside in Vienna proper.”

One day somebody wrote in their desks: “Jews, get out, go to Palestine!” It was 1930.

I guess I am ignorant but I didn’t realize that antisemitism was so prevalent for decades before the holocaust.

In 1920’s Austria: “often the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not so subtle way of discovering if we…were Jewish”
“My fathers insistence that we Jews must be better was based on our country’s firm belief that we were not as good.”

Philippe Halsmann case: “many Austrians were prepared to believe the Jews were murderers by inclination”

Edith about the first time she heard the radio: “I knew I had heard something special, the force of the future, a god-to-be…..”the person who speaks can be very far away, Professor! But his voice flies through the air like a bird! Soon we will be able to hear the voices of people from everywhere!”

Also talks about being amazed by the Hoover vacuum “turned on her machine and like magic whisked dirt away”

“…there was a kind of olfactory afterscent that reminded me of how my Lionel train transformer smelled when, as a kid, I pushed it to hard”

What a wonderful description of a smell I did not even remember existed in my memory until I read this line.

“Although, emotionally delicate and eminently bruises left, teenagers are short on empathy.”