Sara > Recent Status Updates

“I thought that there was only ever a thing and it’s opposite, and nothing in between. In writing this book I have come to believe in this far less than I did when I started. Unraveling and unlearning this split logic is crucial to justice, I think, and it is crucial to love - loving a person, community, or most of all perhaps, a place, which may turn out to be the same thing.”

“‘We want the story to be perfect,’ I noted, ‘and the minute it’s not perfect, we’re like, it’s a lie!’”

“I had made a mistake thinking I knew what it looked like for myself to disappear or what it looked like when someone else did, and I had made a mistake thinking that hiding my truths from other people could keep me from doing harm.”

“‘False confession’ feels like a contradiction in terms, a paradox that undermines the whole idea that what people say can be believed.”

“I’ve seen kids for whom getting pregnant was the thing that really helped them ask the deep questions and make the big, good choices. There are all kinds of ways to life a life, you know.
I know, I said. But I didn’t. “

“Of all the weapons she had commanded, Elizabeth knew the least of love; and of all the weapons in the world, love was the most dangerous.”

“Our courtrooms then, are where some of our most toxic stereotypes and flattest truths are made and reinforced.”

“We tend to treat believability as of it were synonymous with truthfulness or akin to solving a mathematical equation, but the relationship between what is believable and what is true and, further, what makes a story believable to one listener but not to another turn out to be some of the murkiest parts of the human cognition.”

“‘Monsters do not emerge out of a cultural void,’ writes scholar Tina Marie Boyer. ‘They have a literary and cultural heritage.’ In other words: he does not come from nowhere.”

“I felt that no one I knew had a clue about America, it’s true texture and shape and flavor, and that the ways I had been taught to live in it were no longer working.”

“Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.”

“Be as happy as you can in that house. Love your family. Hug your daughter. Kiss your wife. From what I’ve heard, that house hasn’t witnessed a lot of love. It remembers that pain. What you need to do is make it forget.”

“Yes. It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.”

‘“I talk,’ I say. ‘I just don’t like words very much. I don’t like how people use them.’”

“The people here want you to love what they offer. And if they want to show you love through food, you let them know you see it. And then you show love back the best way you know how. That’s home.”

“But, taking the life he’d been given, he found a way to move on anyway.”

“There’s magic in the world tonight and every night. If only he would open his eyes to see it.”

“And we don’t talk about feelings in my family. We pull ourselves together. We keep going. Steady, steady. People like Simon can afford to have feelings. People like me and Pop, survivors? We work, and we don’t feel anything at all. We can’t escape who we are, but maybe we don’t need to. Maybe our future is predicated on what came before.”

“He might consider himself a gourmand, might love to consume the fruits of our bagels, but I don’t think it really makes sense to him, why anyone would want to actually live a life so small.”

“‘People want things,’ he says. ‘No shame in that. Problem is, they’re not willing to sacrifice for them. Not willing to give up something to get something.’”

“I tell myself that I’ve got to do crazy, hard, and brave things, like Grandma’s done all her life, to be anything like her.”

“I don’t really know what I live for, but if I can point to anything it is this. A conversation with a stranger that can turn into a friendship. If not that, then just a memorable conversation. If we all die and our lives are forgotten, it is these conversations that make an impression on a deletable history of the world.”

“‘People who pick on others have a rot inside of them the same way bad fruits bruise faster and poor vegetables whither quicker. They are more susceptible to magic, more inclined to break the longer they live.’”

"You cannot improve your cooking if you feel very little need to improve yourself."

"She once said his tongue was to quickly formed by the West so that he East could never catch up. You and Yun are steamed chicken feet, while Lei is baked chicken nuggets."

"I never hated being a member of a secret society. It used to mean safety, the comfort of a large extended family. But now safety's a trap. And not all family means well."

"It was the smell that had broken her. Why? What memory was it that it pulled at? What almost forgotten part of her heart had it woken up?"

“‘He always preferred books to people. Hence this whole shambling enterprise.’
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to like him.’”

"She didn't end when her life did because, even without the existence of ghosts, that's simply not the way things work."