Sara > Recent Status Updates

“Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.
Only time would tell.”

..... Interacting with thousand or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much h for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.”

“Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network compromised of billions of people. We designed by evolution to be hunter-gathered, with the mental capacity to interact and social with the other members of our tribe - a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. .....

“The world’s population was fast approaching ten billion people, and Mother Earth was making it abundantly clear that she could no longer sustain all of us - especially not after we’d spent the past two centuries poisoning her oceans and atmosphere with wild industrial abandon. We had made our bed, and now we were going to die in it.”

“We’re here to be polite, good hosts, even in these circumstances. Perhaps especially in these circumstances. It feels like everything is crumbling - and our ordained roles are the only thing we have left to hang on to. Danny and I must remain in charge. If we don’t keep that authority, if we let Topher take over - well, I don’t like to think about how the situation could play out.”

"Orsk is all about scripted disorientation. The store wants you to surrender to a programmed shopping experience."

"Ruth Anne took a big ragged breath and started laughing, too. It felt good. It felt like a living thing to do in this sea of dead furniture."

"The hamster wheel kept spinning and spinning and spinning. Sometimes she wanted to let go and find out exactly how far she'd fall if she just stopped fighting. She didn't expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?"

"For her, the world was divided into two kinds of jobs: those where you had to stand up, and those where you could sit down. If you were standing up, you were paid hourly. If you were sitting down, you were salaried."

"But every morning, five days a week (seven during the holidays), they dragged themselves here, to the one thing in their lives that never changed, the one thing they could count on come rain, or shine, or dead pets, or divorce: work."

“The evil wizard or dastardly Druid builds his own doom into his plan, like he knows he really shouldn’t be doing this, or like there’s some magical realm rule where he has to leave a single scale off the dragon’s belly, to give the puny crew a one-in-a-thousand chance.”

“and then pulls him to her chest, her palm to his cheek, and this, her, it’s home, and it’s not haunted, not even a little. This is where he wants to live forever.”

"I thought of how I also wanted to have a name. Out there. One all my own."

"I liked giving it a shake and watching everything mix together, the earth settling at the bottom and the water on top. Like a game where things are tossed up but then fall in line on their own. Something simple. The sort of thing that's never happened to me."

"No blue was the same and no earth tasted alike. No child, sibling, mother, or friends was missed like another. Side by side, they were like glimmering tombs."

"Fancy folk can do that, I thought, stuff a bunch of chocolate and cash in a can and set it right in front of you. So you'll say yes, even if you don't want to."

"Beer was like a blanket hug that covered me from top to bottom, my head most of all."

“Like the real him, the real actual person, wasn’t buried as deep under attitude and jokes and bluster as it was with Ricky and Gabe.”

“It was an affair that showed how scant knowledge and real fears can be magnified in a political arena, transmogrifying into certainties that no scientist could defend and pronouncements that were based on more on hype than on fact.”

"My body didn't feel mine. All this time it had been doing this secret, strange thing . . . without me knowing about it."

"When I look for something to compare my love for the kids with it's actually not my love for Charlie. It's an animal, powerful, blood-thick. The love of kin. The closest thing I can find to it is my love for Alice, my sister."

“it suggests not an impartial, representative government run by consent, with guaranteed rights and the rule of the law, but something closer to a kingdom - literally, a ‘lord-dom’, dependent solely on the whim of its autocratic ruler. And it can be argued that it was this mindset that did, many years later, result in the birth of Russia.”

“And with its ability to shapeshifter restored, it had no need to rely on our hospital as a sanctuary where people were trained not to believe in monsters.”

“No building I have seen since seems to so thoroughly embody the stern, bleak lines of arbitrarily enforced sanity.”

“And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.”

“But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them. Twenty-four hours can be curated. A wedding day is a neat little parcel of time in which I can create something whole and perfect to be cherished for a lifetime, a pearl from a broken necklace.”

“And who were we? There was something spinning wickedly out of control inside this house. It was like seeing inside the Bakers’ world had opened up windows into our own, and the view was not a pretty one.”

“He wanted to know about the sycamore tree and seemed to understand exactly what I meant when I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. ‘It’s that way with people, too,’ he said, ‘only with people it’s sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.’”

“But if chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one’s universe, then I was well on my way. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself when I flopped into bed that night, dead tired.”

“‘Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss. . .’ He turned to me. ‘But every once in a while you find someone who’s iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.’”