Sara > Recent Status Updates

“Bryce, I asked you to conquer your fear, but all you did was give into it. If you were in love with her, that would be one thing. Love is something to be afraid of, but this, this is so embarrassing.”

“It was on a day like that when my father’s notion of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts moved from my head to my heart.”

“As the years advances Lewis’s had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction. That great divide was for young men, who still had to deal with life. For the old (Lewis was 73), the distinction was academic. What did it matter what was true and what was false, what real and what invented? In his head all of it, the half-lies and truths, were one continuum of personal history.”

"'but he flew, do you see what I mean, Son? He was able to fly. It doesn't matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds.'"

"He understands the powerlessness felt by this young inspector who needs something out of the ordinary to happen so his day will be worthwhile,

"After all, since the world began, we've been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we've been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical."

"The human being is complex and I find the vile acts, contradictions, and sublimities characteristic of our condition astonishing . Our existence would be an exasperating shad of gray if we were all flawless."

"He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral, but he couldn't keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one. He also wishes he could break like Ency, but his collapse never comes."

"But he needs someone to say what no one does."

"'I don't get why a person's smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, theyr'e showing their skeleton.'"

"He thinks that Senor Urami needs to reaffirm reality though words, as though words created and maintain the world in which he lives."

"Write because one place to live is in your head and it's not broken yet"

"Ask most poor and/or Black or immigrant folk. Exercising your choice doesn't always result in getting what you want. This is the unspoken fallacy that determines who lives the American dream and who doesn't."

"Yet before I fill out the application for citizenship, fear reveals what is as invisible as privilege: that there is a point where self-determination confronts power and authority."

"This pursuit of passions - not for a better life nor to avert poverty, nor to provide for a family, nor, well, to live - underpins the American dream."

"There is nothing easy about migration. It is a search for a better life, but in this way it is also a death."

"To choose a way you want to define yourself and then dress deliberately toward fulfilling that vision was magic to me. It was a clean talent. I didn't know how to make other people see me, but I wanted to."

"All writers in some way compose love letters to their obsessions. A letter can be a document of deep ambivalence, contradictions, and silences, submerged in the complexities of shared and unshared histories. Or: a longing to locate two disparate points in an expanse of sky."

"for the relative safety and stability of my life here, the ocean of love that my parents recovered in the space of that distance, the constellations and weather they spun inside the rooms of our home."

"What does it mean to experience a history of trauma and blood in ephemeralities, in residue?"

how knowledge in an immigrant household so often comes in tides that approach and recede, how there are always gaps and missing ghosts, how all the fear and protection and silence and love comes so mixed together it would be a falsehood to separate them."

"It was like drawing a boundary around a grouping of stars or cupping some water from the sea. The blocks of text didn't try to parse the entanglements; they allowed the tension between sentences to carry all the absences, the ambiguities, and silences I could never before say -

"A love letter is something broken, too. It cannot say what it longs to say, it circles around an occluded center, it tries to uncover a history between two points."

"In Western culture, we're taught at an early age that the tenets of good behavior fall somewhere between saying thank you and sorry. Say thank you when people do something nice for you. Say sorry when you've done something wrong, or when you've made a mistake, or when you might just have misunderstood. Sorry is a coverall."

"I found meaning in apologizing. But in doing so, I lost the language to express my own discomfort and to give myself space to grieve."

"I regret all the times I said sorry when it was not what I meant at all. I said sorry to fill in silences caused by feelings I could not convey to my parents."

.....Thought they may not be the homes we started in, our bodies become the homes we inhabit."

"There is no easy answer to be had; only the conflict, the question, and the transformation it offers. The reckoning of self happens in the space between the person one is and the person one is becoming. It is where we write our stories, where we recognize the complexity and turmoil of moving through this world in a body flawed and pressed upon by politics and expectation. ....

"I knew on some level that he was immensely proud of me, but I also felt, for the first time, the fear of translation and everything that might be lost in it."

"I do this for my grandmother. For all the times she made a decision to draw from her secondary bank of knowledge in an effort to conceal her difference. For all the times she sacrificed showcasing the beauty of her language to quell the curiosity of others. For all the times she's thought of me and my future, I think about her and her past."