Sara > Recent Status Updates

"sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world."

“And I like him less and more. Less because he appears now to be soft and impractical, and more because this is something he can afford to be.”

“He is infinitely is more talented in the thing I most want to do, and he seems to prefer it that way. It is still how late this occurs to me, that the carrots he dangles into his boredom, how casually he reaches for the stick.”

“Or my envy of his wonder - the glee in his terror, the willingness to experience anew what is familiar.”

“Two people rarely need the same thing, seek the same answers. And yet, what becomes possible when two discrete dreams spin into one?”

“America isn’t the land of the brave. It’s the land of bravado. We’re show-offs. In this country, all we desire is things. America is a place that hoards and accumulates and coasts and compares. Meanwhile too many poor people are suffering. I don’t admire our way of life.”

“Liquor doesn’t fix anything. It brings a person to the edge and lets them dangle between dignity and shame.”

“‘Even though they’re not talking, it’s noisy. Being angry, that’s noisy. You know?’
Rosalind nods. She thinks if the unsaid things that crowd a room. It was sometimes that way with Weaver. Why don’t you love me enough to marry me?
‘Things are complicated for adults,’ she says.
‘They make things complicated,’ Ava says. ‘By not talking.’”

“Knowledge is power, but can be elusive and distracting if it is not grounded in wisdom and understanding.”

"I think she was also happy that I was heading out into the world, escaping the past and moving forward into a different present without even glancing behind me. Because, however painful it might be, that's what all good parents have to do in the end."

"Her father was gone. Graveyards might have housed the dead below the ground, but what lay above was always for the living; they were the places where people came to deal with the break between what their lives had once been and what they now were."

"As you get older, it all begins to blur into one. You start to think life was never any kind of straight line. It was always more of a.... scribble."

"My father had been tough and unforgiving, a man who worked the land when the jobs were there, but always seemed more proud of the way the land worked him, as though hardness achieved through suffering were something to covet."

"There had been times when it felt like I could hear the pages around me rustling slightly, as though the stories within were shuffling softly in their sleep."

"Adrenaline was a poison; if you didn't use it up, it used you instead."

"It occurred to me that, when my mother died, I would be all that was left of a family I hand't known and for a moment all my adult confidence evaporated and I was left feeling lost and unmoored."

"He was a timid boy: shy and sweet and defenseless; always desperate to please the whole world, but never sure what it wanted."

"It's going to be ok.
Twenty-five years have passed, but I still think about that a lot. It's what all good parents tell their children. And yet what does it really amount to? It's a hope, a wish. A hostage to fortune. It's a promise you have to make, and one you must do your best to believe in, because what else is there?"

“She’d told me that the Lakota people didn’t use a term for farewell because of the idea that we are forever connected. To say goodbye would mean the circle was broken.
I pondered this. I sensed we needed to say goodbye to our old lives, whatever they were.”

“‘Virgil, what do you do?’
I hated that question. It was such a white way of looking at the world, that a person is judged by their job, not their character.”

“I think it is pushing toward ugly and there is definitely some meanness in it, but I love it.”

“Everywhere taught me to think about things in the simplest ways. School told me that anything could be summed up and have conclusions drawn from it in five paragraphs. This = good. That = bad. But now I think a lot about context.”

“People feel more loyalty to how they think things should be than to other people, including their family.”

“Life’s meanness is nothing. I’ve spent years now convincing myself that although something is unfair, it can still be worthwhile.”

“There are few people in ones life that fit like an adjacent puzzle piece.”

“I remembered all the baby proofing all over the house, the outlet plugs, the padding on sharp corners, all of this work to protect children from their slips and falls, when it was the grown-ups who needed to be muzzled and padded from their own misdeeds and transgressions.”

“How easy would it be to let the overwhelming swirl of desire suck her down past reluctance. But she’s aware he’s both the siren and the unforgiving undertow. And she’s no longer a girl willing to drown.”

“Romance? Even through her depression over the bombs, even despite distraction and distances, she saw their love as flexible enough to absorb disappointment, anger, truth.”

“She watched the men around her and was disturbed at how much they enjoyed the war, seemed stirred to life by conflict. Marking trees, proving themselves right, defending others. The ability to draw power from an atom: Could it ever be safe in make hands.”

“But what she should do and what she is capable of doing are often two sides to an unsolvable equation.”