Sara > Recent Status Updates

"Because sometimes people confuse attention with love."

"'People get mad about the dumbest shit now because they're too lazy to engage with the stuff that matters,'"

"Lena's grandma used to say the difference between us and them is they try as hard as possible to never think about us, and we have to think about them all the time."

"But her grandmother had surprised her. She had spoken about saving yourself, not for marriage - although that would be great and really what Jesus preferred - but for someone who respected your body as much as you did. Her grandmother had said it was better to love your body as much as possible before letting someone else have access to it. That they could permanently damage in unexpected ways how you saw yourself."

"The problem wasn't the being an adult part. She looked at the textbooks, the nail polishes, the art supplies, the clothes - it was figuring out what kind of adult she wanted to become."

"Here's a doctor throwing a bunch of tests at you and telling you nothing substantial. You're expected to trust them, but they haven't given you a single reason to believe that they care about you. It's like a word search to them, while to you its everything."

"Of course, we didn't use the words Indian or Native American then; we were just people. We didn't know we were supposedly drunks or lazy or savages. I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries."

“She had a choice, where, before, she didn’t. She could allow events to continue unchecked, or she could wrench them out of joint and force them into a new pattern.”

“the meaning of life, Kira, is moving things from point a to point b. That’s it. That’s all we really do.”

“We all have to play the odds, Salvo. It’s the nature of life. The only alternative is to cash out early, and that’s just giving up.”

“as the ancients love to point out, expectations of what could be or should be are the most common sources of our discontent. Expectations lead to disappointment, and disappointment leads to anger and resentment.”

“Fear was driving them, she thought, not hope. And as events had taught her, fear was a poor guide indeed.”

“I know I’ll get through whatever problem I’m dealing with. Life’s not going to break me. It can’t break me. It might kill me, but nothing it throws at me is going to make me give up.”

“He was master of his body, wasn’t he? And he was not afraid of darkness, he was painted in it.”

“He’d always hated cars: godless things, crippling, inhuman, unChristian things. With a bike you were your own master. Wasn’t that all a man could ask?”

“It had laid its plans as carefully as ever, plans being what they were and fragile.”

“There is no delight the equal of dread. If it were possible to sit, invisible, between tsk people on any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that subject. Certainly the debate might appear to be about something entirely different; the state of the nation, idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care”

“I was in fractures before. I am in fractures now. But the pieces still form the same broken picture.”

...The one life you've been given, and you've dedicated it to perfecting this staggering yammering artificial Frankenstein's monster stitched together from the traits of other people. Anything original, anything innately you, it's long ago been discarded."

"We are each our own best effort. And we're satisfied until we see a photograph or hear a recording of our voice. All the worse is the torture of video, to witness the squawking, gawky monster we've created. The you that you've chosen from all possible yous to create....

"Our greatest creation is our selves. The way we cultivate our appearance and behavior. And nowhere is our artwork more apparent than in our minds. The way we each have an idea of self. The one perfect self we've chosen by rejecting all other options.
The opportunity costs of identity."

“That was always the impulse: to reserve, to curate. To cheat death.”

“‘Yawning and laughter,’ she went on to explain, ‘are contagious because they were the protohuman’s method for regulating the mood of their group or tribe.’”

"Generations had watched so much fake death. Beautifully lighted, badly acted, underscored with music. Now nobody could believe in the reality of death.
After people had been fed so many lies they'll never swallow anything as the truth."

"It was hard not to love a man who so steadfastly ignored the awful truth about her. But it was even more difficult to respect him."

“Every evening was a choice between reading a classic book or going to an industry event. In brief: whether to spend her time with smart deaf people or alive idiots.”

“As the chair toppled or the horse bolted, a noose hanging in the area below the ladder did the trick. That gave birth to the fear of walking beneath ladders. Because a person never know. The spirit or spirits of highwaymen or cutthroats might still haunt the place where they’d been executed.”

“Despite all the fuss about universal child care and income inequality, killing was the real measure of women’s progress. As the thrill of that first recording session had ebbed, Mitzi told herself that collecting screams amounted to a political act. It constituted the ultimate power.”

“Everyone wanted to have an effect. People spent their lives trying to get a laugh. Or to seduce an audience of strangers. The goal was to commodify something, repeat it, sell them, these the most intimate of human drives. It meant turning people’s basic humanity into something that could be bought and sold from fast food to porn, this was power.”

"'All good soldiers are philosophers, same as a priest or a professor. You have to be when you deal with matters of life and death.'"