Sara > Recent Status Updates

“She talked about how Damnation was the inescapable circle one made around oneself.”

“Oh yes, I’d picked up on the dead bush, the typos in her email to me, Jack’s smoking, his motorbike, but I hadn’t allowed them to make any emotional connection. I’d treated them like clues in a secondary crime story, something to be solved rather than taken to heart.”

“When you live in the country, you spend every minute of every day surrounded by vast emptiness. I could feel it now. But you never think for a minute that you might become part of it.”

“Why did Katie always have to judge me by her standards? Why couldn’t she see that I didn’t need what she had and that I might be perfectly happy the way things were? If I sounded irritate it’s only because I worried she was right.”

“Cleanliness in a room is the result of work, and all work ought to be respected.”

“Today’s sinner is tomorrow’s saint.”

“His experience during the war had also taught him much about what he called the institutionalism of murder; how, if yin surrounded murder with enough firms and procedures, if you could convince yourself that it was an absolute necessity, then ultimately it would not be murder at all.”

“Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative . maybe that’s one of the reasons we enjoy it.

“They showed me that we are all bigger than our individual selves, and that our lives can celebrate the best parts of each individual, while forging the path that is best for each of us.”

“if Paradise, in order to be paradise, is fertile soil for a vast Hell, the duty of the Poet is to turn Paradise into Hell. Victor Diaz and Jesus Christ set fire to the palm trees.”

“Nothing in nature can bring the mind continuous, unchanging happiness, because the mind itself changes constantly.”

“Disillusionment is enlightenment.”

“It was, I could already tell, going to be a journey full of awkward pauses, terrible humiliations, and so many places where i couldn’t be anyone but myself, but I thought I would survivor It well enough.”

“He does love her, I thought in surprise, and at that point, I suppose I thought that it counted for something even when it stood up alone, without kindness or consideration or mercy or intelligence to back it up.”

“When I read in the newspaper that nearly a million Russian soldiers had been taken prisoner, I kept awake at night trying to count to a million. I thought somehow that if I could count each prisoner, and Misha with them, the prisoners would be protected. Often I would stay awake into the early-morning hours, but I only got into the thousands - not enough.”

“If I was going to be passing anything more than time in public with a man, I should always find out what happened when he heard no, whether it was from me, a taxi driver, a waiter, or his employer.
‘You may decide what to do after that,’ she said, ‘but most times, your action will be clear’”

“there would always be a. A human price for his luxury. Otherwise, I could see him musing, what was the point?”

“She hadn’t yet found herself in such a situation at Wagner, one in which she had to choose between going along with the machine or sticking a foot in its gears.”

“When machines ask us to care for them, we become attached to these machines and think that the machines care for us. ‘Pretend empathy’ had an awesome weapon: the deep psychology of being human.”

“How we talk changes how we see ourselves.”

“But who thinks a life without conflict, in which we don’t have to face the choices we’ve made or deal with troublesome people, is a better life? Apparently, technology does.”

“The system told you to stay on the surface and to take things at interface value. When the world comes to us in simulation, we lose a sense of what lies beneath. And we learn to not care.”

“Learning needs love and a connection to body and mind.”

“I was shaken, but love is not deterred when it wants to love.”

“I found my life’s work by navigating as a bricoleur, trying one thing and stepping back, making new connections, and most of all, by listening.”

“I didn’t make choices; I chose a starting point.”

“I became more comfortable seeing the number of things I wanted to accomplish ( clinical training, psychoanalytic training, training asan ethnographer) not as signs of personal indecision but as necessary steps.”

“As in any love affair, no matter who leaves whom, all parties feel abandoned.”

“I learned the wisdom of what Winston Churchill said about buildings: we build them and then they make and shape us.”

“To see your own culture, you have to make the natural unfamiliar.”